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.