So I've lost 3.4 pounds in the first few days since I weighed in. Not too surprising as I've been eating almost no unhealthy snacks and have cut back my alcohol intake way back as well.
Of course, these are the easy days. The days when those first few pounds drop off so quickly that you start thinking Hey, I am killing this thing! I bet I could lose 20 pounds this month, no problem! The problem for most of us is, that this early rate of weight loss is usually not sustainable without Herculean amounts of time in the gym (think Biggest Loser). Of course most of us can't take so much time away from our regular lives to be able to spend 5 hours a day at the gym and frankly... it's a bad idea. You might be able to get some truly astounding results in a short period of time, but for any normal person (not a peak performance, highly paid athlete) this amount of gym time is not a sustainable lifestyle change. We must guard against getting discouraged in the next two, or three weeks when we might see a decreseplateau in our weightloss
So how do we continue to see great results? Perhaps we should actually be redefining our yardstick and not hoping for ongoing results, like what we often see at the beginning of a weight loss regime. in my own case, to lose 4% in 4 weeks, I need to lose 2.6 pounds per week. That might be a fair amount to lose per week over a long haul. That's why the 6 month Dietbets are only 10% total, not 24%. So what would a 10% loss look like for me on a per week basis? just a shade under 1.1 pounds per week. That is a very doable thing, a healthy rate of loss and one that does not require a person to spend hours a day in the gym.
So, I need to lose a toal of 10.4 poundas in four weeks and 1.1 per week isn't going to cut it, so for this kind of short term contest I need to do two things. Take advantage of as much first week weight loss as I can, and work a little harder than the norm to lose the rest over three weeks. I imagine I'll have lost around 5, or 6 pounds over my first week (lots of first week water loss), so I'll need to lose about 1.6 to 1.8 pounds per week for the remainder of the contest. This is doable... it just requires a little more discipline at the dinner table and maybe an hour a day of exercise. I'm splitting my hour into 30 minutes of elliptical, or treadmill and 30 minutes with freeweights.
Everyone will have their own goals they need to reach, some higher, some lower, but we all have the same struggle and we can all make it happen. Time to look in the mirror and see the winner that's lookiong back at you.
If it's to be, it's up to me.