I fear the inevitable weight-loss-stall is upon me

I've slowed down my weight loss a lot since my last weigh in. It's been two weeks tomorrow and I've only lost 3.8 lbs. I'm going back to my roots. No more chips, pretzels, starchy sides at restaurants. I'm going back to fruits and veggies, food cooked at home, and lean cuisines. Back to drinking tons of water every day. I'm determined not to stall!

3 down, 9 to go!!

Update
So, this was a bittersweet weigh-in for me, because I'm still battling my cold from two weekends ago and I didn't perform as well as I would have liked. Also, because my daily weigh-in progress is in quasi-conflict with Peggy's measurements. I'm sure it will all come out in the wash, and ultimately, the biggest deal is that I'm feeling better, weighing less, fitting back into clothes I haven't worn in a long time - these are the things that really matter.

the Stats (part 4)

Weight: 170 (according to my weigh-in at home this morning, I weigh 167 - attributable to what I ate/drank during the day, the clothes I was wearing, differences in Peggy's scale calibration?) Egh, oh well.

Caliper Measurements:

Tricep: 25, previously 27

Abdomen: 19, previously 23
Thigh: 45, previously 45 (jee whiz, can we get this down, for real?!)

Which means 32.7% body fat, previously 34.4%

Other measurements:

Arm: 10 in., previously 11 in - lost 1 inch

Torso: 29 in., previously 30 - lost 1 inch

Waist: 30 in.,previously 31 - lost 1 inch

Hips: 40 in., previously 40 - lost 0 inches

Thigh: 21 in., previously 24 - lost 3 inches!!

3 Minute Step Test (Heart Rate): 110 bpm., previously 120 bpm.
Pushups: 30 in 60 secs. or as long as I could go without stopping
Situps: 64 in 60 secs.

So you can see, I still did well, just not stellar. Time to turn up the heat on my workouts, according to Peggy; she about killed me doing leg exercises & level 11 on the stepper after doing my fitness test today. According to me, time to keep doing my best at balancing my eating - eating enough calories while eating the right foods. E.g. none of those "addictive foods" from yesterday!

Food addiction?

I recently came across this article after someone had mentioned it on Twitter. After childishly giggling about the author's name, I read through it with mixed feelings.

I can definitely identify with the section directly below. Like everyone, I could happily sit down to a bag of potato chips and polish off the entire thing without thinking much of it. I will start my binge thinking, "I'll just eat a few [insert allegedly-addictive food here]," and before I know it I've closed and reopened the bag several times with a guilty "just a few more."

Imagine a foot-high pile of broccoli, or a giant bowl of apple slices. Do you know anyone who would binge broccoli or apples? On other hand, imagine a mountain of potato chips or a whole bag of cookies, or a pint of ice cream. Those are easy to imagining vanishing in an unconscious, reptilian brain eating frenzy. Broccoli is not addictive, but cookies, chips, or soda absolutely can become addictive drugs.

... Rings a bell, doesn't it? We all have those foods which are drugs for us - for me, in addition to chips, or pretzels, or popcorn, it was fast food - greasy, salty, wonderful fast food, like McDonald's or Guthries. I certainly heard it calling to me from the roadside as I would try to drive home to "eat good" - sounds like an addict itching for a fix.

However, the following rubs me the wrong way. I think that it's appropriate to emphasize choice in the way you manage your own health, or weight, or obesity, if you like.

They would rather ignore this science. They have three mantras about food.

1. It's all about choice. Choosing what you eat is about personal responsibility. Government regulation controlling how you market food or what foods you can eat leads to a nanny state, food "fascists," and interference with our civil liberties.
2. There are no good foods and bad foods. It's all about amount. So no specific foods can be blamed for the obesity epidemic.
3. Focus on education about exercise not diet. As long as you burn off those calories, it shouldn't matter what you eat.

Unfortunately, this is little more than propaganda from an industry interested in profit, not in nourishing the nation.

Do We Really Have a Choice About What We Eat?

The biggest sham in food industry strategy and government food policy is advocating and emphasizing individual choice and personal responsibility to solve our obesity and chronic disease epidemic. We are told that if people just didn't eat so much, exercised more, and took care of themselves, we would be fine. We don't need to change our policies or environment. We don't want the government telling us what to do. We want free choice.

First off, this article just gives people an excuse to be lazy, kinda like the excuses the "fat gene" or "bad metabolism" provided in the past - people think "oh well, I'm stuck like this, so I might as well enjoy it while I can." There has to be some choice involved!

For instance, I'll freely admit that I am a recovering "addict" as it comes to eating - addicted to specific foods, or more broadly, to eating whatever I wanted in whatever quantity while being lazy about exercising. However, instead of attributing my obesity to some "addictive food," I flatly attribute it to my bad choices and my laziness. Acknowledging these things and embarking to change them is what has enabled me to completely devote myself to changing my life (and my weight). If I was back-of-my-mind-sabotaging myself all the time with thoughts of blaming my "addiction" on anything other than my own choices, I would've stayed on the same, unhealthy, unattractive path.

