Weight loss notes after month 12 - one year on!
I'm putting up this update a little late. We had visitors and I wasn't weighing myself often, so it was a couple of days later before I realised the 29th had come and gone. It's been an odd month. About a week in, I decided to not do anything about trying to lose weight this month. No matter what I did I was running into problems, and the weight was just slowly creeping up and up, 100g at a time. It's the coldest month of the year so every old injury I had was getting aggravated by attempts to exercise and twinging constantly so then I wasn't doing the exercise properly or sufficiently. And diet, well, that's generally not too bad but this really is the time of year for sitting back on the couch with a hot chocolate and a biscuit. So I finally said to myself "look, this really isn't working, you're fighting your own body and you know that gives you bad results. Take the month off, follow your instincts, just don't go to any unusual excesses". I decided not to actively try to lose weight. And three days later I'd lost a kilo. I really do get my best results when I work with my body rather than against it. Since then I've put some of that back on, and the weight's gone up and down a lot (varying by up to two kilos!) but based on my measurements on the 29th of June, I'm going to call it a bit less than half a kilo loss for the month, maybe 200-300g.
Which gives me, based on measurements at the beginning and end of this year of effort, a sum total of about 10.5 kg loss for the year. (My monthly changes don't add up to this, there is plenty of rounding error in each measurement.) I was aiming for 1 kg / month so a total of 12 kg, and I did well enough in the first three months that I thought I might well and truly beat that. But I'm not unhappy with where I've got to either. I'm just struggling to keep the last few kilos that I lost from jumping right back on again.
I'm hoping that this month of not particularly doing anything special will help reset my body's sense of "normal". That way when I start trying for 30 minutes of high heart rate exercise broken into several sessions across the day, it should be easier to achieve that at first with light exercise and without needing to exercise so hard that I push my injuries. I'm also hoping that it will allow my body to reset what it thinks my weight is so that it's not constantly trying to put back on what's disappearing. I need a new lower set point and I haven't managed to establish one in the last four months. I dropped below my last set point partly through illness and I think my body didn't realise that this wasn't actually a problem.
The other thing about having a month off is that I was starting to get into a lot of bad habits. Not the kind of bad habits like taking a block of chocolate to bed, but the kind of, well, undermining your good habits is maybe a better way to put it. Doing the 30 minutes of exercise maybe three times a week instead of five. Making the 30 minutes more like 25, or 22, or 21. Breaking the no-snacking-after-dinner rule three or four nights a week instead of once or twice a fortnight. So I was still doing all the things I was supposed to, but not to any effectiveness. Taking the time to say "actually, I'm not doing them" for a while should make it clearer what's "doing it right" when I begin again. I might also spend some time thinking about whether I want to keep going on the same plan I had, or whether I want to alter it somewhat. It did work well initially, as long as I followed it properly.
This month I'm not sure what my goals are. The WiiFit goal turns out to expire on the 16th, I must not have got around to setting that straight away. So I have a couple of weeks to either work hard on trying to make that goal (losing about 1.5 kilos!) or to ignore it and worry about starting up again after the 16th. Which is tempting, as that's usually the end of the coldest period so I have less injury to worry about. I may just reset the goal though if I can, and start anew. I would like to get to around that goalpoint and be stable there, and I would like to drop below my currently lowest-recorded weight but if I can at least reach that range I'll be happy. Whether I do or not? Not sure. Motivation is a bit mixed right now. I may need to change my overall plan just to get my own head back in the game. So I'm not stressing about setting a goal either because I don't think I can pick one right now that'll have any kind of internal meaning, and I never follow external influences if I can possibly avoid it.
Which gives me, based on measurements at the beginning and end of this year of effort, a sum total of about 10.5 kg loss for the year. (My monthly changes don't add up to this, there is plenty of rounding error in each measurement.) I was aiming for 1 kg / month so a total of 12 kg, and I did well enough in the first three months that I thought I might well and truly beat that. But I'm not unhappy with where I've got to either. I'm just struggling to keep the last few kilos that I lost from jumping right back on again.
I'm hoping that this month of not particularly doing anything special will help reset my body's sense of "normal". That way when I start trying for 30 minutes of high heart rate exercise broken into several sessions across the day, it should be easier to achieve that at first with light exercise and without needing to exercise so hard that I push my injuries. I'm also hoping that it will allow my body to reset what it thinks my weight is so that it's not constantly trying to put back on what's disappearing. I need a new lower set point and I haven't managed to establish one in the last four months. I dropped below my last set point partly through illness and I think my body didn't realise that this wasn't actually a problem.
The other thing about having a month off is that I was starting to get into a lot of bad habits. Not the kind of bad habits like taking a block of chocolate to bed, but the kind of, well, undermining your good habits is maybe a better way to put it. Doing the 30 minutes of exercise maybe three times a week instead of five. Making the 30 minutes more like 25, or 22, or 21. Breaking the no-snacking-after-dinner rule three or four nights a week instead of once or twice a fortnight. So I was still doing all the things I was supposed to, but not to any effectiveness. Taking the time to say "actually, I'm not doing them" for a while should make it clearer what's "doing it right" when I begin again. I might also spend some time thinking about whether I want to keep going on the same plan I had, or whether I want to alter it somewhat. It did work well initially, as long as I followed it properly.
This month I'm not sure what my goals are. The WiiFit goal turns out to expire on the 16th, I must not have got around to setting that straight away. So I have a couple of weeks to either work hard on trying to make that goal (losing about 1.5 kilos!) or to ignore it and worry about starting up again after the 16th. Which is tempting, as that's usually the end of the coldest period so I have less injury to worry about. I may just reset the goal though if I can, and start anew. I would like to get to around that goalpoint and be stable there, and I would like to drop below my currently lowest-recorded weight but if I can at least reach that range I'll be happy. Whether I do or not? Not sure. Motivation is a bit mixed right now. I may need to change my overall plan just to get my own head back in the game. So I'm not stressing about setting a goal either because I don't think I can pick one right now that'll have any kind of internal meaning, and I never follow external influences if I can possibly avoid it.