12 lbs in 12 weeks (Week 4)

As suspected, my weigh-in last week undervalued my actual weight, so today the scale is telling me that my weight is 166.5 lbs.



I’m still meeting my target goals (167 lbs was my target for this week), so no big deal.  As long as my weight is trending down, then I’m happy.

I know I can do better about eating.  I have observed myself eating while knowing that my body has told me that I’ve already had enough to eat.  I need to manage my portions better.

I have been going to the gym regularly, and so my strength-training is yielding improvements.  I can now do 16-17 push-ups.  I had given myself a goal of adding 1 push-up per week, but so far I’ve been improving at a rate of about 2 per week.  I can bench press about 50 lbs.

It’s funny, because in the past the number of push-ups I was able to perform stayed constant (something like 10 total).  I could never figure how to boost that number.  This time around I’ve been doing bench- and military-presses regularly, and doing push-ups every single day, and that combination seems to have been the key.

For this week (well, for every week!), I’m going to have to be very disciplined about my eating, since I’m only slightly below my weight-loss target.  I’ve been doing exercise regularly, so the critical adjustment I need to make in my life-style in order to lose weight is to consume less food.

12 lbs in 12 weeks (Week 3)

Well, another good week.  I managed to lose another 2 lbs, so I'm down to 164.5 lbs.  Here’s today’s chart:




I don’t know how much I trust this result, since I still think I’ve been eating too much for my evening meal.  I watch what I eat but I haven’t exactly been abstemious.

I’ve been doing my usual routine in the gym, and the strength-training is going well.  This past week I managed 12-14 push-ups per day, so there’s been definite improvement.

One frustrating thing is that with all the salt in my food (our chef uses lots of it for flavor), I retain water and so it’s hard to know what my actual weight is, since it can fluctuate so much.  I find that I have to be careful about what I eat (that is, watch the salt) a day or two before my Monday weigh-in, so the results aren’t thrown off.

12 lbs in 12 weeks (Week 2)

Well, today is Monday and that means I had my weigh-in this morning.  The news was good: I lost 2 lbs from last week and so I’m down to 166.5 lbs.  Here’s a plot of my actual weight compared to my weekly goal weight:



I think I’m still eating too much.  They say that you should eat slowly, and stop when your body tells you it has had enough.  My tendency is to fill my plate with food, and then eat whatever is on my plate.  I’m good in the sense that I haven’t been going back for seconds, but bad in that I often take more food than I really need.

In the evenings, I have a light meal.  I know that on some days, my meal isn’t really light enough.  (Hey, I love to eat, what can I say…)  Note that you only need food to supply the energy you need to get through the day, so it’s smarter to front-load your meals: a larger mid-day meal, and a smaller evening meal.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a large meal at the end of the day, since the day is almost over.  I think my eating habits have improved but I know I can do better.  (If it were otherwise, then I wouldn’t be writing this post!)

I was good about hitting the gym.  I think I only missed one day (and that was because I had to work late).  I sometimes dread going, and can think of a thousand reasons not to go.  But you know what?  After I go for a workout, I’m always glad I went.

At the gym I have a loose schedule of activities: 20 min. of stair-stepper, 20 min. of treadmill, and about 20 min. of weights.  I’ve been doing chest and shoulders on one day and arms on the next.  I begin the strength training part of my routine with crunches and push-ups.  The past week I managed about 10-12 push-ups per day.  (I’d like to be able to do one extra push-up per week.  At the end of this sojourn I’d like to be able to do 25 push-ups.)

12 lbs in 12 weeks (Week 1)

Last time around this year I gave myself the goal of getting my weight back down to 160 lbs by the Thanksgiving holiday.  I succeeded in that goal, but since that time, my weight has crept back up, so it’s time to begin the process again.

My current weight is about 170 lbs, and Thanksgiving is about 12 weeks away, so this year’s weight loss goal will have as its theme “12 lbs in 12 weeks”.  My target weight is 158 lbs.

Here’s my current weight plotted against my goal weight:



I do my weigh-in every Monday morning, so expect a new blog post on that topic every week.  Giving myself a schedule, and advertising my progress, keeps me honest about actually achieving the goal I have set for myself.

I have no excuse for re-gaining the weight I lost last fall.  Part of the problem is that I now work for Google, and my new employer provides our meals every day.  I’m not complaining, of course, just saying that all that good food tempts me to eat more than I would have otherwise, when lunch was just a tuna sandwich and a banana.  I just need to re-calibrate how much I eat, and have a little more discipline.  It’s easy to slide back into bad habits.

Last year I also was very aggressive about daily exercise.  I am a YMCA member (Google even subsidizes my membership fee), and I live just down the street from our local chapter, so I have really have no excuse for not going.  Besides the health benefits, going to the gym also gave me time to get some reading done.  (I’m a big fan of the stair-stepper machine, which allows you to read while exercising.)  I plan to incorporate exercise into my weight-loss regimen this year as well.  Yesterday I went to the gym for 20 mins of stair-stepper, 20 mins of tread-mill, and 20 mins of weight-training.