Of Weddings and Weight Goals

257.3

Holy progress batman! Since I'm not going to be able to weigh in tomorrow or Sunday (traveling for a wedding), this is going to have to go down as my weigh in. It's a loss of a very impressive 6.7 pounds for the week. In a word, nice.

The next weigh in that I'm planning on putting on the side of the blog is Tuesdays. I know, I know, I started on a Saturday, so Saturday should by normal logic be my official big "side of the blog" weigh in date. Let's be honest: Saturday is a terrible weigh in day. In addition to being one of the two days I'm least likely to blog (tied with Sunday), it's also the day I'm most likely to be away and least likely to have access to a scale. Saturday has all the qualities of a terrible weekly weigh in day, and it will not be mine.

What will? Tuesday, of course! I love Tuesday for weigh ins. 80% of this is purely sentimental, of course. I weighed in for months and months on Tuesday when I first started this blog, and with it I dropped over 40 pounds. There are other reasons why I think Tuesday makes a great weigh in day: it's close enough to the weekend to keep you on your toes, but far enough away that you have a smidgen of time to get rid of any sodium induced bloat. It's unaffected by most holidays and long weekends, meaning you're less likely to be away from a scale. It's a great weigh in day, and most importantly, it's *my* weigh in day.


I mentioned, yesterday, that I had weight goals that I was keeping separate from the Hot 100 challenge. And I do.

Sort of.

Obviously my intention, broadly speaking, is to lose weight, preferably at a reasonable clip. When I first started on the 18th at 264, I set myself up with what I thought to be an extremely ambitious "super mini goal" of being 255 by Friday, October 8th, when I'm flying down to North Carolina to visit a friend for the weekend. On that day, it required me losing a rather tricky 3.15 pounds a week: more than I'd normally shoot for, but I knew I'd get some help from first week losses. I also set myself up with what I viewed as a more reasonable mini goal of getting down to 250, which would mean having lost a smidge over 5% of my starting weight, by Monday, October 25th. That originally required me to lose a hard but reasonable 2.65 pounds a week.

Good, stretch yourself goals, right? Not so much any more. For 255 by October 8th, I now only need to lose 1.15 pounds a week. For 250 by the 25th, I now only need to lose 1.65 pounds a week. These are not the things ambition is made of.

Which might lead one to say "change your goals." The thing is, however, you don't really want to spend all your time shooting at a moving target. Part of weight loss has to be occasionally succeeding. I set my targets, and now it's time to head towards them, wimpy though they may currently seem.

My official, near term goals, therefore, are to be 255 pounds by Friday, October 8th and to get down to 250, marking a 5% loss of my starting weight, by Monday, October 25th.

What are we looking at long term? Well, my best friend from college is getting married this June (unfortunately, to a guy I despise) and I am on the hook to be a bridesmaid. Her mother is sewing the bridesmaid dresses for us, and has asked us to get measured and send the information to her by February 1st. This is going to be insanely tough for me emotionally, and I'd like to be as low as I can by then.

Depending on how things are going, I may end up just telling my friend's mom that I've been losing weight and am probably going to lose more before the wedding and just see how she wants to deal with it. If it means I need to get the dress professionally made closer to the actual wedding or even step down as a bridesmaid, that's life. If push comes to shove, I'm not going to put my life/health on hold for four months because of someone else's wedding (especially a wedding I think is such a terrible idea).

To get back from the bridesmaid tangent, what all this means is that February 1st is a goal date of mine, although I don't actually yet have a goal number. To get to 220, I'd need to lose almost exactly 2 pounds a week from now until then. To get to 210, I'm looking at 2.5. And for 200, I'd need an average of 3, which is almost certainly out of range.

I think my current plan is to shoot for 255, and then 250, as quickly as I reasonably can. From there, I'm likely to set a goal for either 237 (a bit over 10% of my starting weight) or 233 (no longer morbidly obese, and historically a big trip up point for me). The date will be determined by how soon I hit 250. If I do 237, my next goal is 233 (clearly), and from there I'll shoot for 220 and/or figure out where I can be by February.

