Get Fit Slowly

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190

June 10th, 2008 · 17 Comments

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Today marks the first time since starting this project that I’ve reached 190 pounds. On New Years Day, I weighed 207. In the past 23 weeks I’ve lost 17 pounds. In the grand scheme of things, I am meeting my goal: I am getting fit slowly.

Yesterday at my personal finance blog, I wrote about the importance of ignoring daily stock market fluctuations. Daily movements are meaningless. What’s important is the long-term trend. The same is true with fitness and weight loss.

As regular readers know, it’s very easy for me to get wrapped up in the day-to-day minutia of my diet and workout. I stress over little things. My wife calls me Overanalytical Man, and she doesn’t mean it in a good way. I spend too much time focusing on the details sometimes so that I miss the Big Picture.

There’s been a lot about my fitness regimen that makes me unhappy. I’ve done a good job lifting weights, and during April and May I did several hours of cardio work each week. I’m proud of these accomplishments. But since my thigh injury two weeks ago, I’ve managed just two hours of aerobic activity, all of it on the stationary bike. Until the past few days, my weight had plateaued. I was eating too much, and often not well. I even bought a pack of Sno-Balls last week.

If I wanted to be crazy overanalytical, I could let these setbacks get me down. I’m not going to do that. I want to focus on my achievements instead:

  • I’ve lost seventeen pounds.
  • I’ve discovered a love for running. I ran 12.62 miles one day. I ran a 10k race. I’ve run 114 miles this year, which is two miles more than I’ve biked!
  • I’ve made slow, steady progress with the weights. I’m mostly doing upper body now, having abandoned lower body workouts because they seemed to be interfering with my running. But these upper body workouts are progressing well. I’ve learned to enjoy the long plateaus (and even occasional setbacks). I know that the repetition will make me stronger.
  • With Mac, I’ve made a tentative start to this site, sharing what I do and learn with you. Your feedback has been awesome, and has had a tremendous influence on what I’ve done.
  • I’ve begun to learn about healthy lifestyles, and how they can be incorporated long-term.

I’m nowhere near perfect. Far from it, as my recent Sno-Ball snack will attest. But I’m making progress. And I have goals.

In the short term, I have an appointment next Monday to have somebody look at my leg. Though I want to be out running, I’m able to take the long view — I know that I need to take care of my body in order for it to continue to be of use to me. Tomorrow this blasted nine-month Oregon winter is supposed to end, which means I can soon focus on cycling. Finally, I’ve spent the past two days re-dedicating myself to small portions of healthy foods.

Although I have bad days, when viewed as a whole my fitness is progressing well.

And today I weigh 190.

Tags: Progress · Real-Life · Weight Loss




17 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Tiffany // Jun 10, 2008 at 4:53 pm

    Keep it up Jd. You look great and more importantly, you ARE getting healthier.

  • 2 MITBeta @ Don't Feed The Alligators // Jun 10, 2008 at 5:57 pm

    JD:

    I weigh myself every day, but plot it using the tools available the Hacker’s Diet website (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html).

    This calculates a daily rolling average. When losing weight, the goal is to clock in below average rather than simply below yesterday’s weight. Much of the time, you can be above yesterday’s weight, but below the average, which further drags down the average.

    This was very motivating for me in losing 35 pounds 2 years ago.

    Check out my chart here..

  • 3 Lance // Jun 10, 2008 at 6:45 pm

    Congratulations!! Milestones are important, and this sure sounds like one. The hardest part for me is the healthy eating - it’s easy to get sidetracked with the plethora of choices that can become available on any given day. Keep at it, you’re doing great!

  • 4 Brooke // Jun 10, 2008 at 6:52 pm

    FABULOUS!!!!

  • 5 Natalie // Jun 10, 2008 at 7:36 pm

    Wow! Great job and I think you have a fabulous attitude. I think you are always going to have better eating days than others. We all make unhealthy food choice once in a while. As long as it is once in a while and you didn’t eat 10 snowballs, its just part of life.

    And from one Oregonian to another, I am hoping that winter is really leaving for good this week!

  • 6 Samantha // Jun 10, 2008 at 8:36 pm

    good for you! slow and steady wins the race. :)

  • 7 Andrew is getting fit // Jun 10, 2008 at 11:19 pm

    Well done. I hope to be at 190 later this year as well. Still got a ways to go.

    Try logging your weight at PhysicsDiet.com. It smoothes out those fluctations and produces pretty graphs too.

  • 8 greenman2001 // Jun 11, 2008 at 11:05 am

    SnoBalls are the canary in your mineshaft. You may not be able to stop yourself from eating them, but they should at least be an occasion for deep reflection, analysis, self-talk, and maybe a blog post. Something is triggering your Sno-ball episodes, and getting a handle on those triggers is at the heart of permanently changing your behavior.

    One of your achievements (and Mac’s) has been to bring your attention to this part of your life. It’s the first step toward change. Whatever failures you undergo along the way, the ONLY way to succeed is to refocus your attention and continue your practice. You and he are both good at doing this.

    A third component of successful change is to stop doing what isn’t working and try new behaviors that address the shortcomings of the old, unsuccessful behaviors. You and he are much less successful at this. When a strategy fails you double down on it instead of backing away from it. One example for each of you.

