Weight Loss 2.0

It's close to 10 years since I changed up my eating & lifestyle habits. Over the course of the intervening years I managed to loose a fair amount of weight - sub 290 at times - as well as gain some back.

At this 10 year mark there are a number of positive changes that are still with me:

• I eat a fair amount of healthy, prepared from scratch meals/food
• A good portion of my food is from a CSA - organic & locally grown
• Refined sugar from drinks and food is absent from most of my daily diet
• Exercise is part of my weekly - if not daily - routine:
• bicycle 17 miles 3x/week during the spring-summer-fall
• swim a mile or more 2-3 times/week during the winter - all at once or in stages
• perform HIIT intervals 2-3 times/week using hand weights, medicine balls, kettle bells, and sometimes just body weight
• Overall my health numbers are good - blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, etc - all in normal range

Some new things that I'm doing:

• I track my activity, exercise, etc w/an Apple watch
• I hit my activity goal most days, except for the weekend
• I work with a health coach - doing that over the last 2 years

Some not so good things:

• I find myself close to where I was in April of 2010 - 318'ish lbs
• Processed food has made its way back into my diet at least once per week
• I go through periods of snacking on refined sugar treats, peanut M & Ms mainly
• I've gotten away from AB's "list", i.e. every day foods, 3x/week, 1x/week
• Alcohol consumption has increased a fair amount
• Nutrient dense food makes up less of my diet - no avocados, fiber supplements (flax seed, psyllium husks)
• Gotten away from green tea & soy milk and back to coffee, milk
• Processed grains - flour from home made bread, etc are in my diet
• I don't write about what I'm doing/seeing/trying

Those are the major ones - there may be a few others but those popped into my head as I re-read entries from 2009 - 2011.

My health coach encourages me to set weekly goals and then about every 3 months set some more longer term goals. Mainly I've focused on staying on my exercise routine or goals related to it - how far to bike, swim, etc and some food related goals. What I've noticed is that exercise alone won't get me to loose weight - I need to recapture the food practices that helped me go from 351 to sub 290. I need to set weight goals to accompany the exercise and food changes.

For 2019 I'm challenging myself to the following:

1. Incorporate nutrient dense foods & supplements into my daily diet
2. Incorporate daily servings of fruits and veggies into my daily diet
3. Minimize daily intake of refined sugar snacks and drinks, e.g fruit juice
4. Keep eating out and/or processed foods to no more than once per week
5. Keep hitting my activity goal of 1k calories/day
6. Decrease alcohol consumption
7. Drink green tea daily
8. By this time next year, be at or below 290
9. Write about what I'm feeling, seeing, experiencing, learning

I'll probably ask myself at some future date, why now, why again, what motivated you to do this - admittedly - again. Photographs. Over the holidays I was in front of the camera instead of behind it and the images I saw of myself were not what I wanted to see. Although I'm not as large as I was at 351, it's no longer moving in the correct direction. Maybe I should do that more often, hummm...

Familiar Refrain

I know this is going to sound really repetitive but I'm trying to get back on the weight loss path again. As it turnes out I did make my goal for the end of January by hitting 291.5 - from which I promptly zoomed right back up to 303!! So frustrating!!

Based on what I see, loosing large amounts (more than 4 lbs) of weight in a short period of time - like 2 weeks - is a recipe for gaining it all back. Although I set myself a goal for loosing 1.5-2 lbs/week I had to cram a lot of that loss into a short period of time - post cruise it was like 2.5 weeks. Add to that my excuse making that it was too cold to walk (temps in the teens isn't really inviting) and it's no wonder I found myself at 303 come the first day of March.

What's a XXLXT to do? Try it again, but this time stay to the 1.5 - 2 lbs per week. So I set myself another goal that by the end of March, the 29th to be exact I'd weigh 297. Today's the day and I weigh exactly 297! Gratz!! My feeling is that in order to continue to loose 1.5 lbs per week I'm really going to need to work at this. The warmer weather (well now only in the upper 20's at night) and the spring change over to more veggies will help.

