Back to Basics

About a month ago I finally started doing something about my gaining a bunch of weight back and poor eating habits. Things started off well but a cold slowed me down for a while. Still I had pretty good progress I lost close to 10 lbs during the past month. I’m very happy about this, but I’m impatient and last time I worked hard I was able to do better than that.

What worked for me last time. What got me started was a competition. Up front I had to put in money, there was a chance for a cash prize at the end, and there was healthy competition and motivation from the rest of the group. There was more than that too though, a big part was making the decision to do something, setting a goal, making that goal public, then working to meet that goal with frequent measurement and check ins. For me I think that is a good recipe to meet most goals in life.

If that worked before, I don’t need the competition part. I’ve always been good at competing with myself and that’s what I’m doing here. So what are my goals. Long term I want to get back to my healthy weight of being below 180 lbs. For not I’m going to look at where I want to be for October 11th, that’s the day I’m signed up to run a 10k race. Obviously part of my goal is to be able to run 10k again. Weight wise I want to be at least 185 lbs.

On July 13th I was right about 225 lbs. I’m very ashamed that I let myself get back to this point. Roughly a week ago I was somewhere around 220 lbs, today I’m at about 216 lbs. For my goal of 185 lbs that means about 30 lbs I have to lose in 8 weeks. That averages out to about 3.8 lbs per week to lose. Looking back at my last time this ambitious but achievable.

To keep myself accountable I’m going to start doing weekly weigh-ins again here on the blog.