Time to Quit Dorking Around

12/03/2006

I was looking at my results for the month of November and they clearly show that I am futzing around and not being serious. I've been totally rocking on the exercise front, but I've pretty much been going over on calories. I haven't been making terrible choices like I've done in the past - just eating too much of the stuff I can have. Basically, it's like I'm doing my maintenance plan instead of my weight loss plan. While it is nice to know that I can maintain my weight without having to write down every bite and just using what I've learned, it is NOT nice to know that this is the weight I'm maintaining. I need to quit dorking around. After all, I have another 50 pounds to lose. That's still a lot of weight and I'll never get it off at this rate.

So, some key decisions today -

1. Write everything down that I eat. I find it's harder to cheat when every bite is accounted for.

2. Start weighing every morning again. This is hard to do while travelling, but it does keep me on track. I'm home now, so no execuses.

3. Bump up the exercise. I'm doing 3 days a week very consistently now, but want to bump it up. Not only for weight loss, but also because I want to work on my endurance. I ran another 5K yesterday and, while I almost made my goal time of 45 minutes (finisihed in 45:05) and beat my personal record of 47:59, I still wasn't happy. It was a stuggle and I finished towards the end of the pack. I don't necessarily want to win, but I would like to come in with the top 25%. The only way I can do that is to (a) drop the rest of the weight and (b) work on my endurance. So, this week I'm adding 2 more days to my exercise plan.

4. Get serious again. When I lost the most weight the quickest was when I was a machine. I didn't think about how food tasted. I just thought about what the food would do for my body & how much energy it would give me. Time to start looking at food like that again.

So, today starts a new week for me. I really would like to hit 175 by the end of the year. That's about a 2.5 pound weight loss per week. That may be not be attainable since I typically lose in the 1 - 1.5 pound range, but I'm going to try. After all, I've never been 100% on diet and 100% on exercise at the same time. Who knows? Maybe 2.5 pounds per week is too low.

With friendship,

Care'