Reaching an important milestone,
making some changes

As promised, I took the weekend off from blogging. It was a busy weekend and I needed the break from blogging. Even though the weekend wasn’t nearly long enough, it’s time to get back in the saddle to get a new week started and get back to my normal routine, which includes getting my daily journals going again. In the meantime, I do have some news to share about my progress and my overall game plan.

First and foremost, I finally hit an important milestone this weekend: 50 pounds lost. You might have expected a little more fanfare, but I’m a little gun shy after the previous weekend’s hoopla. As I explained last Tuesday, I made tremendous progress during that previous week only to see it almost entirely evaporate by the start of last week. And it took me working very hard throughout last week to catch back up by Friday. Fortunately, I was able to actually gain ground by Saturday morning’s weigh-in to put me over the 50-pounds-lost hump.

Last week’s wild swings caused me to seriously reevaluate my regimen. After consulting with my advisers, I came to a few conclusions:

1. I was becoming a little too obsessed with my day-to-day (as well as hour-to-hour and sometimes even more ridiculous) scale checks. It was causing me not to see the bigger perspective and causing me to be far too unrealistic about my expectations with day-to-day results.
2. I needed to begin to adjust my expectations for weekly progress. Up to this point, I’ve averaged 3 to 3.5 pounds per week for the last 15 weeks, obviously some weeks being less than that and several weeks being more than that. But that pace is a little unsustainable over the long haul and is considered by some experts to be less than optimal for healthy weight loss.
3. I was consuming too few calories on many days. Most of my daily menu have been ranging between 1400 to 1600 calories while most days’ exercise was burning between 250 to 600 calories. On some days the net calorie intake could be as low as 800 calories. Some nutritionists might say that’s okay, but I discovered that my body was reacting with significantly less energy and seemingly more erratic weight fluctuations.

As a result, I’ve made the following modifications to my game plan:

1. Weigh-ins will be done weekly instead of daily. That doesn’t mean I won’t sneak on to the weight scale more often, but I will only document the weekly weigh-in from this point forward. It’s a better reflection of the overall trend anyway and helps level out the wild swings that can occur from day to day as the body makes its adjustments with water weight and other factors.
2. I’m scaling back my expectations for weekly weight loss to a more realistic 2 to 2.5 pounds per week. The official target weight loss should be around 2 pounds per week, but I’d still like to shoot for 2.5 pounds for the next few months to stay ahead of pace. I’m fully expecting the pace to slow down significantly as I get closer to this year’s goal, and even more so as I get closer to my ultimate goal.
3. I’m actually going to increase my daily calorie intake. In some initial consultations with a nutritionist, I was told that my minimum intake should be 1300 calories, but it was unclear to me if that was before or after exercise was factored in. After the last few weeks, I’ve decided that I should make that my minimum net intake for the day, at least for the next couple of months to see if things improve. I’m planning on targeting for a 1600 to 1900 calorie daily menu and 250 to 500 calorie burn in my daily exercise program.

So, as of today, that’s where things stand. I plan to continue with my daily journals — at least during the week — and other updates during the week as warranted.