Update – 1/15
Continuing on the thread of finally losing some of this weight I gained that I wrote about first on 1/8, today is the weekly update.
On 1/2, I kicked the effort off. That day, I stepped on the scale, and it was an eye-boggling 263.2 pounds.
I will be honest, I had been hiding from the scale, and this number shocked me, but I was not surprised.
While it isn’t a New Year’s resolution, as I know that would be doomed to failure, it was a wake up call.
Today, when I woke up and stepped on the scale, it read 254.4 pounds. Of course, in the first week, I lost about 5#’s of probable water weight, so that lead to a precipitous decline that wasn’t real. Now I am settling into a routine.
The hard things
For me, it has always been about self control. I am a “stress eater”. When life is stressful, and as a product manager, I live on stress, I compensate with snacking, and other unhealthy habits.
The first few weeks of a real diet effort for me is adjusting to a lower caloric intake. Enough that I am not hungry, switching to healthier choices (with one exception that I will discuss later), and cutting out the between meal munchies.
Breakfast is cereal, measured, with 1% milk. Lunch is a skimpy sandwich, on whole wheat bread, with a yogurt and a small piece of cheese. Dinner is a healthy salad (with some goodies like dried cranberries, and crumbled feta cheese) with a modest dressing, and a lean cuisine frozen meal.
No desserts. In fact, since January 2, I have not had any chocolate. That might be a record for me.
The bad thing
One thing that I know isn’t great is the lean cuisine frozen meal. They are chocked full of sodium, to enhance the flavor, often at my limit for the recommended daily dose. But the alternative is to cook, and I love to cook.
The problem with a meal I prepare is that portion control is impossible. It is there, so I eat it.
Lean Cuisine, while not the healthiest option, is portion controlled, and that for me is the difference, and worth the salt bomb.
Other tidbits
One piece of advice that all diets recommend is to not step on the scale each day. A proper diet will have ups and downs, and to prevent the despair that often derails the efforts, the recommendation is to weigh yourself once a week, and track it with that granularity.
I get that. But for me, it isn’t workable. I am a geek, and a quasi metrologist (by training and background), so I like to measure things.
And for me, one of the great motivators is to see, in as close to real time as possible, how my weight is changing. Thus, the daily routine is wake up, step on the scale, start the coffee, and measure my blood pressure/pulse rate.
Of course, my Perfect Diet Tracker tells me I am losing weight too fast, and it is probably true, but it is like a bike ride, where I am competing against myself. I can’t help it.
