3/25/12: Breaking Through the 217lb Plateau!

Yeah!!!! Official Weigh-In Mark the Chart day is tomorrow, but this morning I finally saw some progress on the scale after a week and a half of hovering around 217.5 lbs. Today I weighed in at 215.6, which is below my line!!!! What a relief!! The last 10 days or so have been a struggle, with my weight holding steady while I was working my butt off at the gym, but today, finally, I saw some results. Perhaps it's my body’s way of approving of my attitude adjustment. Perhaps it was the calorie counting. Whatever it is, it sure feels good!!!

I have noticed that I tend to lose weight on the weekends and struggle to hold steady during the following week. Monday morning weigh-ins are always better than Thursday. It makes me wonder if the stress of the work week somehow accumulates in my body, maybe in the form of water retention. Then Saturday comes along and I am relaxed and happy and the result is a drop on the scale Sunday morning. It's much easier for me to control what I eat on the weekends, so I know that is part of it, but I know when I see a 2 pound drop in one day it's partly water weight. It seems like what is happening is that the work I am doing to burn fat is masked by water weight during the week, then the weekend comes, the excess water weight drops off, and I can see the results on Sunday morning. I have never noticed this before, but I have never made a point of weighing myself on Thursdays and Mondays before. Thursdays always seem to be my heaviest day of the week. Strange... Regardless of what is causing those weekly fluctuations, the good news is the progression of the line is downhill, and that is what matters.
I told you a few posts ago that I would start counting calories, and I have done that. Here are my results since Thursday, the day I started counting:

Thursday: Calories consumed -1,607: Calories burned (45 minutes weight lifting) - 451: Net Calories - 1156

Friday: Calories consumed - 2,165: Calories burned (90 minutes housework) - 425: Net Calories - 1,740

Saturday: Calories consumed - 1,193: Calories burned (60 minutes jog/walk) - 493: Net Calories - 700

My goal is to net less than 1,200 calories a day.

On Friday I blew that out of the water because of Fourth Friday, our monthly game night. Instead of eating a real dinner on Friday I snacked on veggies with spinach dip (about 1/4 cup of dip, which was 160 calories) , homemade toll house chocolate chip cookies (I think I ate about a dozen of them at about 50 (calculated) calories a pop), popcorn (2 cups), a brownie, and 3 glasses of red wine. That's 1200 calories of snacking!!!

I knew Friday was going to be rough, so I tried to be very careful about what I ate for breakfast and lunch, to mitigate the calories I would consume that evening, but I still far exceeded my allotment for the day. As you can see, I tried to make up for that on Saturday. :)

Also, normally, I would not count housework as calories burned. But come Friday morning I had so much housework left to do that I made it an exception to the rule. Instead of getting up at 4:30 to go to the gym for an hour, I got up at 4:30 and became a whirling dervish until 7:00AM, taking about a 20 minute break for breakfast. Given the fact that I was working hard enough that entire time to elevate my heart rate and be sweating, I decided to count it. It made me feel a little better about the 2,165 calories I consumed that day!! I did try to be fair, though, and only calculated calories burned for 90 minutes of housework even though I actually cleaned for over two hours. (I know I’m rationalizing, but I do that sometimes…you’re just going to have to put up with that every now and then, if you are going to continue to read this blog!)

Calorie counting is helping. It even helped on Friday, when I it may seem to you that I was going to town on the snacks. Actually, I was very conscious of what I was eating because I knew I would have to record it. If I hadn't been, I could have easily eaten twice as much as I did and drank most of that bottle of wine instead of half of it. The hard part isn't so much keeping track of the calories; it's telling you about it, afterwards! So, thanks again for listening. The blogging helps!