First off, eek! Under 200 days until the wedding! Hard to believe that my first post in this series was over 100 days ago. I've made some very real (very slow) progress since then, which is what this post is about. 

I recently redoubled my efforts. Truth be told, while not giving up completely, I'd been slacking off. A couple hundred calories here, some M&Ms there, a beer or three after work...but for the past week I've been much better (including two happy hours this week where I stuck to my drink limit). I've been staying within my calorie goals for the most part, and only being slightly more relaxed on the weekend. And we're back to our twice a week (minimum) gym routine, so I'm getting my burn in too!

The efforts have paid off. The scale is dropping again - including a HUGE drop right after I joined a new Transformer. I feel a little bad for anyone from that group reading this (shout out to the March 1 peeps!) since the drop was much more about work I'd done right before my weigh in rather than after. I'm not cheating, I promise!

So about that progress...I've been keeping track of my calories and weight every day for the past 80 days in a spreadsheet. And yesterday was the first day that I found the "trend lines" feature. This is something I'd been calculating regularly on my own, with a healthy dose of self-talk that went something like "Okay, we had a good week. Averaging X calories below maintance. If we keep that up for 200 more days, I'll weigh Y in September." 

Having the computer calculate the trend lines for whole 80 days was remarkable. It shows three really important things to me.

  1. My weight is ACTUALLY trending down. Despite the fluxuations, it's not just in my head or wishful thinking, it's actually headed down.
  2. Progress is a little slower than I'd anticipated. I have a goal 10 lb range I'd like to hit, and my trend line is still above even that.
  3. My trend line that predictes how many pounds I should lose (based on my calorie intake) and my trend line for actual pounds lost are almost the same line. This means that despite all the crazy eat clean / calories are different stuff out there, for me the most important thing is limiting total calories, not eating any particular type of food. (With the cavaet that I eat pretty clean anyway - I'd say less than once a week for fast food, etc.)  

 

So, hooray! I'm even okay with #2, because knowledge is half the battle. If I really want to meet my wedding goals, I'll have to put in the effort and not just hope for it. 

Today's Goals

Under goal calories, no booze (I went slightly over yesterday). 

Yesterday

Under Goal: No

Under Maintenance: YES

Exercised: Painted the apartment