It's been a while, hasn't it?

Yeah... so, everything has been fine for the last month or so. After I hit my 5-pound goal, I basically decided I was cool with my body, cool with the number, and I wasn't going to try to change my weight anymore. For the first couple of weeks I bounced between 127-130. Then I got my period around the same time I had a wisdom tooth bothering me and dropped down to just under 125 in a few days, then hovered around 125-126 for somewhat over a week. I kept counting calories for a bit and figured that, eating intuitively, I take in about 1600 calories/day during the first half of my cycle and 1900 calories/day in the second half, and a 2500 or so day about a once a week - all averaging out to about 1850/day. Then I dropped the calorie counting, and pretty soon after that I dropped the exercise tracking because I know whether I'm doing enough exercise without looking a spreadsheet of it. The reasons I exercise have nothing to do with weight anymore and everything to do with mood regulation. Finally when I hit the middle of my cycle, I shot up to 129 in a few days, and have dropped back to 126-128. So, I guess I lost a pound or something on average during that first month "maintaining". I'm still writing down what I eat, and weighing every day - not so much because I need to monitor it that closely, but to establish a baseline and to assess when I've "really" stabilized at a static average weight, which may take a few months.

I figure as long as my weight stays below 130 it can do whatever it wants. Past 130 I'll start paying attention, 135 I think is my definite action level, and 145 should be about my max. Of course, this could change if I actually get into some strength training and it pays off, or further in the future when I get pregnant, but for now those are the graduated ceilings I see for my weight.

Anyway, I'm actually thinking of quitting this blog. Nobody's reading it, I'm doing fine, and it's been suggested I create a web-based presentation of my weight loss process, but I don't really want to just open this anonymous blog to all the people who know me. So I'm going to take the data, re-work it up, and start a new blog that will actually be associated with me and have readers. 

Adios, amigos!

Goal

At 128.8 yesterday and 127.6 today (yeah, I dunno either) I have met my goal of losing 5 pounds from the 133 range. At this point I can really say I'm totally satisfied with the number on the scale and the shape of my body. Or at least, I'm torn between thinking I could lose a few more pounds from my stomach and I ought to put a little back on my ribs. I've been eating cookies.

I want to do more strength training, and more yoga (I've hardly done any since the end of the academic year). I went and got some pants today that are long so I can wear them at work (a chemistry lab) but are flexible enough I can do yoga on my lunch break without changing clothes. Gotta find some way to motivate myself to do strength-building calisthenics, like pushups and bicycle/leglifts, on a regular basis. Also, with my full-time work, and some extra stuff I'm doing related to my work last summer, my running frequency isn't great and when I do run I feel I'm squeezing it in. I'm thinking of maybe setting my standard at fewer times a week but trying to do really good quality workouts that have a full spectrum of exercise types - a run and yoga-stretches and calisthenics.

On that note, it was nice this morning to go for a run just because I thought it would feel good, and without caring at all about how many calories it would burn. With my experience intuitive-eating in the last week or so, I'm pretty confident that the amount of exercise I need to stay mentally sane is at least as much as I need to maintain my weight given how much my body tells me to eat. What my mind nags me to eat can sometimes be another story, but there you go with the mental sanity, and also, it's much less of an issue due to my work right now, where I get very absorbed in what I'm doing and have to specifically change location from lab to office in order to eat.

129.8

A moment of appreciation for my first-ever-since-sixth-grade weight in the 120s.

One year (well, almost)

It's been a year. Okay, it's been 52 weeks. Okay, it's been 13 4-week periods since the nearest Saturday before I started counting calories and weighing, which means my June-to-June weight graph is full, which is I why I chose today.

And lucky of luckies, I have a new low today: 130.2

Here is the the weight graph. I'm pretty proud of both the graph and its contents (click to see a more readable version):

Plans and updates

After watching a few more days, I think I need to revise that to "my weight has stabilized around the 133 range." Which means the 5 pounds now only go down to 128. That's fine anyway; that'll be about 2 pounds back to my birthday weight, and 3 pounds after that. I realized that I haven't been watching a graph of my weight since my birthday, and today I put my post-birthday weights in a graph and could see exactly what's been going on. For about two weeks I basically stayed steady, then gained about a pound in the last two weeks of classes, and then with the end of semester party and my period hitting just after I got a big spike in my weight, so I had to wait for the water retention to level out, but it looks like I gained about a pound for real over that weekend. Anyway, my weight has been edging slowly down for the past few days, and I think I've been on the right track (if chipping a little slowly) for the past week and a half or so.

