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...

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.