This first week is the easy week. Weight falls off like water. Being at home tonight and Sunday, and dealing with food at the wedding tomorrow, are going to be my first real challenges. Let's meet them with aplomb.

In other news: 25th Happy Birthday to Mae Flowers of A Journey to Thin! She's amazing and has lost over 60 pounds.

Hot 100

258.8

Not bad. I'm down another .5 pounds day to day, and I've dropped an awesome 5.2 pounds since I started.

As of today, there are exactly 100 days left in 2010. Steve of Log My Loss is running, as he did last year, a Hot 100 challenge for the last 100 days of 2010. I, as I did last year, intend to participate. In the interest of mixing things up, this year I intend to, you know, actually finish the challenge instead of puttering out mid-November.

This year doesn't have last year's requirements that all goals be measurable, achievable, and entirely within your control. So it's just, basically, to make three or more goals that can last you till January, and to write about them each week.

1. Blog 5+ days a week. Blogging helps me stay focused and motivated. It forces me to spend a portion of each day really *thinking* about what I'm doing and why. Blogging help keeps me on track, and so I shall blog.
2. Go for a walk outside every day. Yes, even if it's hot or cold or raining or snowing or I'm feeling under the weather and really would rather not. Every damn day, I need to go outside and spend some time trudging through the fresh air. I can do it.
3. Act as if my weight can't hold my career back by doing what I should be doing and applying to new jobs. This might not seem quite like it fits in with a weight loss challenge, but for me it does. I've been using feeling bad about my weight as an excuse not to apply for jobs, and I shouldn't be. While yes, studies do show that obese people are less likely to be hired, there is no chance I'll ever get hired for a job I don't apply for. Ideally, I'd like to find a new job before this challenge is over, and if that happens I'll update with a new goal.

So, those are my challenge goals. You'll notice they're not quite weight centric. The only one that has a direct effect on the scale is #2, and even that's a pretty weak one. A walk of indeterminate length and intensity, even every day, is not the stuff big losses on the scales are made of.

There's a reason for this. It's not that I don't have lots of weight related goals: I do, and I'll probably discuss them in the upcoming future. But the issue is, I already have those. Those wouldn't be challenge goals, they would just be me continuing along my merry way and picking up challenge credit as I went.

So, those are my Hot 100 goals. If you want to try to close out the last 100 days of the year with a bang, it's not too late to join! They're accepting participants until October 1st. Just head over to Log My Loss for all the details.

Some guidelines and goals

Weight: 240.2

Today marks one week of being back. I've lost an excellent 4.3 pounds, which is just .2 pounds shy of half the 9 pounds I gained being away.

I'm debating whether or not I should put it as my big side of the blog weigh in. On the one hand, I started on a Thursday so this is a week later and should be my next weigh in. Just going by normal standards, this should be the day.

But, Tuesdays are my weigh in day. For months I weighed in on Tuesdays. I like Tuesdays. They're close enough to the weekend to keep the pressure up, and you're less likely to be away then you would on a Monday. And they're just my weigh in day.

On the other hand, I know I won't be able to weigh in on at least one Tuesday next month since I'm going to be on the road, so maybe I should just suck it up and stick with Thursdays for the time being.

I know I owe you guys a post on serious stuff, but today I just want to do today is set out some straightforward goals for myself:

1. There's no reason not to take the stairs down when I leave my apartment. I live on the 8th floor and taking the stairs down is both easy and smart. Unfortunately, I can't take the stairs up: you can't open the doors from inside the stairwell on any floor but the lobby and basement. (For the record, how lame is that? Shouldn't it be a fire hazard or something?)
2. I need to really write down what I'm eating. When I originally started this blog/diet, I wrote down every morsel. Along the way, I got comfortable enough judging my food and tracking calories in my head that I stopped. For now, I need to write things down. I'm not assigning myself a definite calorie limit, but I know around where I want to be.
3. Lunch time walks are one of the keys to success. Going out in the fresh air and getting a bit of midday exercise not only burns calories, it makes me feel infinitely better for the rest of the afternoon. At least 4 days a week, I want to go for a walk during lunch.
4. The most important thing I can do to get myself to the gym is to not sit down after getting home from work. If I change immediately, grab a bottle of water and head off, I get there. The moment I sit down, my chances of heading out the door plummet. As of now, I'm going to plan to hit the gym at least 4 work days a week, and hopefully on the weekends as well.