I've been following that pointlike plan I described last time with 33-222-111-zeroes-dinner as the target. I may stick with this plan on some days for the summer but I was also thinking of a new template. The idea would be, eat a sensible breakfast, eat a normal dinner, and plan on often having after-dinner treats or beverages, but during the day, bring a protein bar and 500 calories' worth of fruit and vegetables, of which I can eat as much as I want. There will be a fridge at work, so I can just keep track of what I have there and top it off to 500 each morning. I'll try to get some cardio most days, which can be before either breakfast or my protein bar. I think the 500 calories' worth of fruits and veggies is brilliant, because if I eat it all that's definitely 5 or more servings, and 500 calories of fruits and veggies is really a lot of volume, so it shouldn't feel limiting. It also keeps my calories around 1100-1200 before dinner, which leaves room for a nice dinner and a drink or a dessert all within 1800 or so, and my exercise will basically be my deficit. I'd like to keep doing yoga, but I'm not sure where I'd go. I don't know if I want to keep doing Bikram - although once-a-week or so would probably kick my losses up a bit - but any other type of yoga I'd want to do more often than I can probably afford.

Lose 5 more pounds

After waiting for my weight to stabilize, it looks like I'm back to the 132 range. I've done a lot of exercise the past couple days - gotten back on the elliptical since I found my Sansa cable again, and really pushed it, a whole 60 minutes today, plus some yoga while cooling down.

I'm sort of back to counting calories. It's actually a little like a WW points system, only with big points, and I think of them more as levels - plus it all translates back into calories at the literal end of the day, just a much rougher estimate than I was working with before. The benefit is being able to think about my meals and snacks as "chunks" in the plan of the day. I assign foods or combinations of foods I often eat to levels:

1 - under 100 calories
2 - 100-200 calories
3 - 200-300 calories

There are then "zeroes", which are under 30, and the idea is to account for a piece of hard candy or a bite of someone's food without using up a whole level 1. My typical target day plan is eat 2 "3's", 3 "2's" and 3 "1's" apart from dinner, then about 500 calories for dinner (counted normally), and less than 100 calories' worth of zeroes, estimated according to how many and what they actually were at the end of the day. Estimating 1's as 100 calories, 2's as 150, and 3's as 250, this totals about 1750-1850.

I'm making it a goal to lose 5 pounds from here. So, I want to see 127.x.  I'm not sure what the timescale will be, but I'd say a month would be ambitious and it should definitely be done by the end of the summer. Maybe by 4th of July.

Phase 3 conclusion and new directions

It's finally the final day. My 21st birthday. The end of phase III, the projected end-date of this entire project.

Today I am 130.8 pounds, 23.9% body fat according to my scale, measurements (inches): waist 26 1/2, hips 36 1/2, thigh 21, arm 10 3/4. This means since the end of phase II I have lost:

13.6 pounds and 6.0% body fat (though as we know, the scale is not necessarily reliable)
1.5 inches off my waist, 2.25 off my hips, 1.5 off my thigh, and 1 off my arm
About 1 pant size (my best-fit pants are a 4, though the 6s still work)

And in the grand total I have lost:

53.8 pounds
7.5 inches from my waist as well as 5 from my thigh
4 pant sizes

So I did it! I'm 21, have met my rather arbitrarily chosen goal, and I believe I'm within 10 pounds of my ideal weight. Also, my pants are tiny - before this whole thing I really never thought I'd get smaller than a size 8. I'm happy that I went to that fitness testing and got the alternative body fat measurement, because it tells me I am not just-barely entering the recommended range, but rather that I'm well within it already. It also helps that my belly seems to have gotten noticeably tighter in the last week or so. At this point, I think my personal perception of my body is the best indicator of my progress, followed by weight and inch measurements, and lastly the body fat guesses of my scale.

