Weekly Weigh-in

Sunday morning brings us round again to another weekly weigh-in. (Hey, that rhymed.)

This week I'd like to take the time to mention a tool that I feel helps me a bit when it comes to watching what I eat. When I started in on my weight-loss goals I decided to take a look at how many calories I was actually eating in a given day. It really wasn't pretty. An average meal out for me could easily contain nearly 1500 calories. It wasn't any surprise to me that I'd been eating too much, I just never before had realized by how much it really was.

So, armed with this knowledge I decided to start looking around the internet for the nutrition data for places that I go on a regular basis when I go out to eat. I managed to find official sources for most places and reputable unofficial ones for some of the less cooperative chains. I went through their menu offerings and found things that were both tasty, and reasonable in the calories column. I put them all into a list on my computer, broke it up by meal, and printed it out. Each meal is subdivided into small, medium, and large categories based on -1 standard deviation, average, and +1 standard deviation of calories, and each size is also assigned a Weight Watchers points value just because I'm a data nut (as I don't do Weight Watchers the actual number isn't much use to me but it makes a good relative assessment if I'm at a restaurant that lists it for certain items on the menu or something).

I mention this list this week because I've used it a number of times over the week, and I feel like it has helped me do better than I would have otherwise. Is this a method that will work for everyone, probably not, is it a method that works for me, maybe, does it make me feel like I'm doing something, definitely. For that alone I feel it's worth keeping around, because it at least seems to help some.

Now for the actual weight. Didn't get any additional exercise this week and work was lighter than usual so I'm not expecting much. 249.2, down only .2 since last week. While I wasn't expecting much, I was expecting a bit more than that. I really need to either hit the pool or take to my feet at some point this week, so if you see me feel free to ask how much I have done so far. I think another step I want to take is to borrow a page from Ed Levine's Serious Diet when I go out to eat. While my wallet won't let me just leave food there, I can at least force myself to bring some back and have it for lunch later in the week.

So that does it for this weeks installment of my weekly weigh-in. Progress, though small, is still progress at making me not so large.