For now, those are my basic guidelines for staying on the right track.

Two days ago I made plans to fly out to visit my best friend from college in February, and I'm really, really excited to see her since we haven't been able to get together for a little over a year. Literally a few hours after we finalized the trip and I bought the tickets, her boyfriend proposed. So, come the weekend of February 20th, I'll not only be seeing her for the first time in a year, I'll be meeting her fianc�e for the first time ever. A little nerve-wracking, to say the least. It's a little over three weeks away, so nothing drastic is going to happen, but I'd like to make some decent progress by then. If I can lose 4.7 pounds by then, I'll at least be as thin as I was before I got lost, and if I can drop 7.2 pounds by then, I'd no longer be morbid for the visit. Who knows if I'll be able to make either of those goals (I really should be able to make the first and the second is within reason), but now is as good a time as any to set them up.

It's highly unlikely I'll be at my goal weight to walk down the aisle for my brother's wedding this summer, but maybe, just maybe, I'll be there by the time I need to be a bridesmaid in hers the summer after.

The First 100 Days

Today marks the 100th day of my journey. I've been doing this for 100 days. 24000ish hours. 14 weeks and a smidge. Three months and change.

And, I've been doing pretty well. I've lost exactly 37 pounds. That's 13.31% of my starting body weight, and 6.35 points of BMI. It means I've lost an average of 2.59 pounds week, or .37 pounds a day. In my most impressive week, I lost 7.5 pounds. In my least impressive, I lost only .2. I am yet to post a weekly gain.

Losing 37 pounds is equivalent to 129500 calories. That means each day, I've burned an average of 1295 calories more than I took in. When I began, I was a tight size 22, although I did have one suit that was a size 24. Today, I'm a size 18, and the suit jacket I wear to work every day is a size 16.

All that in 100 days.

I've come far, but I have a long way to go. 8 more pounds till I'm not morbidly obese, and 96 more pounds till I'm not overweight at all.

I've learned I'm stronger than I thought, and can walk farther than I might have imagined possible. I've found that there are few things as powerful as simply keeping going.

Each day I don't binge and each day I burn a bit more than I take in is a victory. Each step I walk, each minute I spend on the elliptical and each weight I lift is progress. I am constantly moving closer to my goal and farther from where I was.

The journey is long. It's difficult. I've been challenged. I've been overwhelmed. At times I've fallen. But thus far I've always gotten back up, dusted myself off, and kept going.

This is a numbers game. It's a game of emotion, too, of figuring out who you are, why you're doing this, and how you got this way. But more than that, I think, it's the numbers. Just day in, day out, slowly building up the deficits. There's nothing you can't do if you just keep going.

I've had a great 100 days. Here's to many, many more.


Also, Jenn of Watch My Butt Shrink gave me a Great Shrinking Butt award! Thanks Jenn!

I hit my first goal!

Okay, I know I might have kind of given it away in the title, but check out this weigh in:

Weight: 250.0
BMI: 42.91

Ahhh! YAY! Okay. I should not just write random screamy things as they do nothing to illuminate the post, but by god I just cannot stop smiling.

I started this journey on July 7th. Using that as day 1, today is day 59. When I started, I declared a mini goal of getting to 250 pounds by September 15th. This is the equivalent of 28 pounds and just an eensy bit over 10% of my starting weight. Hitting it required dropping an average of 2.8 pounds/week. Today, September 3rd, 12 days early, I finished my first mini goal.

What now? Well, it's time for a new mini goal!