Where do we go from here? I think I will cut back significantly on my weight-related regulatory behaviors. Specifically, I'll stop counting calories, weigh myself less often (once to a few times a week) and use my scale's body fat function a lot less often (once a month to once a week). What I'll keep doing is writing down qualitatively what I eat in the day and tracking my exercise. I'm going to set up a new spreadsheet that has cells to record weight, body fat, and inch measurements, though none of those will be recorded daily, and exercise in the cardio, strength, and flexibility categories, which will be recorded daily. Calorie intake, expenditure, and deficit estimations will be absent. However, I'll continue with the food journal at least for a bit, and do a weekly reflection on the following questions:

How many days did I eat 5 or more fruits and vegetables? Fewer than 3?
What percentage of my meals included significant protein? What about snacks?
Do I feel that my diet was satisfactory overall this week?
Did I have any negative outcomes this week that I feel may have been related to my dietary choices?

I figure I have stop counting calories sometime, and I know even when I went on vacation I tended to think about the calories, so just not recording them will be a way of slowly phasing out that mindset. Hopefully, just mindfulness and my acquired experience with portion sizes will be enough to keep me on track, and allow me to maintain or lose as I please without being quantitatively rigorous. I'll still probably look at calories and serving sizes in order to make decisions about what I eat, but that's something everyone who's ever had a weight problem should do. If I start to gain without clear cause, I can always go back and audit my diet. My main focus for a while will be exercise and finding a balance between the different types. Overall, the goal is to find an equilibrium where I feel nourished, have treats sometimes, and do exercise I enjoy, in such proportions as to maintain my body in a state I'm happy with, without interfering with my other priorities.

I'll be redesigning this blog, including changing the background (probably immediately after posting this), re-titling it, moving and updating my caption, goals, and weight loss ticker, over the next few weeks. I'll also post some before/after/transition pictures soon, and maybe a weight graph. I have a master, long range weight graph, but it doesn't want to cooperate right now, and it might be nice to wait until I fill up a year of weight records before posting it. I will definitely have a post for my "fat-iversary", although I'll have to decide if that's June 7th (the day I started counted calories) or June 11th (the day I weighed myself).

Until I post again, adieu!

Not much new

133.2 and 25.3% body fat. I'm not thrilled that the percentage has been up above 25% again a few days lately. 133.2 has come up a LOT of times recently. Apparently my low weight/fat upon returning from my trip was spurious. My week of restriction went well, although results aren't evident at this time. I had Pilates on Monday and Wednesday, yoga on Tuesday and Thursday, and a run on Friday. I stayed under 1600 calories M-W and had 1690 calories Th, but the extra 90 were less than the amount I had accumulated "under target" the past three days, so I count myself as successful at hitting 1600 for the four major schooldays. Yesterday I hit 2085 which is a little more than 2000 but I'm not worried about that for reasons that will be clarified. It was great, I had just a light breakfast and then pushed it 'til midafternoon and then had a whole box of Annie's macaroni and cheese and a bunch of ice cream bars. Mmm yum. So the idea is that between Saturday and Sunday, one can be another roughly-2000 calorie day and the other should be no more than 1700-1750. Anyway, after all the food yesterday afternoon I wasn't very hungry this morning and feel like I will be eating lightly today, so I'm pretty confident I'll make up for that 85-calorie difference without any trouble.

This coming week I'll be doing a similar strategy. Target of 1600 for M-Th, except for T when I'll be going to Bikram so if I feel extra hungry, an 1800 target is still a greater deficit than a 1600 target with the usual yoga. Out of F-Sa-Su, two can be about 2000 and 1 should be around 1700. Usually the 2000 calorie days will probably be Friday and Sunday - Friday because it's nice to dig into a big bowl of something delicious at the end of the week, and Sunday because I'll be doing my long runs on Sunday. The general exercise plan from here is Pilates MW, yoga TTh, shorter runs with a little stretching and pushups WF, and long runs Su. I might do some home-yoga on Saturdays too but it could be a day off too - that might vary week to week as I feel like I need rest or stretching more. The modified plan for this week, to use up my Bikram classes, is to replace Tuesday vinyasa, Friday run, and Sunday run (both of the coming weekends) with Bikram.

