weight loss

This was a full day spent house-sitting in Parksville, over on smoke-filled Vancouver Island. To be fair, everywhere is smoke-filled right now, due to fire all up and down the west coast of the U.S.

I did not snack as such, sticking only to the three meals, but the meals were not exactly calorie-light:

• Breakfast: Sausage McMuffin with Egg and hash brown
• Lunch: Chow mien with lemon honey ginger chicken
• Dinner: Tropical Hawaiian pizza from Panago

Plus a small cup of chocolate mousse for dessert after dinner. This was probably a combined 50,000 calories. It just means I’ll have to dedicate myself that much more on return to the mainland!

No weight report today as the Parksville abode does not have a scale. I’ll just assume (hope) I am under, say, 174 pounds. Maybe.

Today, as we were heading out to the ferry to Vancouver Island for a weekend of house sitting, I had a few cheese strips, but I was otherwise good.

Weight-wise I edged up a bit to 170 pounds even, but that could easily be due to water or other random body things, not because I’m secretly scarfing giant bags of pork rinds.

The snacking today was a few small cubes of cheese and a piece of toast with (no sugar added) jam, so I wasn’t scarfing bags of donuts.

And I did a full walk/run workout, even though it was a rather unseasonably warm 31ºC out.

But the best news came early in the day when I stepped on the scale and saw I had lost 1.4 pounds, dropping to 169.6 pounds, the first dip below 170 this year if you don’t count flu-related weight loss (which I don’t, because that never stays off unless you find some way to perpetually have the flu, which is probably not the greatest idea).

I may very well be up again tomorrow, but I have now tasted life below 170 and I shall taste it some more.

Absolutely no cheating today. I was, in fact, a bit peckish by the time dinner came around. We had take-out (bad) but it was chicken and a salad (good). I didn’t do my post-work exercise because I actually went into the office today and had the subsequent Very Long Commute™, but I did clock almost a 3 km walk around the Langara Golf Course trail, as lumpy and root-filled as ever.

My weight stayed the same, a bit surprising perhaps, given I weighed myself much earlier in the morning than usual, coming in once again at 171 pounds even.

A few plain tortilla chips (maybe six?) and some salsa, and a small piece of toast and some jam. Other than that, stuck to the meals and came in under my calorie goal. I’m actually a tiny bit hungry now.

Weight was unchanged, staying at 171. It was a weird and sort of awful day and I feel light-headed from, I think, the nasal spray I use when my allergies get so bad I can’t breathe through my nose anymore.

But at least the entire world isn’t literally on fire.

Yet.

Another day of no snacks, go me!

Stranger still, I not only was not up in weight this morning, I was down 1.7 pounds, putting me even lower than before yesterday’s 1.6 point gain. This may be the biggest 24 hour gain/drop ever. It’s weird, but I’ll take it. I weighed exactly 171 pounds, so I’m now just over one pound away from dipping below 170 (not counting flu-related weight loss) for the first time in 2020.

Given that it is 2020, it’s also possible I may gain five pounds overnight.

I have had no snacks today.

I had breakfast, dinner and two leftover slices of pizza for lunch.

I also did a 5K run at Burnaby Lake, my total distance for the day as I write this is 22.75 km.

The one down note was my weight, which was not down but up. Up 1.6 pounds, to be exact, to 172.7 pounds. Boo. This is not unexpected, though, as I ate a truckload of pizza and drank a ton of fizzy (but calorie-free) beverages after because pizza makes me very, very thirsty.

I may actually be up tomorrow for the same reason, as I have drank my approximate body weight again today due to the leftover pizza, and the long workout. But you never know, because bodies are weird and mysterious things.

But no cheating!

I only had a slice of toast for lunch and some pizza (mmm, pizza) for dinner, so technically no cheating.

Bad news: I also didn’t exercise today because Nic and I went to a bird sanctuary in Delta to check out…birds. Then we watched Hamilton (not at the sanctuary).

But I did complete all of the activity rings on my watch, so that’s good.

In better news, my weight was down to 171.1 pounds this morning. So for today at least I was gloriously less in weight than I was on January 1st of this year, when I came in at 171.5 pounds. I am cautiously optimistic that I can finally get down below 170 before the end of the month.

Actually, let’s not. The reality is I cheated a bit today. It was Friday, I was stressed out and had some snacks I shouldn’t have. I felt bad. I was bad. But I also had another good workout, so that absolves me a little.

I expect the weekend, oddly enough, to be better.

My weight was down 0.6 pounds, so I almost erased yesterday’s gain. Given my water consumption today, I won’t be surprised to see it go back up tomorrow, but bodies are weird, so you never know.

I did come under my calorie goal unless I ate an entire pie and blanked it from my mind after, so that also helps overcome the cheating.

But it was still bad. No more! Hardly ever again!

Yes, I had a few more crackers, but only a few. And a couple of small cubes of cheese. I was otherwise good.

My weight was up today, from 171.8 to 172.6, probably due to water, my irregular regularity or ALIENS.

Tomorrow I shall redouble my efforts to have no snacks at all, except for maybe a banana or some yummo sugar snap peas.

Yes, today my snacking consisted of a single chocolate-covered almond. The no-snacking thing must be working because I didn’t immediately want to scarf down the entire bag (I did not procure said almonds).

I did another good walk/run, as well, so my daily exercise is also continuing to roll along.

In neutral news, my weight remained unchanged at 171.8 pounds. I’m kind of excited to see it drop some more, because dipping below 170 will be a nice psychological boost.

Too bad work sucks corn dogs, it’s the one real blotch in my life right now. Oh well. At least I’ll be physically fit.

I cheated again a bit today, basically the same as yesterday, with a few crackers and a Clif Bar.

But I also went on my first 5K run in awhile, so I burned a few calories there. I’m calling it even because I can.

Somewhat to my surprise, my weight was down 0.3 pounds this morning. I am close once again to where I was at the start of the year, so here’s hoping tomorrow continues the downward trend.

You may have noticed that the last two days of cheating have also been the start of the work week. This is not a coincidence, as I am not particularly enjoying my work these days. I am trying to be positive and research other careers and look into other job opportunities instead of just being perpetually frustrated and enduring where I am now. Having the self-awareness that I am doing that snacking-as-comfort-food thing will hopefully make it easier to slap my hand away from the box of crackers that calls to me with its sweet and crunchy voice.