Weekly Weigh-in (Week 41)

Sunday morning yet again, and time for my weekly weigh-in.

This week I feel has been one of my better weeks for my weight. I've been eating a bit less fruit, but there are lots of worse things one can do than not eat quite enough fruit. Life is full of stressful events, luckily I've been learning of late much better how to just let the stress flow around me without having much lasting impact. The reason I mention that here is that I know for many, myself included, stress can be a factor in over eating. Another over eating trigger I've been less good about controlling recently is big changes in my schedule. A party comes up or etc. and you end up eating more than you should, or something else out of the ordinary happens and throws off your calorie intake. It's a hard thing to work with, but I'm hopeful that I can manage it, and if not 1 bad meal doesn't remove all the benefit from the other 20 good meals that week, just lessens them somewhat.

Now, the first in what will turn out to be a string of segments in this post about the things I've been doing to help manage my weight. For the first installment, I'm going to talk about what I've been doing the longest for this, diet. I don't really like to call what I do a diet, because the word seems to imply to me something that ends rather than being the lifestyle change that eating right needs to be. When asked what diet I'm on though my usual answer is "The Don't Be a Fatass Diet." It works something like this, don't eat like a fatass and you won't be a fatass. Now, for reference, before I started on my weightloss trend my average meals were running close to 1500 calories in many cases. That's not a good thing at all. So I decided to sit down and figure out what I should be eating at the places I went to the most.

Most restaurants have their nutrition information posted on their websites, and those that don't can usually be found through sites like dailyplate.com. I went through and set myself a per meal cap for lunch and dinner, at the time the two meals I actually ate, and codified what I would eat at each place that was in that calorie range. I put all that together into an excel sheet that calculated an average and a standard deviation for said figures, for reasons I'll explain in a future update, and then printed it off on a sheet I carry around in my wallet. That way when I go out to eat to a place on my list, I can look up what I should order and know that I'm being smarter about my calories than I was before.

This has been a large part of the secret to my success I feel. Just eating reasonable portion sizes cut my calorie intake per day massively and has helped me burn off a lot of fat. In the past week or so I've decided to up the ante and start trying to count calories pretty extensively in an effort to help further manage my intake and thus my weight, we'll see how that works out as the weeks go by.

Well, what does the scale have to say? 221.2, up .6 from last week. Up a little this time around, but not much, especially considering how much I overate on a couple occasions this week. I'm going to be trying to do better next week, but even still, I'm in much better shape than I was this time last year, or even a few months ago, and that's something I'm proud of. I'll see you all next week, probably with the explanation for why I had excel doing math on my food list.