Also, I'm doing something mildly interesting today: fitness testing. There was a flyer in the sports center about fitness testing on several dimensions, including body composition, cardiovascular fitness, muscular strength and endurance, and some that I can't remember. I know basically about my body composition, but I am interested in what other dimensions they test and how I compare to recommendations. I mean, I think it's pretty cool that I can run 2 miles in less than 25 minutes with no preparation and can sustain a 6-7 mph pace on a treadmill for a couple of minutes, but what are the standards? How strong do they expect 20-year-old college girls to be? I know 25% isn't awesome for body fat, but what conclusions might they draw when considered alongside my other abilities, and will they get a different number if they use a different method? Etc.

Go figure

So I go away for a week, have positive calorie balance most of the days, have virtually no daily activity, only do one run the whole time, eat chocolate pie with whipped cream one night, breaded chicken strips the next day, and binge on Easter candy... and come back to new lows in both weight and fat percentage. WTF body.

This morning, 132.6 (-1.0 from when I left) and 24.2% fat. If it was just weight, I'd chalk it up to my period ending or being dehydrated from travel, but then you'd expect the body fat to go up. I don't really know what's up with that seeing as I basically sat on my ass the whole time.

Still, it strikes me that it's been a month since I reached my 50-pound goal, and I've only lost 2 pounds since then. Not that it's a big deal, but I'm enthusiastic about getting back into gear this coming week, with daily exercise and low-calorie meal plans and ice cream bribes. I, or rather my boyfriend while I was on airplanes, got a box of Skinny Cow ice cream bars and my plan is that at least some days this week, if I am within my target for the day minus 100 calories by the end of dinner, then I can have a 100-calorie ice cream bar for dessert. Ice cream is one of my favorite foods, so I think this ought to be pretty motivating for being judicious about food offered to me during the day and not overeating at dinner.

Weigh-in, body fat goal, gotta go

Oh, right, I have a blog. No, I'm not avoiding you. I've just been insanely busy this week.

Yesterday I was 133.8 and 25.2% body fat which is what, -0.8 from last week? Not bad for a week when I only had two workouts at all. Yesterday I broke my pseudo-Lent-fast slightly, as I had decided in advance I was allowed to for that particular day, by drinking some wine with my cast-mates. I made these super delicious vegan chocolate coconut cookie bars and also these things that are like mashed potatoes and vegetables in cups of pie crust, ate a lot of them, and had wine, but actually, the cast party was way less intense than I thought it might be, so I didn't do any other drugs or even eat anything off-Lent. Just the wine.

Anyway, this morning I was 24.7% fat, which means I've met my second body fat goal. Awesome sauce. And now I gotta go - lots of schoolwork still to do this weekend.

First post-goal weigh-in

Today I still weigh 134.6 pounds and I clock in at 26.4% body fat. I'm not thrilled that my body fat has apparently gone up while my weight has stayed the same. I was a little lax this week, but I still had some deficit each day, and I was hoping to lose a little, if not the usual 1-2 pounds.

Bought new pants today. I hate shopping for pants. You put one tiny little constraint on the kind of pants you want, like "black jeans", and suddenly the whole world has turned against you. You walk in wearing 6P jeans that are getting a bit loose, so you look for 4P in the same brand, and they fit alright, but they are all a stupid shape. All the brands that have black jeans in an unstupid shape are sized so big that even the 4s are just as loose as the pants you're already wearing, but there aren't any 2s on the rack to try on. The only brands that have any 2s are the ones sized the opposite direction so that you'd have to weigh about 90 pounds to fit into them.

I found some pants eventually, but it was a huge pain in the ass. I was almost ready to give up. Fortunately, they were clearanced, so that was a little spritz of happy at the end of the whole affair. They are 4's and they are nice and snug around my hipbones, which I really enjoy because it reminds me to feel skinny, but they're roomy/stretchy enough everywhere else to allow free movement. They're nice.

GOAL PARTAAAAYYY!!!

This shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s... okay, no.

This morning I'm 134.6 pounds (2.2 down from last week) and 25.6% body fat. So I've hit my goal right on the dot, and my lean mass is still in triple digits. I now get to see what my ticker does when you hit goal, which turns out to be: nothing interesting. It just says 0 lb to go. And 50 pounds lost. Which is pretty awesome - 50 pounds lost. Annika Q and the whole 50 pounds... that she got rid of. Not to mention 3 compounds of 10% of my body weight. I tripled what they usually get in those obesity-and-dieting studies. Woohoo!

