Not such a good week last week. Okay, maybe a little of it was having people over to play The Beatles: Rock Band and eating some of the food they brought, but it was also not having the right foods around the house.
With Week 30's weigh-in right around the corner, I suspect I'll likely gain rather than lose this week too. Potentially I could still break even for September, but it's really just been one (or two) bad weeks. So I'll have to focus more on eating better and exercising more. (Bonus: my current contract is with a company downtown, so as long as the weather isn't terrible, I can walk to lunch.)
I need to restock my food here so that I'm eating better foods. I know that is part of it. I can feel myself hungry for the wrong things because I don't have enough good choices here.
Still, I've made a lot of good progress, and I need to keep focused on that. I just put a bunch of slacks in the Goodwill pile: basically everything that I bought when I was getting bigger is now big enough that I can't even keep them up well with a belt. And I saved the old ones, so really I just swapped the two piles. If I can put in a little bit more work each week, it won't be long until I can switch into maintenance mode ... and maybe go shopping!
A profile of zlionsfan
- zlionsfan
- Indiana, United States
- I like cats. I play a lot of games. Sometimes I develop web-based applications; this keeps my current employer from firing me too often. My favorite color is blue, or maybe green.
Perhaps you should think about joining our new challenge that starts in October?
ReplyDeleteWhere has that bike been? I haven't seen it out and about for months.
That's because you didn't ride with me to CVS the other day. (Of course I went to the one at 131st and 37 instead of the one at 146th ...)
ReplyDeleteI'll be all right. I ended up exactly even this week, so I'm down slightly for the month. The problem for me with the challenge is that it won't motivate me; my problem isn't tracking food or drinking water, it's what I'm eating at home, and I'm pretty close to my goal anyway.
Wii Fit. Just not this week. I have to get more work done ...
I haven't developed the new challenge, but I think I am going to focus it around training for the 5K that I am going to do in December. That is "Jog" the 5K not just walk.
ReplyDeleteIf I could make a recommendation ... it seems that your struggles more recently have to do with not losing weight. I wonder if perhaps your challenge was giving you credit for things that didn't lead to weight loss, or if maybe it should have penalized you for things that hurt your weight-loss efforts. (For example, you got a point for staying within your calorie limit. What was the penalty for going over by, say, 1000 calories? Nothing.)
ReplyDeleteI would recommend that you do this month's challenge strictly on weight loss. (Percentage of body weight is probably the best way to do it.) With anything else, you run the risk of working on your score rather than working on your weight.
That is a valid point. Diane told me today that I should have called it a "Fitness Challenge", because I wanted to reward myself for the thing I like to do (exercise). There was not penalty for being bad except for missing points.
ReplyDeleteI will put that out as a suggestion to the group for October.
I guess if you want to incorporate exercise, what you could do is break it out by weeks: for each week, you add up the points like you're doing now (except for weight-loss points), but instead of just counting them, you multiply them by the percentage of your weight you lost from the start of the month. If you gained or maintained, you get zero credit that week.
ReplyDeleteTo make it easier to calculate, you should probably base the percentage off the initial weight for the month, rather than recalculating it each week Biggest Loser-style.
That way you would still get credit for exercising, but only if it actually led to weight loss.
And if you're not staying within in your calories, writing down your food, drinking water, or exercising, then either a) you're not trying to lose weight, b) you're losing it doing something bad, or c) you've got the weight-loss thing down pat and you don't need a competition.
Of course this is all coming from someone who isn't competing, isn't recording what he's eating, and is occasionally going over his calories ... take all this with an ems-sized grain of salt.