So, I've got two long term goals, which I call my long term goal and my long term stretch goal. My long term goal is to not be obese at my brother's wedding, which would mean getting my weight down to 175 by August 14th, 2010. My long term stretch goal is to not be overweight at my brother's wedding, which means hitting 145 by that same 8/14/2010. When I started, that meant losing a little under 1.8 pounds/week for my normal goal, and losing a little over 2.3 pounds/week for my stretch goal. Because I've been going above pace, the sustained loss needed to hit those milestones is now a bit over 1.5 pounds/week and a bit over 2.1 pounds/week respectively.

Once I set my first mini goal, I knew the weight I was going to attach to my second mini goal: 233 pounds. At 233 pounds, for the first time in too long, I will no longer be morbidly obese. Morbid is such a wretched word, such a wretched concept, one label I just can't wait to be rid of. My next goal is to not be morbid.

But I need a deadline. Some people don't like deadlines (weight loss isn't a race, after all), but for me they're helpful. It gives me a discreet point to work towards, and an expectation of pace. By attaching a deadline to my goal, I'm more likely to work harder and lose the weight faster.

So, 17 pounds. Back when I thought I'd be hitting 250 on the 15th, I sort of assumed that I'd make Halloween the deadline. Plugging that into calculators this morning (thank you fitday!) that meant a pace of 2.05 pounds/week. That's slower than my stretch goal, and thus way too slow for a mini goal. Mini goals are meant to push me.

The next meaningful date I could think of was Saint Crispin's Day, which is October 25th. An October 25th deadline would mean a loss of 2.29 pounds/week. This is above the pace needed for my stretch goal. The main benefit is that doing things around Saint Crispin's day is just totally badass. I could be all "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers we" and whatnot.

But, I asked myself, is 2.29 enough of a stretch while you're still this high? I weigh quite a bit right now. This, in many ways, sucks. But having so much to lose gives me one substantive benefit: moving myself around burns a heck of a lot more calories than it would for a person of reasonable size. Because I still weigh so much, dropping a given pound is comparatively easier than it will be down the road.

So I tried pushing it up a bit more to the 15th, the ides of October. (Did you know the ides only take place on the 15th during October, March, May and July? In all other months they're on the 13th. In other news, I am a gigantic nerd.) Fitday says this means losing 2.83 pounds/week. This is a slight bit more than my last mini goal (which started at 2.80 pounds/week) but is slower than the actual pace I've had thus far of 3.32 pounds/week.

My new goal is to lose 17 pounds by October 15th.

It's going to be tough. That's a high number. I'll need to push workouts and keep mistakes few and far between. But it's also eminently doable. If I want to, there's not a doubt in my mind that I can make it.

The comments you guys left yesterday were just incredibly insightful. Several of you brought up that "easy" isn't quite the right word, and thinking about it more I realized that's true. The pain of recovery and long term restrictions are not to be underestimated. I started drafting a bit more of a response to all the good points you guys brought up last night, but that got preempted by my WOOHOO 10% post. So look for that in the near future.

In the mean time, I'm still smiling. I've lost 10% of my bodyweight. I've improved how I look, lowered my risk of disease, and quite a few other things. I'm happy I stuck through, and I'm proud of myself for doing so. I hope the rest of you guys get to have just as fabulous a day as I'm having.

Should I push up my deadline?

Weight: 256.7
BMI: 44.06

As I've talked about a few times in the past, my first mini-goal is to get to 250lbs by September 15th. The weight is meaningful (it'll mean I've lost 10% of my bodyweight, plus it's a big round number), but the date is not. I picked it, essentially, by playing around in calculators. September 1st seemed too tough and October 1st would be too easy: so the 15th it was. When I started, the goal required a sustained loss of 2.8 pounds a week: ambitious, but not impossible. As of now, it would require a sustained loss of 1.46 pounds a week: cake, at the rate I've been going.

So, I've been playing with the idea of moving the date up a bit to September first. Including today and the 1st, that would give me 19 days to hit goal, meaning I'd need to lose 2.5 pounds a week to hit it. I think that's a high enough number that it'll be challenging, but low enough that I should be able to make it if I work hard enough.