What I feel I need to work on is being consistant with my eating, i.e. no late night binging, cut out the discretionary sugar, watch the nut intake and stick to AB's eating guide lines. I have vacation starting April 15 where I'll be traveling to visit Mom for a week or so. By April 12 I'd like to be 294 and then hold that weight through the 26th. I'll start the clock again at that point.

After I lost that initial 50+ lbs I really felt great! Since then it's been a "brick wall" never seeming able to get below about 286. I still feel good about loosing the weight but I'm unsatisfied with this "yo-yo" weight process. I'm never going to get over this hump with out some discipline. I know it's in me. It's just a matter of want.

Get Busy

So far meeting my target of begin at 291.5 lbs by months end is not going well. Between the cruise, weather, special events, and not totally staying on track, I'm not loosing the 1.5 lbs per week that I wanted. Depressing? Yes. Unexpected? No.

But perhaps I need to change my expectations. I know I can loose this but I'm not making the same type of concerted effort I made last year. When I sit an eat 2 pieces of birthday cake and claim its a "special occasion" that's a far cry when I would have eaten 1 or 1/2 a piece last year. How many "special occasions" am I allowed before I'm just totally off this?

I'm really going to try between now and next Tuesday (the end of the period) to stay on track. I'm not going to starve myself but I'm really going to try to return to what I was doing a year ago when I first started this program.

There's a phrase from "The Shawshank Redemption" that captures my mood. Tim Robbins' character says: Get busy living or get busy dying. I'll turn that to be: Get busy loosing or get busy gaining. It's my choice.

Playing Catch-up

First day back from our 7 day cruise I weighed in at 298.5 lbs - back where I started the year - *sigh*. Oh well, back on the program again. I did walk for 1 hour 3 of the 7 days on the cruise but as the week wore on I was walking a lot in port and opted to skip the track. Probably a bad idea.

At any rate, today being Wednesday I'm at 297 lbs and 21% of the way to my weight goal for January. I'll have to really keep on track if I'm going to hit the target. The current snowy/icy weather is not permitting much evening walking but I am getting a lot of shoveling exercise in. I'm not going to force the weight loss. It'll either come off by my normal eating pattern or not but I'm going to do anything different.

Reviewing and Progressing

One side benefit of including weight loss details, like calorie counts, in blog posts is that they serve as a record not only of results, but also of how. In reviewing entries from 2010 I noticed a few things:

• I was eating more fruit in the beginning and less as time wore on
• I was having trouble managing the 3x per week load
• I stuck pretty well to the "never eat" list
• Other than alcohol, the no more than once per week list has been managed well

While I intend to do some more spelunking in the 2010 posts, I'm struck by the first 2 items. In the time since I've plateaued, I'm doing better with the 3x per week list (yogurt, broccoli, avocados, and oily fish) than when I started out. I'm still not a sweet potato fan, but I'm doing well with the others. 

In the beginning I think I was just doing the oily fish 3x per week and some of the yogurt but none of the others. Broccoli and avocados were added sometime over the spring when I was having lower GI issues and stopped eating oranges, kiwis and pineapple. I'm not certain what caused the GI issues and they have subsided to some extent, but the high fruit content stopped. Perhaps I'll try returning to it over the winter like last year.

Per usual Wednesday has rolled around and I've jumped down to 295. That's not unusual for midweek. It's the Thursday - Sunday time frame that gets me off track. As I head into that period, I'm resolved not to break what I've started again. That said, I'm also heading into the beginning of my Cruise week so we'll see how it goes. For my HR weigh challenge I've lost 50% of the weight (3.5/7 = .5) I targeted. Toward my 1-2 lbs per week reminder, I'm not looking to loose any more this week. If it happens, it happens, but I want to be at least 296.5 on Monday of next week.

