Weigh in Wednesday: How it Started and How it's Going

Content warning: yep this one is about weight loss.  That's not everyone's cup of tea, so feel free to skip if this isn't your jam.

Andddd....every word in this post is 100% my opinion. I do have a very old and completely unused bachelor's degree in Nutrition (backstory here) but all that means is that I am more aware than most that I am not qualified, certified, or licensed to give nutrition or weight loss advice and that's not my intention.  I have a rough idea of what's going on with me and no clue about what's going on with you.

Alright friends, last month I took some time to think out loud about my weight.  I added 15 unwanted pounds between mid 2021 to late 2022 and I thought that I might be ready to do something about it.  I decided to take a shot at a mild calorie reduction and see where I was in a month.  If I lost weight great, if not then the plan was to accept my weight and move on with life.

TL&DR: things are going well.

It's Not My First Time at This Rodeo

I was overweight as a kid and lost 50 pounds in college (thanks nutrition degree!).  Since then my weight has crept up from time to time, but nothing that I couldn't knock out by cutting back on the calories and upping the exercise.  They say that abs are made in the kitchen, but most of my weight control has come from the gym.

In my early 30's there was a time when my weight went noticeably up, and in addition to the gym I combated it with a food log and daily weigh ins.  After I lost the weight I did a lookback and saw that through loss and maintenance my daily average for calories was 2,200.  But that was an average with a lot of extremes.  I was trying to eat 1,200 calories a day because that's what people did back then and not making it so there were a good number of high calories days to offset it.  Yes my weight fluctuates from day to day like every other human but at the time it was useful to have a daily number and my weight stayed nicely in check for years afterwards.

Toward the end of 2017 my weight crept up again and I took it to the blog (oh come on with those numbers...today's are exactly 10 pounds higher on both sides).  That went swimmingly well until I got the half marathon bug and started distance running.  The plus side was that I could eat like a horse but the downside is that the scale stayed glued to the 140 mark for a few years.  I broke the matrix of "if the scale goes up just eat less and workout more".  With running I couldn't eat less and I couldn't figure out how to workout "more" than the 30 miles a week that I was already running.  Every once in a while I'd try to get the scale down but not too seriously.  I was basically happy with the way things were.  Except that it drove me bonkers to track my food and to weigh myself when the answer was always "a lot" for food and "the same" for weight so I stopped doing it.

And that brings us to how we got here.  Let me introduce you to the summer of 2021

• I worked with a running coach who had me doing lots of slow running which did my fitness no favors and I believe primed the pump for weight gain.
  
• I worked with a dietitian who wanted me to eat gobs of protein which led to eating gobs of food to try to get that protein in==>I believe this is the #1 culprit for the weight gain.
  
• A prolonged period of work stress that made me incredibly unhappy.
  

The lb's came to the party...5 pounds that summer, 5 pounds in the fall, and then 5 more pounds over the course of 2022.  I saw the numbers go up and I felt my clothes get tighter but I couldn't figure out what to do about it besides get bigger pants which is exactly what I did.  Give me credit for self knowledge: I knew that I wasn't ready to do anything about my weight so I didn't.

Getting Ready

That bring us to last summer.  My year of unhappiness at work started to clear up.  I finally accepted that running had gone from something wonderful to something horrible and stopped.  I did a lot of work to get my eating from "I need to eat a ton of food that I hate because it's supposed to be good for running" back to my previous "I eat what I wanna eat and don't eat what I don't wanna eat".  Hmm...maybe it was time to take a look at the weight.

It's not like I actually had a plan, but here's what happened next.  I realized that back when I kept the food log I knew that I was eating 2,200 calories a day but I had no clue what I was eating now and what I needed to change.  In the past I've tracked food in a notebook or in MyFitnessPal but the problem with both methods is that they just ended up being a data dumping ground.  This time I set myself up a 'lil spreadsheet so that I could step in and work with the numbers.  I got a couple of weeks of eating without trying to change anything, and then I started playing around to see where I could cut back.  Stop snacking?  No good because then I got too hungry and made up for the lost calories.  Lose the booze?  Good idea in theory but again it seems like I start getting the calories elsewhere.  Oh hold up, it's Thanksgiving and I know good and well that I'm not going to be making any changes until the holiday season is done so I just kick back and enjoy life.  When all is said and done I have three months worth of numbers.