I took my measurements as well: waist 26 3/4, hips 37 1/4, thigh 21 1/2, arm 11. My waist hasn't changed a ton lately and my arm measure has been totally stalled for a while, but my hip and thigh measures have dropped a lot since I last measured. That helps to explain why my pants are getting baggy. However, considering it's currently subfreezing outside, it's actually rather useful to be able to wear an extra pair of yoga pants under my jeans.

I'll do a more thorough debriefing and where-do-we-go-from-here reflection on my birthday, when phase 3 is officially over. However, for now what I'll say is - I'm happy with my weight, and I wouldn't mind if this was the end, but I don't think it has to be, and I think my ideal weight/fat content is still lower. I haven't met my <25% body fat goal yet. I think in the future, my ceiling weight should be around 145. That's when I really began to feel like I looked good and felt good, and it's within normal BMI. At the moment, I'll keep exercising and calorie counting, but think less about weight, more about body fat %, and most of all about fitness. I'll probably go for a bit less calorie deficit than I have been, inching toward a more maintenance-oriented version of this lifestyle. For example, I have my aerobics class certain days and I might choose to do yoga on the alternate days, rather than doing them the same day and then other hi-cal workouts the other days. I would try to get back into running, but I think I'll wait for the weather to get above, oh, fifty Fahrenheit. It just sucks futzing with layers and the air freezes your throat and if your ears aren't warm enough you get a terrible headache and so on...

Oh, and one last thing - I'm dropping sugar and refined flour from my pseudo-Lent restrictions because I feel like it is a) not really a big issue for me in the first place, b) hard to enforce, and thereby c) being a pain in the ass in a way that is not useful. Just a few examples to justify my choice: I can't eat the honey roasted peanuts my boyfriend bought because they have regular sugar in them too, but I can make cookies with honey. If I want to go get a yogurt for a snack, most of the time I'm out of luck because I don't want to eat plain yogurt or yogurt sweetened with Splenda, but all other yogurt is sweetened with sugar except maybe those awesome Fage cups. I ate a salad the other day from the salad bar and used this orange ginger dressing, and it didn't even occur to me to think salad dressing might have sugar, but when I got to the bottom of the bowl I realized it was really sweet. Anyway, so I'm still excluding milk, cheese, butter, and intoxicants, but I think the whole thing might have started out too broad.

Weigh-in and pants

Today I am 136.8 pounds at 27.0% body fat, which is 1.2 pounds down from last week. Happy days! I will soon meet my goal which, although I think it will not be the end of my body improvement journey, will be pretty awesome to say I finally met, considering I first conceptualized it when I was 13 and it ended up being a 50-pound goal.

My pants situation. I've been wearing these size 6 jeans for a while, since about 155. They are finally starting to get loose enough that I think I'd like to go shop for size 4 jeans, although they'll be perfectly acceptable for wearing for a while yet. I will look for some black jeans because I need something black for a performance I'm going to be in soon. Anyway, I also have these size 4 pants that I bought in order to have something "business casual" before my Europe trip. The 4Ps I tried on were too small, but the 6Ms were too long, so I settled for a 4M, and it's just not quite the right shape, so I haven't really been wearing those much, but anyway, a 4 has fit for a while. The sixth grade pants, size 8 in some mysterious system that is scaled way small, have gradually come to fit more and more, and they've reached a point where I can tell they're just never going to fit properly, because they are actually getting loose on the hips, but still are too tight in the thighs. So sad, but at least I can put that question to rest. I may try and patch the cool design they have onto another pair of pants. Finally - this morning I was wearing this size-6 skirt that was slightly tight when I acquired it and now fits perfectly, when my boyfriend brought me a size 2 pair of pants he found abandoned in the laundry room. I looked at them, thought "yeah those look a little small," but tried them on. If they were made out of an ordinary, not so stretchy material they would be wearable but too tight to move in, but with 3% lycra-spandex they fit perfectly. So apparently I now wear anywhere from a 2 to a 6. I find this really interesting because when I wore size 10 or 12 and even 8, I was just one size unless I was borderline and then one would be a little loose and one a little tight. Now, apparently, I span 3 sizes. So strange.

