100 Days

What I ate today

Breakfast (9 a.m.)
2 servings of low fat oatmeal
Calories: 200
Fat: 2 grams

Lunch (noonish)
2 cans of tuna
2 slices of bread
4 servings of fat free mayo
1 serving of cottage cheese
Calories: 570
Fat: 9.5 grams (the cottage cheese wasn’t lowfat, a shopping mistake I shouldn’t have made.)

Dinner (5 p.m.)
1 Subway footlong club
Calories: 640
Fat: 12 grams

Snack (7 p.m.)
1 can of some sort of soup
Calories: 180
Fat: 2 grams

Total calories: 1,590
Total fat: 25.5 grams

Exercise: Started to do upper body, got some back done. However, I got paranoid about someone getting on my elliptical machine at the end of my workout, so I hopped on it and went for 40 minutes, burned 700 calories. I will finish the upper body workout Wednesday.

So my weight today was 280.8. Not bad, I suppose. It’s a two pound drop from last week. However, a reader comment made me think about this a little bit more:

From: Htom
Your weight is going to change during the day (and night) as long as you're alive. You're going to sweat, exhale moisture, drink, eat.

The best way to deal with these swings is math. Try www.physicsdiet.com; here's a sample page (not mine, I haven't entered the data yet), scroll down to the charts and notice how the green dots (scale readings) bounce up and down, while the smoothed average keeps falling: http://www.physicsdiet.com/Public.aspx?u=matt

All right, so let’s tall about this. Htom is absolutely correct. Your weight will fluctuate, sometimes violently, throughout the day. That is why I wouldn’t recommend weighing in every day. This website he gives is very detailed, and kind of goes hand-in-hand with the Hacker’s diet, which has been suggested to me several times and looks to be of sound reasoning.

The physics diet site relies on numbers and average losses to more accurately determine the success of your diet. It accounts for the fluctuations and features very pretty charts. It almost seems too perfect … like they are trying to take over the world. Hmmmm.

If you are looking for some very good insight on losing weight, I would suggest both the physics diet and the hackers diet. However, I haven’t yet been able to work up the energy to really read the sites.

As for me, I do have my own semi-daily weigh-in plan going, and I am pretty happy with it. I don’t necessarily weight myself every day in order to get an accurate reading of my progress. I try, at least, to take it week by week and I also take into account whatever variables may go into the daily reading.

One thing daily weigh-ins tells me, though, is how the previous day went. If I can take into account the variables (what time I am weighing in, what I ate that day, how much water I’ve drank to that point, how bad I need to pee or poop …) I can figure out if the previous day was good or bad. If it was good, I reflect on what I ate that day and store that information in my mind. Case in point: One day last week the variables combined with poor eating choices made me gain three pounds one day. After I weighed in and worked out, I went to the coffee shop and had two plain bagels with plain cream cheese for lunch. The rest of the day I stuck with the diet. The next day I went back and was four pounds lighter, a full pound less than the original weight before the gain. So after that workout I had two more bagels for lunch and I lost more weight the next day. Does that mean bagels are good for me? No. It means that plain bagels with plain cream cheese won’t kill the momentum if handled correctly. You can’t say that about a stuffed-crust pizza.

The other main reason I weigh myself every day is entertainment. When I weigh in, I do it two times. The first time is right before I work out. The second time (which is the reading I use to determine weight loss) is right after I work out. I kind of like the fact that you can lose up to two pounds during a workout. Yeah, I know it is water weight, but still it makes you feel good and can give you a nice motivational edge.

But that doesn’t answer why I don’t just weigh in once after the workout. Why put myself through the charade of weighing in before the workout when I know that number isn’t going to be recorded? Well, that weigh in gives me something to think about while I am working out. It actually makes the workout go faster and makes it less likely that I will just give up out of boredom. Also, there is a certain amount of motivation that comes from seeing how much you can lose during the workout. So today, before the workout, I was at 282, a half-pound drop from the last post-workout weigh in. So the tone of today’s workout was happy and joyous. I knew that I had probably lost about a pound and a half in actuality.

So throughout the workout, my mind was concentrated, using 282 as the start, on figuring out how much weight I could actually lose in the next week. I figure that I could probably get down to 275 in the final push before I go home. I also set a mini-goal of getting under 280 by the end of Thursday’s workout.

So that’s how my mind works during weig-ins. And that is why I do it every time I go to the gym. And I feel comfortable with that because I understand the swings.