Do you guys think moving up a goal date is a good idea (to keep things challenging) or a bad idea ( since I think you lose something if you're trying to hit a moving target)? What would you do?

Just to give a visual, the below chart represents the weekly weight loss I'd need to sustain* on any given day to hit my current mini goal (250 by 9/15), my long term goal (175 by 8/14/2010 aka my brother's wedding) and my stretch goal (145 by the wedding). My short term goal has gone from being more challenging than my stretch goal to easier than my regular long term goal.

Personally, I'm leaning for it being time for an update.


*I appreciate that the chart might be a little weird to people who don't like mathy things. Essentially, it's a judge of pace: how much do I need to be losing each week to hit my goals. Consistently beating pace means I can go slower later and still make it. Going behind pace means I'll need to lose more quickly later. A fuller explanation of the philosophy behind the graph (and why I like it so very much) is available here.

Goodbye, 5% of my starting weight.

Weight: 263.6
BMI: 45.24

Let's start with the good news first: I'm more than half way to my mini goal! I'm 28 days in and I've now lost 14.4 pounds and 5.18% of my starting body weight. My deadline to hit 25--a 10% loss of my initial bodyweight--is 9/15/2009, which is 43 days away. No matter which way you slice it, I'm pretty darn happy with the 263.6 number.

Things, however, weren't looking so sunny immediately upon my return from San Diego. The first two days went relatively well. I perhaps ate a bit more than I would've if I'd been at home, but not by much. By mid week I'd succumbed to french fries and a glass of white wine. Thursday I went on an In-n-Out burger outing. Friday was pretty darn close to an unmitigated disaster. In the morning I ate a scoop of hash browns, two pieces of sausage, and berries and cream. On the flight from San Diego to Atlanta I ate both complimentary cookies and an $8 turkey, apple and brie Sandwich with honey mustard (delicious, by the way). Stuck in the Atlanta airport, I ate a grilled Chick-Fil-A sandwich and fries. Disaster. Delicious, delicious disaster.

And it showed. My weight on Friday evening was a super high 269.4. By Saturday morning I was down to the still insanely high 268.0.

I dropped quickly from there though. Yesterday, I joyfully hit a new low of 264.7, and today, an even lower 263.6. I feel like I might be in for a small gain tomorrow, but we shall see.

I'm on track. I'm more than halfway to my first goal. And I've lost an amazing 14.4 pounds in 28 days. Now if I can only stop dreaming about Chick-Fil-A's delicious, delicious waffle fries, we'll be in business.

Fun with Graphs

As I've brought up a few times, I keep an Excel chart of my weight loss. I do this for several reasons:

1. I'm a nerd.
2. Recording day-to-day makes me more accountable
3. It's good to look at when I'm losing motivation
4. I have a lot of fun doing so

Today, I'm going to share some of the fun graphs I have, why I have them, what they mean, and how they help.

The most basic graph I keep is just one of my overall weight loss progress. As of today it looks like:


I've been lucky thus far in mostly having consistent losses, but that's not always the case. While the scale is a good overall judge of progress, it's a very noisy instrument. A lot of the time it'll pick up that your dinner last night was salty, or that you're bloated, or that you're dehydrated or that it's that time of the month, or a variety of other things rather than the actual truth of what's going on. This is the reason many people will just weigh themselves once a week: they just want to get an overview of the numbers, they don't want to deal with the day to day noise.

While I see the appeal of that, getting a reading once a week doesn't make your readings more accurate: it just gives you one data point to go on, and you don't know if it's actually your real weight showing up. There is, however, a solution for that: the moving average. So, I have a chart that shows my real weight, and the five day moving average. (For the first 1-4 days, I did an average of how many days I had data for.) As long as you're losing weight, even if you have days you go up and days you go down, the moving average should head consistently downward. Take a look:

Notice how on July 10th, even though I gained .8 pounds and saw a sharp spike in my day to day weight, the moving average of my weight was still falling. The moving average tends to be more valuable if you are having more up and down fluctuations than I am at the moment, but I still like having it for when I do get those--and if my previous attempts at weight loss are any indication, I eventually will.