Weigh-in with the LAST MICROGOAL

Well how's this for progress: 138.0 and 27.6% body fat! Actually, I'm extremely skeptical of this number since that means I lost 2.4 pounds since YESTERDAY. But then there was the time I lost 4 pounds in less than a week after breaking through my 170 plateau, so who knows. If you frame it as 3.2 pounds since 3 weeks ago, it sounds a little more reasonable. At any rate, I'll count myself as having cracked my last microgoal. The LAST ONE, before my final goal. As in, I have less than 5 pounds to go. Oh, and my ticker is now so close to the end that the current number is overlapping with the goal number. This is really amazing.

Progress, metabolism, and set points

Today saw a new low of 140.4, which is a good sign. It's about time this train got moving again. When I showed my boyfriend the flatline of the past couple of weeks, he said "well maybe that's just the weight your body wants to be when you're fit and working out." I said maybe if it doesn't budge for another month I'll consider that hypothesis, but I think it's just a plateau. My reasoning is, at the beginning of January my estimated calorie balance was pretty much in line with my actual weight loss. If the flatline was a reflection of my "really" maintaining, my burn rate would have had to drop to at least 300 calories less than what my formulas predict, in just a few weeks, with no unusual metabolism-affecting behavior on my part. I find that implausible.

It's actually really fascinating to me, why different people have stable or unstable body weight, where their most stable body weight is, and how much ease or difficulty they have in changing it. There's set point theory, which is supported by numerous studies of generally two types. One type is conducted on normal weight people who are put on either low- or high-calorie diets; they tend to lose or gain less weight than expected purely from calorie calculations, and also vary within the sample in ways consistent with their family history as to how much weight change is experienced and whether muscle or fat is affected. The other type of study is conducted on moderately obese people who are put on a diet, and the usual result is that they can lose about 10% of their body weight and then stall out, either because they start getting too hungry to stick to the diet, or for no clear reason even though they are continuing to comply. One flaw with some of these studies is that they put people on extreme diets suddenly, which will of course have metabolic effects, but others make reasonable changes and still get the same results.

Then there are the common and not-so-common situations that really throw that whole idea into question, or at least demand a better understanding of how a set point is set. There are extreme examples like Jennette Fulda/PastaQueen, who became almost 400 pounds and then lost half her body weight, or Jessica Smith who similarly was very fat and then slimmed down enormously. Then what about the "freshman 15" effect? If body weight is more or less hardwired, then why do so many people gain weight when they go to college - why don't their natural hunger mechanisms compensate for the different environmental conditions, say, causing them to eat lightly the day after a pizza party? Why do some people seem to gain weight at much more than the typical pound-per-year rate, piling on the pounds until they reach a psychological breaking point, and always have trouble maintaining a weight loss even if they previously were stable for a time at that weight? Why has my boyfriend's weight been stable plus or minus 2 pounds for years, whereas mine has been more like plus or minus 15? And why has it been so easy for me to lose over 40 pounds? I'm now almost 10 pounds lighter than I ever was as a teenager, 25 pounds lighter than my most average weight, what you might have called my apparent set point, and I'm feeling no backlash. I am still pushing typical deficits of 300-600 calories, and I'm not killing my life with exercise or white-knuckling against hunger. How do you explain that in set point theory?

Bored weigh in

So, I haven't posted much lately. That's because nothing is happening. I'm not losing and I'm not gaining. I'm going to school and doing yoga and aerobics and elliptical, and often feeling hungry at night or hungrier due to exercise, but still pushing a deficit most days. Yesterday I weighed in at 141.4 pounds, and I was out of town the week before, but two Saturdays ago I weighed 141.2 pounds. So that's +0.2 pounds in 2 weeks. Statistically insignificant. My body fat percentage has also been going nowhere since I got back from my trip. It's somewhere between 28% and 29%.

