WEIGHT LOSS 2020

Thought I should post something other than a monthly recap, so let's talk about my recent weight loss. Unlike my eleven pound mission in 2015, I did not document this one on the blog from week to week (obviously). Apparently I also made an effort to drop some weight from August to October 2017. I have no memory of that, but I have a bunch of weigh in and food logs in My Fitness Pal so I guess that was a thing. Basically the pattern is every two or three years I have to make an effort to get back to goal weight by losing about ten pounds.

Day to day I do not count calories in any formal way. Many days I just roughly track them in my head, ballparking stuff, and that is pretty successful. I think I did the math at one point, and let's say I need to eat 2200 calories a day to maintain my weight. If I gain ten pounds over two and a half years, that means I'm eating something like 2235 calories a day on average. Which is pretty dang good when you think about it! Basically, the weight slowly creeps on, which makes it really hard to notice. I don't regularly weigh myself or anything, so usually the first alarm bell is my pants being noticeably tighter. I'll ignore it for a month or two, then one day I'll step on the scale and that usually sets something into motion.

Tracking with MFP.

This time when I stepped on the scale my weight was 180.4. Anything over 180 for me is definitely "red alert" time. I had stepped on the scale every so often over the years and my weight usually was no more than 176. I'd like to be at 170, but when I'm only six pounds over I'm not ready to "buckle" down. Most of my pants still fit fine at this weight. Once I'm more like 178... then the pants get tight. Anyways, I knew weight had slowly crept on, I could see it in the mirror,  and now faced with the scale reporting over 180... I went into immediate action.

My goal weight is 170. When I lost weight back in 2015, I set it at 165. If you go back to the final week or two of that series, you'll see that I figured out 165 is too low. Anything under 168 and my pants start falling off my body and my face gets all angular and I don't like the way I looked. I could buy skinnier pants, but naw, I like how 170 looks and my entire wardrobe is based around that. So 170 it was! That meant I needed to lose 10.4 pounds. Easy enough.

Like all the times previous, I simply counted calories. This worked for my initial weight loss back in 2011 and each time since. I set my goal to lose the weight in six weeks, so I had to lose between 1.5 and 2.0 pounds per week. This put my daily caloric intake at 1700ish. The first few days I was starving. All the memories of weight loss were flowing back. However, I was determined to stick it through. I knew if I did it, it would work, and I would be done in six weeks. So onward I pressed. After the first few days, I was no longer ravenously hungry.

Honestly, it was pretty uneventful. Maybe even easier this time around with the pandemic, I was stuck at my house all the time and didn't go out to eat much or anything. So it was very easy to control my meals and stay on track. By two weeks in or so, the 1700 calories actually felt satisfying. The results were matching the calories in/calories out math almost exactly too. Funny how that works. Anyways, I ended up hitting my goal in six weeks, just like I had set out to do.

I will say that the last week or two, when I was a pound or two away from 170... those were hard. For whatever reason my mental game let up and I started to crave gorging on food and all of a sudden I wasn't satisfied with 1700 anymore. So they kinda sucked. However, I was determined to stick with it. Over the Fourth of July weekend my family did some socially distant camping, so I knew I was going to pig out and live it up then. So that "reward" kept me on track to hit my goal.

Anyways, it is now a month later and I am still right at goal weight. I have continued to track in My Fitness Pal to maintain. I don't know how long that will last, but it has definitely helped me stop snacking a couple of times. Previously, I could house 400 or 500 calories of Ritz and cheese at night as a snack. Now, I'll look at my tracker and have a popsicle instead. Little things like that can really help that slow weight creep from happening. I'm sure it'll eventually happen again, but maybe I can last a little bit longer this time around.