My last post was about winning my first Transformer!

Since then, a week of holiday feasting (and drinking) has done remarkable damage.  I'm up quite a bit from where I was a week ago.  It looks (impossibly) like almost 10 lbs.

This is also not the ideal way to start with a weigh in: the morning after feasting and drinking, slightly hung over and dehydrated. 

I'm hoping that number will be a blip on my radar.  Experience has taught me a few things by now:

  • A short stint of overeating (like a week) isn't undo-able.  Life happens.  A good week of sticking to my calories and exercise should melt that right back off if I do so IMMEDIATELY.  Letting it stay is a much bigger problem.
  • Alcohol is not my friend.  I'm over 21 and I made it a disturbingly scary point to enjoy every single one of my favorite holiday beverages (though I prefer my eggnog non-alcoholic).  In general, more drinks = rapid rise in weight.  Alcohol has 7 kcal/g, whereas carbs and protein have 4 kcal/g and fat has 9 kcal/g (these are averages).  That's partly why, and it's also part of why most diet plans strongly discourage drinking.  The other part is that it lowers inhibitions and you tend to eat more when drinking: double damage.
  • Keeping to 1200 cal/day is not feasible.  However, keeping to 1400-ish calories is.
  • I shalt not "eat back" all my exercise calories.  Most machines can't or don't subtract out your baseline metabolism (how many calories you would have burned standing still on the treadmill) and that number is often an overestimate.  I know from previous experience that if I eat those calories back, my weight loss stalls.  Eating back half my exercise calories seems to be safe.
  • I like numbers and data.  I absolutely love my Microsoft Band (fitness tracking + smartwatch in one) and wear it constantly; I also LOVE my Withings scale and I didn't expect to care so much but that daily graph of results really really helps motivate me to keep that number moving DOWN.

I so wanted to make a bad pun in the title about this (5k = 5 keys) and that made me realize there's actually a number 6.  I'm no runner, but last Transformer I made myself a rule: 5k/day.  I try to walk a continuous 5k every day.  In fact, I try to jog that 3 days a week so I can keep up or improve my times for the 5k races I do.  I recently read "3 miles or 30 minutes/day" which is also good--but I think that should be "whichever is LONGER."  I'm also becoming an advocate of the 10,000 steps/day (EGAD) idea.  Given that each mile is about 2000 steps, just doing my 5k gives me over half that.  Lazy day with lots of sitting? Walk some more.  A 5-mile walk (for me) takes about an hour and a half at my normal walking speed and that gives me my full 10,000 steps.  So my last "rule" ends up being:

  • 10k steps or 5 km, whichever comes LAST.  If I had an active day, I still have to do the 5k walk but I can stop there.  If I had a sluggish day, I can walk extra to get to my 10,000 steps.