I'm eating an average of 2,400 calories a day and according to my Garmin I'm burning an average of 2,400 calories a day.  My average is a mix of:

• Lower calorie days when I'm less hungry or when I'm deliberately trying to cut back - these are fine.
• Normal calorie days when nothing much is going on - these are fine.
• High calorie days due to special events, like family parties and Christmas - these are fine and desirable.
• High calorie days when I'm bored/stressed/whatever and just eat a lot - hey this thing is not like the other things.
  

I did the Excel thing and replaced all of the bored/stressed/whatever days with the average 2,400 and saw my average drop...oooh now I know what the enemy is so I can get after it.

Launch

It's action time. Starting on January 2nd I started cutting back on food where it made sense and not where it didn't with the goal of an average of 2,000 calories a day.  I came out at an average of 2,100 calories and five lb's gone.

This is excellent.  It's also just one month and it doesn't mean anything.  What really matters is where things are six months from now and one year from now.  But here's what I've seen over the one month of success that I've had.

• Overall my appetite and energy are good.  I'm aware that I'm eating less but it's not too annoying.
  
• Monday through Thursday tend to be lower calorie days because...well because they're routine and boring.
• Weekends skew higher cuz they're fun.  I don't do anything special to cut back except the common sense stuff.  I'm capable of eating half a pizza but I stop at two slices.  I don't drink any more and also I don't drink any less.  I'm most likely knocking back a couple of brews with the hubs on Friday and Saturday and it's wonderful and it's staying in the picture.
• The really fun day of the month was my stepson's birthday party.  IT'S ONE DAY.  I ate what I wanted.
• BUT on the flip side...yes I still get bored/stressed/whatever.  The third week of the month was really tough and came with some high calorie days.  I observed, gave myself a break, asked myself "hey are you in or out?", and then I got back on track.  One of my observations is that the middle of the month is always going to be high stress because that's when most of my work falls.  It's cool.  Either I'll find another outlet for the stress or I'll decide losing weight isn't my priority right now.
• And sometimes I get hungry because I'm human.  This is a tricky one that I've narrowed down pretty well over the last year.  If I'm truly hungry, then I need to eat and problem solved.  If I'm just stressed or angry, I either need to walk away or grab a handful of carrots and rage eat them.  What doesn't work is when I get it wrong - if I'm truly hungry then walking away or eating something low calorie just makes me hungrier, and there's no amount of food that I can eat to fix stress/anger.
• I'm trying to get the right balance of doing what I need to do without being a slave to the numbers.  Yes I track calories but I try not to look at the totals too much.  Yes I weigh myself but only once a week. I'm trying to have a general sense of what's going on without getting nutty.
• No change to exercise.  I work out 5 days a week: 4 days of strength with a 20 minute high intensity cardio finisher and one day of 45 minutes of cardio.  This is a huge cutback over when I was running.  FWIW I believe that the short but high intensity cardio sessions are doing everything that running wasn't doing for me in terms of weight loss but like everything else here that's just my opinion.

What's Next

More of the same.  I believe that my loss will slow down going forward as it has every other time that I've lost weight.  I don't need to have another five pounds in a month loss, I just need to have any kind of loss and keep repeating it from month to month and we're golden. 

I try not to think about the end game.  I mean I've already said it many times on the blog, I prefer to weigh 130 pounds but it's been a long time since I've been there and it's daunting to think about losing 20 more pounds.  140 was a good weight for me for a long time, and yes it's closer than it was a month ago, but it's still a ways away.  My job right now is just to commit to another month of keeping the cals at an average of 2,000 a day...or 2,100...whatever....same difference. 

I'll check back in early March to let you know how February went.

Peace out!