However, one must remember I encountered a similarly irritating plateau just above 170, and I think there was a little bit of a plateau around 155. Every 15 pounds. I hope that's what this is - a plateau that will eventually break, and not the point at which my formulas are showing inaccuracy. For now I will keep eating as lightly as I can manage, go to vinyasa yoga 2x a week, aerobics 2x a week, elliptical when it fits into the schedule, and next week when I deposit my financial aid check I can get a Bikram package which will give me 1-2 Bikram classes each weekend. And let's hope this thing cracks

Exercise plans

Well, I didn't break 140 before school started back up, mostly because last week was a wash. I'm around 141-142, which is fine, but I need to get rolling again.

This quarter I plan to take yoga (vinyasa flow) in the morning and aerobics in the evening on Tuesday and Thursday. Next quarter I'll have pilates before lunch on Monday and Wednesday, so I'll switch my yoga to those days. On the alternate days, I'll do cardio and strength exercises on the machines/mats, and maybe on some days I'll do a run instead of machines. I'd still like to do Bikram each weekend but I'm debating which location and second-guessing whether I'll really be able to go often enough to use up all my classes before the expiration date (they usually rig it so you have to do at least 5 per month which is a leetle more than I think is realistic).

141.2

Well, I lost my pound!

Reflection on the trip pre weigh in

So, before I even look at the scale, I am going to make a little evaluation of how things went as far as my diet and exercise on the trip.

I ended up altering my exercise a little. 10 sun salutes is really too much, so I did 5 instead. I got bored doing 2 different kinds of crunches, so I eliminated the regular crunches and just did oblique crunches, because you still use the middle muscles for those. I still did my yoga routine, knee pushups, and oblique crunches most of the days, like I wanted to. The last couple of days I didn't do the pushups and crunches, but I did the yoga.

As far as the weight I expect to have, the first thing to note is that I left on day 7 of my menstrual cycle and tomorrow, when I have my official return weigh-in, it will be day 23. So I will expect a water-hormone-related gain related to that, but my body fat percentage will tell me about that. Hopefully, I have drunk enough water today to stabilize my hydration level despite the 22-hour assault of airplanes. In France, I may have managed to lose a pound because we walked SO MUCH and often we either were too busy to eat lunch or we ate a big rich lunch and weren't hungry for dinner, so we had only 2 meals a day sometimes. In Finland, I probably about broke even most days (well, except for those two dinners with the obscene flow of alcohol) but it's hard to say. We did some walking, but it was cold and the city was very compact, so not as much, and we usually ate three square meals. As for the travelling days, the ones in the middle were normal, the short day I really have no idea how well I matched my calories to my time, and on the long day (today) I was incredibly hungry, probably because we got up at 3:30 AM, so I've eaten a lot, but then it's been a 34 hour day.

My pants have gotten looser, but that means nothing because I've been wearing the same 2 pairs of pants for 2 1/2 weeks. My dress, which would be less likely to stretch and which I wore only twice, I think fit a little better than when I acquired it, but it's hard to tell. Based on my body image when I looked in the mirror, I felt like I was losing weight in France and at best maintaining in Finland, but there are psychological factors including my knowledge of my behavior during that time, so that's probably an unreliable indicator for such a small potential weight change.


I have to admit I couldn't resist calorie estimating entirely. I didn't think much about it in France because we were walking so much, but especially in Finland where I could tell I was near the line and kept being faced by large dinners I wanted to keep a rough mental tally (estimated to an increment of 100) of how much I had probably eaten. I also weighed myself once, about 3 days ago. I saw the scale in the WC when we were at a dinner and had to step on. Of course, it read in kilograms, and it read 64 1/2 kg. Well, 65x2 = 130 so 65x0.2 = 13, adds up to 143, minus a pound for the 1/2 kg, so about 142 pounds. Considering I was wearing clothes and it was 7 PM, not bad. But then I remembered that analog scales, in my experience, tend to run low.

So, I may have lost my pound or I may not have. I would be surprised if I lost much more than a pound, and I would NOT be surprised if I lost a pound or less of fat but maintained or gained overall because of my cycle. I would also be somewhat surprised and definitely disappointed if I gained fat overall. We'll find out tomorrow, and in a few days I can do a check between Saturdays 3 weeks apart.

Leaving weight (and such)

Leaving weight is 142.4 pounds. Also 29.2% fat, 27.5 inch waist, 38.5 inch hips, 22.5 inch thigh, 11.0 inch arm.

I guess this makes the returning goal 141.4.

Remind me to talk about pants when I get back...