Second, the article belittles the three "mantras" above, describing them as propaganda. Now I won't go as far as to say that those mantras are fact, but do they not make at least a little common sense? #1 - would we really like to abandon personal responsibility for our person in favor of government responsibility? I mean I know we do it for everything else in our lives (sigh), but for our own bodies?? #2 - yes, there are good and bad foods. But you choose to eat them, and in what quantity. I may be drawn to eat more potato chips than I originally intended, but to blame the chip for being delicious and superior to any other food? No, I cannot. #3 - why not educate on both food and exercise? Giving more information is never the problem; however, misinformation like this article (absolving people from their own part of the guilt over eating themselves to death) is not the way to go.

Does my analysis of this article betray a lack of compassion on my part towards those with addictions in general, or just those who blame their struggle with weight on something else, instead of taking personal responsibility? Is it wrong to want to hold people accountable to the choices they make and the rewards and/or consequences that accompany them? Because I am in the midst of a bootstraps effort at turning my health and weight around, my personal responsibility for the results I see (either positive or negative) is of particular importance to me, but do others feel differently? Is it comforting to some to see this article's absolution? I don't want to be cavalier by demanding personal responsibility, because I know that addiction is a very real struggle for many people. I have felt the pull of addiction myself, but chose to turn away. I went back and found this from my first post in this blog, when I said I'm Tired... thought it was appropriate to this topic of discussion.

I'm tired of the addiction pulling me into its gravity.

(almost) Before Pictures

So Peggy and I were talking on Thursday and we both agreed that it would've been nice for us to have taken Before pictures back on July 19th when we started kicking my butt into shape. Peggy would've liked them for her personal portfolio because we've made such progress so far (weigh-in #3 coming Tuesday!!). I would've liked them for posterity; however, I feel like I have plenty of fat-girl Before pictures, such as this one that a moron took while we were at the beach for Jen's bachelorette party:Anyway, later on Thursday my mom commented on "how skinny" I looked, and I told her thanks for flattering me, but that I still had a long way to go (at that point, almost exactly 50 lbs). I decided that since I'm still more "before" than "after" at this point (having lost 35 lbs, needing to lose 50 more), I'd go ahead and take some pictures now, calling them (almost) before pictures. I've sent them to Peggy, but I'm also posting them here, for the record.

So, 10/15/2010, 169.8 lbs:

...and from the side.

So it may not seem immediately obvious, but my posting these pictures on here should speak loudly of how much I trust you, readers. I love you all, and thank you so much for your support of me as I keep going at this!

For now,
BCB

Yes, it's possible to over-ice

the result:

This all happened by my being too overzealous about icing my crackly, weak right knee. My knees are a constant bother during my workouts, but they usually don't hurt until later, when I try to go up and down the stairs at home, or get up off the floor, or whatever you have. I have taken to icing my knee using an icepack and an ace bandage to secure it. These are the icepacks I've been using:

Usually, when I've been icing my knee, I'll secure one of these on my knee, and then sit and work, or watch tv, or whatever, until its completely thawed out, and then I'll replace it with a fresh ice pack. Sometimes will even go to bed with one on my leg. Never had any problems before.

So last night, I had an ice pack on my knee, but when I was getting ready to go to bed, I thought I would put on a fresh-from-the-freezer pack. The one I had on my knee wasn't exactly cold, so I thought it couldn't hurt to get it really cold before going to bed. So I replaced the 1st ice pack with the 2nd, and went to bed. I remember thinking, "gee whiz, this is cold," and in my half-asleep state when I finally unwound the ace bandage and freed my frozen knee, feeling relief to be free from the icepack, but I didn't think anything of it.

Then this morning, as soon as I tried to stand up out of my bed, I knew something was up, because I felt like I had intense sunburn on my leg, not to mention my knee wouldn't straighten out all the way. My first thought was that I might have had an allergic reaction to something in the ice packs (latex?), but it turns out, I had given myself frostburn with my double ice pack situation last night.

I think the difference between last night and my normal icing procedure was that I didn't let the first icepack (and the skin of my knee) completely thaw before going into the second icepack. And I gave myself a nasty burn. Great.

Peggy knew it by the signs as soon as she saw it. Apparently a couple years ago she gave herself a combination icy-hot + ice pack burn, and she still has the scars to prove it (please no scars, that's all my pasty legs need, wtf!). She was very disappointed in my general lack of knowledge about proper icing procedure, but I swear, it only makes sense that if a little bit of ice is good for an injury, a lot should be better, right??

No more icing for me for a while. In the meantime, we've pulled the wedge from my mom's knee surgery up from the basement, and I'm sleeping with my leg propped up on it from now on. Looks comfy, right?

Anyway, be warned. Unless you want to look like you have leprosy of the knee, DO NOT over-ice your limbs. Frostbites a b, yo.

I'm obsessed... er, the case for a daily weigh-in.

Warning: this post might only appeal to the Brittany of 2011 (Brittany 2.0), or to those of you with a fondness for nerdy data analysis.