Now, neither of those are the coolest chart I have.

One of the big things they advocate at Spark People is attaching deadlines to your weight loss goals. Some sort of "A wish + a deadline = goal!" cheese. To a certain extent, I think this isn't optimal: set your goal too low and you end up not really challenging yourself; aim too high and you're in for a sea of disappointment. If you use Spark to track your weight (or Fitday, and perhaps other weight loss software I'm not familiar with), they'll have one static line for your goal. If you're not closely racing the line, it's really not all that helpful: if you're well under or well over it, it's really not showing much about how your most recent progress is comparing to what you need to get to. (Spark will also only track one weight goal at a time, which I find relatively annoying.)

As of now, I have three goals: one short term, one long term, and one long term stretch.

My short term goal is to get to 250lbs by September 15th. The date is arbitrary, but the poundage is meaningful. 250 will mean I've lost 28 pounds, or 10% of my starting body weight. (Technically, the 10% mark will be met at 250.2, I rounded.) 250 is also just a big milestone number, and it seems to work in many ways. The 9/15 date was picked just by playing in calculators: 10/1 seemed too easy, 9/1 too harsh.

My long term goal is to no longer be obese at my brother's wedding, which will mean getting to 175 by August 14th, 2010. My long term stretch goal is to not be overweight by my brother's wedding, which would mean hitting 145 or below by the same 8/14/2010 goal. To be 100% honest, I would be overjoyed and incredibly proud of myself with either. For now, they're just giving me benchmarks.

My favorite chart makes use of all three goals. It's aim is to answer the question of "how much sustained weight would I need to lose per week to hit my goals of 250, 175, and 145?" It looks like this:

I'm also going to show you guys this as a table, since I think it's helpful to look at both:

There's a column for date, weight, days till 9/15, the average amount of weight I'd need to lose each week to get to 250 as of that day, the days till my brothers wedding, the average amount of weight I need to lose each week to get to be not obese, and the same for not overweight.

What I like so much about this chart is that I can see how well I'm doing relative to how well I need to do to hit my goal. Every day I lose .4 pounds or more (the equivalent of 2.8lbs/week), all my goals become easier. When I lose .3 pounds a day (2.1/week), my short term goal and the "not obese" goal are both easier, but the road to my stretch goal becomes slightly harder. .2 pounds day (1.4/week) and everything becomes harder.

But the best part is, those rules aren't constant. Not too long ago, a .3 pound day was bad for my short term and stretch goals. When I started my short term goal, it meant losing 2.8 pounds a week. Because I've been above pace so much, I now only need to lose a smidge more than 2 pounds a week. Progress!

There are a few reasons I like this standard so much. One of them is that it's forward-looking: all the other stats just judge progress thus far. This one is more about how each day will impact the rest of my journey. Essentially, every day I do an awesome job makes the days ahead easier.

The thing about my goals is, while they're there, and I like using them to measure progress and stay on top of myself, they're not really what I care about. Yes, it would be nice to look fabulous in my brother's wedding pictures: I'm going to have to see them for years and years to come. But, relative to how much I care about the reasons I'm actually doing this, it's meaningless. I care a bit, but it's not really what I care about.

I care about my future health: I don't want to get diabetes, or heart disease, or all those other things that being obese makes me more likely to get. Most importantly, I don't want my weight to hold me back any more.

I want to sit on airplanes without feeling bad for the person sitting next to me. I want to be able to run if I need to and not get winded. I want to go to the beach and not feel like I shouldn't be wearing a bathing suit. I want to not be scared of amusement park rides. I want to just live my day to day life without there being things I can't do because I'm too damn fat.

The goals and charts are just window dressing, they're not what matters. But they help me get through the day to day, and keep me solid when I want to stray. The charts help prove what I inherently know: each day I do a good job makes the next day easier.