    For you: you have switched (for the most part) from unhealthy foods to healthy ones, but you complain that healthy food is boring and when you fall, it’s often because “interesting” food like a breakfast of chocolate cake immersed in glass of milk pulls you away from brocolli. But you don’t seem to have made a forceful, dedicated effort to find or learn how to cook “interesting” healthy food. You keep eating the boring stuff and try to maintain this habit through sheer willpower, hating it the whole tim — and frequently failing at it.

    For Mac: he knows that counting calories is a very effective way for him to lose weight (most of his weight loss appears to have taken place when he was carefully logging his food intake, and stops as soon as he leaves off logging it), but finds that the process of recording that data is a huge obstacle to his doing it — and once he stops doing it, he stops losing weight. So he makes a new resolution to try harder, but of course, with every failure the resolution loses its magic powers, which were once so strong. One solution would be for him to simplify his diet for a period of time, to repeat meals and menus frequently, so that he doesn’t have to do so much logging of information. His “calories in” would be “automatic,” and the recording obstacle could be eliminated entirely.

    While you say here that the feedback from know-it-all readers like me has had a tremendous influence on you, my observation is that you’ve ignored virtually all of the great advice you’ve gotten on the site (including the advice to slow down). You’re both using more-or-less the same strategy and tactics you started with. The results have fallen far short of your expectations.

    That isn’t to say your progress hasn’t been strong: in my opinion you’re both doing great. I’d say this even if you weren’t losing weight: your focus on exercise makes it very, very hard for you to lose weight and will continue to be an obstacle. But you’ve both increased your activity levels enormously (even while injured), and this is the key to good health. You’re both healthier than you were when you started the blog, and that’s great!

    Please give us a blog post in which you list all the ways reader feedback has resulted in an actual change in your behavior. A subscriber appreciation post!

  • 9 Beth // Jun 11, 2008 at 11:35 am

    I read the comments hoping to see greenman2001 “weigh” in….love how he takes you to task, calls you on the b.s., makes very good observations/suggestions and does it all in a very courteous and civilized way. It is folks like him that you NEED in your life - one way or another - to keep you brutally honest and accountable to yourself while you get fit. I use his advice and observations to you in the same way with myself and it really does help to be honest with what I’M doing - and not doing -to get fit. Oh, and good work J.D. Keep it going!

  • 10 Janice // Jun 11, 2008 at 11:58 am

    Thanks for a timely post, from a personal standpoint. My scale went up this morning (from yesterday morning) when I was quite well-behaved yesterday. I got up all eager to get on the scale because I thought it would be moving in the right direction, but instead it had gone the other way. Frustrating. Sometimes I think it is easy to blame weight gain on “random fluctuations”, which can sometimes be a rationalization for gaining weight. But you are right, it is the long-term trend that counts. I’m a 5′ 6″ woman, and have held a steady weight of 145 (give or take a pound or two, mostly give) for two years now after losing around 20 pounds. I am trying to push it down to 143 by the end of this month, then down to 142 in advance of a vacation next month, so your post on vacations also rang true for me. But in trying to push my weight down further, I am also experiencing some frustrations, like this morning. I have to remember that the trend over the next few weeks matters more than what happened between yesterday and today. That way I will avoid my usual reaction to being frustrated — eating chocolate and feeling sorry for myself. Again, thanks for the blog.

  • 11 greenman2001 // Jun 11, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    Beth,

    Thanks for the support. In the next post Mac tells me he finds me dogmatic and condescending. (Of course, he’s right.)

  • 12 Cynthia // Jun 11, 2008 at 7:42 pm

    Congrats on hitting a nice milestone! And yeah, it’s the big picture that’s important.

  • 13 Maria // Jun 12, 2008 at 4:06 am

    WOO HOO!!!!!
    an occassional sno-ball is alright. Everything in moderation is the key. Suggestion: eat one and freeze the other.
    thanks for all the inspiration. It keeps me going.

  • 14 MITBeta @ Don't Feed The Alligators // Jun 15, 2008 at 3:45 am

    @Janice:

    Sounds like you need to use one of the software options that smooths out the peaks and valleys on a weight graph. The trend is the most important thing, not today’s actual weight. Check out the Hacker’s Diet (available online) or the Physics Diet. Good luck…

  • 15 April // Jun 17, 2008 at 5:31 am

    Fluctuations kill me. I panic if I’m three pounds heavier, and for women especially, it’s pretty typical to fluctuate.

    I used to weigh 20 pounds more than I do now. I’m finally at a point where I’m happy with my body, and I’ve only felt like that at one other point in my life (senior year of high school). So when the scale starts to move, I can’t help but to panic a little.

    I don’t let those fluctuations derail me anymore, though. Instead, I go back to counting calories for a few days until the numbers go back down, so that even if it’s just water weight, I know I’m watching the calories and working out and doing what I am supposed to be doing.

    I wish I could dicth the scale, but it’s my little red flag system for keeping the weight off.

  • 16 Janice // Jun 17, 2008 at 11:55 am

    To MITBeta:

    Thanks! I had actually started using the tool for smoothing at The Hacker’s Diet after reading this post and your first comment. Great site. I have close to a weeks’ worth of data in there now, and will continue to use it. The smoothing and trend data really do help.

  • 17 MITBeta @ Don't Feed The Alligators // Jun 17, 2008 at 6:01 pm

    @ April: See my advice above for smoothing out the fluctuations. I see nothing wrong with stepping on the scale every day. This is the quickest feedback mechanism available to most of us. And we all need some kind of feedback mechanism.

    @ Janice: Glad to hear that The Hacker’s Diet helped you like it did me!

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