In the spirit of detail keeping, I'm also experimenting with a new pre-dinner experiment. I've wanted to "get more into wine" as part of 2011 and have decided to try 1 (yes just 1) glass of wine (~ 5 oz) with some bread and cheese. The bread I'm making myself over the weekend and the cheese I'm using is decent quality stuff. I'm concerned it'll be too much, but I'm doing this instead of munching "free form" on nuts, etc. Perhaps eating a measured amount of good tasting stuff will keep me from bindging on the not-so-great stuff, at least in quantity. 

One final review item I picked up: the more I blogged, the more consistant and downward trending was the weight loss.. humm...

A Year On

Here it is the first week of 2011 and I'm lighter by nearly 50 lbs than I was at this time last year. Officially at 298.5 lbs. The holidays "forced" me to put on more weight than I wanted. At my lightest, I was 284 - about 15 lbs from where I am now and 4 lbs then from the 280 lb goal - and unable to take that next step.

Still, 2010 was a good year for me. I'm lighter, in better shape and can honestly say that I'm all the better for it despite my 15 lb weight gain from my low point. I'm thrilled that I've lost the weight and disappointed that I can't seem to loose more.

On the plus side, I can see that geting back on the "live and let diet" eating cycle will cause the weight to come off. My problem is that I can't seem to stay on it. I end up eating a few handfulls of this, some of that, and before you know it I'm hauling down a Pop-Tart and a glass of milk. And when I do manage to break the cycle, I end up getting discouraged by not not loosing more than I feel I should.

I feel I have more weight to loose, the hard part is staying true to the goal and not just being satisfied with the nearly 50 I've lost. In looking back at my 2010, I had some goals - see myself, be at 317, 299, 290, etc. Some of those goals were pretty big - like seeing myself. I had no idea how far I had to go or how close I was to 330. Now I see myself daily and can measure progress (more recently lack there of). I hit most of them by loosing 1-2 lbs a week. Somehow during the year I expected to start loosing more per week - big jumps, perhaps in thinking I needed to catch up for the "yo-yo" effect.

I tried jogging (not me), tried eating new items (more yogurt, granola, etc), and all the while expected large per week jumps in weight loss. Perhaps my expectations got the better of me over the summer and (perhaps) what I need to do is return to the expectations I had last year when I started seeing results: That by staying true to how I was eating and putting in my body I can expect to loose a little bit of weight over time. I'd be happy to loose 5-7 lbs in a month, 15 lbs in 3 or so and not let my expectations get the better of me in the short run. It's a long haul game and I need to play it like that.

So to start 2011 I have 2 interesting items: (1) I have a cruise to go on the second week of January. (2) the HR dept at work is issuing a "weight loss accountability" challenge - report on your percentage progress toward a goal. Do I take that as a challenge to try and stick to my 1-2 lbs per week weight loss and shoot for 6-7 lbs lost in January (back being 290 or so) while at the same time doing a cruise?? Last cruise I lost 3 lbs by exercising, taking the stairs and watching what I ate.

I think I'm up to a January challenge to be 290 come the end of the month.

Dog Days of Summer

Here it is August and I see that then entire month of July evaporated with out a post. Between enjoying the outdoors during our brief New England summer and vacations, posting has not been on my mind.

On the exercise front I started jogging during part of my walking route. About 1/3 of the way is a slow to moderate jog while the rest is "recovery" walking. Although I had great hopes for this in early June, July's heat wave forced me from this new routine. I hope to get back into walking/jogging more regularly when the weather starts to cool again.

On the weight side I'm down to about 290 (give or take a pound or 2 - darn scale). That's 7 lbs in about 6 weeks or so. Not bad for summer time, traveling and out door gatherings. I feel pretty good about a pound a week.

That mark also (finally) puts me past the 50 lb loss mark! So I guess I need a new goal - I'm thinking 280 would be a good target. I've got a 5 lb head start on the goal and hitting it would be 65 lbs gone! My target date is Oct 31. That gives me some padding in case I plateau out.

As far as eating patterns go, I'm getting a little tired of my current lunch rotation - salad with either fruit/avocado or sardines. I'm going to try using tuna instead of sardines and work the avocado in some other way. 6 months of salads is about to drive me nuts!