The worst part about winter is the short days. I don't like the cold, I don't like the snow and the cold rain, but most of all I don't like the short days. Now that I am training and spending more time running and biking, the short days are even worse. It is 6:19 in the morning and it is pitch black out. I want to get my brick in early this morning so I am home before it gets too late, but I don't like riding in the dark. I'll need to wait a bit longer. It's only going to get worse as we get closer to the solstice so I guess I am going to have to be in the habit of getting up before dawn and getting other things done, so I can use my daylight hours for training. Eventually it will be too cold to train outdoors and then it won't matter. By then I will be desperate for spring to return.
This morning I weighed 154.2!! I know this is not much different than the weight I posted a few days ago, so you may be wondering what the exclamation points are for. The exclamation points are there because I am so pleased with the fact that I am truly into a routine that is producing consistent, predictable results. I got very frustrated with my stops and starts for that first few weeks after the triathlon. Even though I was exercising consistently, my eating was erratic which showed up on the scale. The day my actual weight line hit my goal line and threatened to go over it was the day I decided to get serious about my eating again. That was about a week and a half ago. Ever since that day my weight has been predictably consistent and I have started losing weight again. There are a lot of other good things happening, too, as a result of getting serious about food. I am not thinking about food all the time, anymore. I wake up and eat my breakfast of eggs, veggies, and a banana and then pack the rest of my food for the day to take with me to work. Once I am at work I don't think much about food other than when I glance at the clock and see it is around 11:00am, it's time for my Greek yogurt and berries. My snacks are packed (nuts - a combination of walnuts, almonds and macademia nuts, heavy on the almonds, and an apple), as well as an afternoon meal that generally consists of whatever chicken I cook that week and a vegetable. My last meal of the work day is generally around 3:00 in the afternoon and by then I've consumed about 1600 calories. When I get home from work I eat a light snack consisting of protein (more chicken, most likely) and a complex carb of some sort. The result is I spend very little time and energy thinking about food. I am not having mental wrestling matches, trying to talk myself into eating the right things and not eating the wrong things. Food is just fuel. It fires my engines and gets me through the day.
This plan does not always work, however. Sometimes I get stuck in a meeting that starts before 10 and goes later than noon. If I don't plan correctly and it's one o'clock before I eat my yogurt, the rest of my day is kind of hellish when it comes to food cravings. It doesn't seem to matter that I get caught up and eat what I would normally eat, but just later in the day; my food cravings last until I go to bed that night. The cravings, of course, feel like they are for sugar or something sweet. It's pretty obvious to me that by letting too much time go between meals (6 - 8 hours) I am messing around with my blood chemistry to the point that I have difficulty getting it back on track that day. It's not even that I feel famished at 1:00, I don't even feel very hungry, it's just that I know I need to eat. For the rest of the day, after that late lunch, all I can think about is getting my hands on more food. I don't need to eat every two-three hours as some people suggest, but I do eat my first major snack, if you want to call it that, about 4 hours after breakfast. I eat my late lunch about 4 hours after that. In between I snack on my 2 ounces of nuts (usually I eat most of them at about 10:00 am, but sometimes they are still around and I eat them with my mid-afternoon lunch). It's exceedingly clear to me that when I eat is as important to my success as what I eat. Skipping meals, or pushing them back a few hours, plays all kind of hell with my "will power," which, I am confident, has everything to do with whacky blood chemistry sending all of the wrong messages to my brain.
I want to talk for a couple of minutes about my friend, the scale. I know there are a lot of opinions about whether or not you should weigh yourself every day. I have had people tell me to throw away my scale, others tell me that they can't stay on track without weighing themselves every morning and every night. For me, it works to weigh myself every single day. Sometimes I even weigh myself before I go to bed and try to predict what I will weigh in the morning. The funny thing is, I can just about predict what I will weigh based on what I eat. People (including me) complain about how erratic their weight is, how they will gain two pounds or more in a day, or eight pounds or more in a week. People (including me) sometimes complain that the weight gain (or lack of weight loss) is unpredictable and has nothing to do with what they eat or drink. I can tell you that for me, that simply is not true. What I weigh in the evening before I go to bed or in the morning as soon as I get up, has everything to do with what I ate or drank in the day or two immediately preceeding getting on the scale. If I eat only food I prepared for myself (therefore carefully controlling salt, fat, and other additives), if I eat controlled portions of protein, fruits, veggies and some carbs, if I eat on a schedule, if I don't eat for a few hours before I go to bed, and if I drink plenty of water; I will either stay about the same as the day before or I will lose a few ounces. If any of these things are off, and it could be any one of these things, I could see a weight gain. If I take one of my meals at a restaurant, all of a sudden there is an unknown variable there. I don't know how much butter they put on that piece of fish before they grilled it. I don't have any idea how much salt was in that salad dressing. If everything else is consistent, yet I take a meal at a restaurant and I gain a little weight, I will avoid that meal in the future. I'll make an assumption that there was something I did not know about in that food. I have found a couple of restaurant meals, close to my work, that work well for me. They don't have an impact on my weight. I feel confident when I eat those meals that I am sticking to plan. If it wasn't for the scale, I wouldn't know this. I guess what I am saying is that I like my scale because it tells me how my body is responding to what I am putting in it. I consider it a bad sign if I bloat up and "unexpectedly" gain weight. Something caused that. I want to know what it is. By weighing myself every day, I can isolate the events that caused the changes in weight. Sometimes I forget to drink water, then I will be a little heavier the next day. Sometimes I skip a meal and load all my calories at the end of the day. I'm a little heavier the next day. Sometimes I eat crap. I'm a little heavier the next day. It is amazing to me how consistently my body responds to what I put into it. I need my scale, because it keeps my mind in the game.
There are times, when I am trying to lose weight, that my weight plateaus, even when I do everything right. This is frustrating and I don't really understand how that works or why that happens. I do know that I just need to be patient, though. I know if I consistently do the right thing that the scale will start moving in the right direction again.
I pay attention to my scale and I pay attention to my body. If my scale goes up, I try to figure out why. If my hands swell or my joints hurt, I try to figure out why. I can almost always isolate it to something I ate or water I didn't drink. Our bodies are amazing organisms that respond to the slightest changes in what we put into them. They are maintaining chemical balances in millions of ways, I am sure, one of which is by changing the volume of water it stores in order to keep everything in balance. If I start storing more water, there is a reason. I look at it very simplistically and assume it is because my sodium level has risen and I need more water to balance it out. Maybe it is something else. Maybe my kidneys or liver are excreting some sort of poison as a result of something I ate or drank, and my body has to try to flush it out. I don't know exactly what is going on in there, but I do know that what I eat and drink is reflected, almost immediately, on my scale. Therefore, my scale helps me diagnose what works and doesn't work with regard to my daily diet. I will never throw away my scale. I will always weigh myself daily to keep tabs on what is going on on the inside. It is one of the most important tools in my toolbox.
For now, the sun has come up and I need to run (literally)! Thursday I ate 2,050 calories and 98 grams of protein. Friday I ate 2,046 calories and 116 grams of protein.
Have a great weekend!
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