I admit it, really I do. I've become obsessed with measurements, with scales, with cataloging every thing I eat, with predicting my continuing weight loss trends, with dates and numbers and goals and small steps. I know all this is against Peggy's methodology, since she doesn't want me weighing myself or anything, but I can't imagine how people stay motivated / make corrections to their diets, or goals, or plans, when they don't see any results but for a month at a time. I mean, if nearly a month went by before I realized that my weight loss had stalled, I'd be really down on myself and frustrated that I didn't know it sooner to do something about it. So I advocate a daily weigh-in (weigh-a-day).

My theory is that Peggy doesn't want anyone going to weigh themselves just after a workout (pounds having just been lost by sweating it out), and then to emotionally freak out when they weigh themselves the next morning ("what?!? I've gained weight over night?!? If I'm going to gain weight, I might as well eat something tasty for the extra pounds!"). So she sets this rule that we're supposed to wait for her to weigh us. But I'm not playing the freak-out-over-fluctuations strategy, I'm simply weighing myself each morning, recording it on MyFitnessPal and a handful of spreadsheets (nerdy, I know, I know), and tracking it over time... all very rational, albeit obsessive.

I know that there are those of you out there who say, "its not the weight that matters, its how I feel. That's why I don't weigh myself regularly." If you guys can maintain your weight based on feeling alone, more power to you! But for me, this mentality has been a means of reaching the obese level of weight I was at when I started this journey. "The number didn't matter," so I just let it creep on up there. I didn't even restrict myself when the "feel" of it was wrong, when my clothes stopped fitting, etc. So now, I weigh-a-day.

Still others of you will insist that weight can fluctuate so significantly that you don't want to weigh everyday. I myself know that weight can fluctuate day to day, based on water, time of the month, etc. In fact, one night, I decided to use baking soda to whiten my teeth, and since I don't mind the taste of baking soda, swallowed a whole bunch of it. Turns out that baking soda makes you retain water, maybe even more than salt. Woke up and weighed about 2.5 lbs more than I had the morning before - ack! But anyway, since weight can fluctuate, I don't get upset when I go a day or two at nearly the same weight. But weight shouldn't ever be fluctuating up (unless I've gone on a salt or baking-soda binge, or eat a lot more one day than another), so I continue to weigh-a-day.

These daily weigh-ins help me to know what affects my progress - how much I eat, what I eat, the days I don't work out, etc. There may be slight fluctuations, but over the course of a few days, I can estimate how much weight I should be losing. And then, using my nerdy spreadsheets, I can try to project when I'll freaking reach my goals!! Wheee!

I thought some of you might like to see the spreadsheet I'm using to track my progress so far. I can send you a copy if you're interested in using it for yourself. I've copied from the spreadsheet a chart that predicts my weight (see below). The bottom is my goal weight: 120 lbs. The vertical line represents today. The blue squiggly lines to the left of today are my actual weights, starting waaaay up at 204 lbs, going all the way down to today (171.4 lbs!!). The lines to the right of vertical predict my weight loss, using three different methods. The gray line (I consider this to be a worst-case-scenario-type line) is if I lose 2 lbs/week from now on; that puts me at 120 lbs on April 2, 2011 (sigh). The pink line shows the pace of my weight loss if I continue on my from-the-beginning-of-training (July 19th) average: I'll be at 120 on February 3, 2011 (better). The green line shows the trend of my most recent weight loss (since my last weigh-in on September 20th): it predicts I'll hit 120 on January 18, 2011 (get it, girl!!).



Now the reality is that I will probably be somewhere between green and pink, since continuing to lose weight at this rate (.48 lbs/day) will grow increasingly difficult, the less and less I weigh. I'll put in new copies of this chart every once in a while to see how it changes as time goes on.

Now, for you "the numbers don't matter" sticklers out there, no, I'm not really stuck on the 120 lbs number. For my height (5'4") and "frame" (Medium), my healthy ideal weight is between 108-132 lbs. If I get to 130 lbs (because I'll be a dense, muscly beast) and look the way I want ("feel" the way I want, if you will), then great, I'll stop there. I want to be a size 4-6, be happy in a bathing suit, in shorts, in anything I want to wear. Those are my goals. The chart is clearly not able to predict these things, but really, I want to have a date (or a range of dates) in mind to look forward to reaching my goals, so that I can get to the fun part:

Learning how to maintain this new lifestyle on my own (workouts, eating, etc.).
Shocking people who haven't seen a skinny Brittany since her first year at Samford.
Going to the doctor and not having to worry about what she'll say.
Buying a bathing suit I really love.
Catching someone's eye.
Retooling my entire wardrobe - Clothes I used to love but can't wear now? Skinny jeans? Fitted dresses? Trendy items I don't give a second glance now? Shopping trip, anyone?
A new goal to work on - what should it be?

So that's it, I know it's a boring numbers-based post. But since I started this blog as a way to keep up with my thoughts on this journey as I go through it, I wanted to record for posterity the reasons I find its better to weigh yourself every day. I'm not trying to convince anyone other than Brittany 2.0. Cheers!