Tuesday Weigh In

257.2

This counts as my official weekly side of the blog weigh in. From now on, I weigh on Tuesdays. (Of course, me being me, I'll still start each post with my weight.)

I'm not faring too poorly in my wedding/weekend home recovery. This is .1 pounds lower than Friday, and 1.6 pounds lower than yesterday, when I shot up to 258.8. What's important is that I'm back into progress, and that my goals didn't get too horribly thrown off by the wedding.

Still, right now, I'm mostly feeling pretty blah. I'm squeaking along, but I'm just not accomplishing anything.

Let's be honest: the number one thing I need to do right now is apply to jobs. It's not that I don't like my job (I do!) but I've been here almost two years and it's time to move on. I need to get something that pays more and where I'll have more challenges and more opportunity for advancement. My current job is stale, and it's time for me to move on.

So, I've settled that. And I've actually found two jobs I would love to have and think I have a decent shot at. (Well, one I would love love love love to have, and one that would be a solid choice and improvement over my current position.) I've worked a lot on my resume and think it's currently at a place I like. But I just can't write the damn cover letters and get my applications out the door. I don't know what's wrong with me.

One of the jobs (the one I'd love love love) is in Denver. I have spent literally hours online looking at apartments I could get if I moved to Denver. I could get a place as nice, if not nicer, for about half of what I'm paying to live in DC. I've also spent hours looking at cars, dreaming about what my priorities would be if I were to get a car, debating if I'd buy purely from my savings or if I'd go wild and finance a nicer one than savings could buy. (Spoiler alert: I'm pretty cautious with money and there's approximately a zero chance I'd take out a loan to buy a nicer car.) Basically, I've just been daydreaming. Sure, I suppose it's better than, you know, eating, but it's really just not productive.

What I need to do is focus. Apply to jobs. Work out. Kick ass at my current job. Heck, even blog. I just need to not spend forever thinking about what I'd do if I got a new job without, you know, actually doing anything about it.

Of Weddings and Weight Goals

257.3

Holy progress batman! Since I'm not going to be able to weigh in tomorrow or Sunday (traveling for a wedding), this is going to have to go down as my weigh in. It's a loss of a very impressive 6.7 pounds for the week. In a word, nice.

The next weigh in that I'm planning on putting on the side of the blog is Tuesdays. I know, I know, I started on a Saturday, so Saturday should by normal logic be my official big "side of the blog" weigh in date. Let's be honest: Saturday is a terrible weigh in day. In addition to being one of the two days I'm least likely to blog (tied with Sunday), it's also the day I'm most likely to be away and least likely to have access to a scale. Saturday has all the qualities of a terrible weekly weigh in day, and it will not be mine.

What will? Tuesday, of course! I love Tuesday for weigh ins. 80% of this is purely sentimental, of course. I weighed in for months and months on Tuesday when I first started this blog, and with it I dropped over 40 pounds. There are other reasons why I think Tuesday makes a great weigh in day: it's close enough to the weekend to keep you on your toes, but far enough away that you have a smidgen of time to get rid of any sodium induced bloat. It's unaffected by most holidays and long weekends, meaning you're less likely to be away from a scale. It's a great weigh in day, and most importantly, it's *my* weigh in day.


I mentioned, yesterday, that I had weight goals that I was keeping separate from the Hot 100 challenge. And I do.

Sort of.

Obviously my intention, broadly speaking, is to lose weight, preferably at a reasonable clip. When I first started on the 18th at 264, I set myself up with what I thought to be an extremely ambitious "super mini goal" of being 255 by Friday, October 8th, when I'm flying down to North Carolina to visit a friend for the weekend. On that day, it required me losing a rather tricky 3.15 pounds a week: more than I'd normally shoot for, but I knew I'd get some help from first week losses. I also set myself up with what I viewed as a more reasonable mini goal of getting down to 250, which would mean having lost a smidge over 5% of my starting weight, by Monday, October 25th. That originally required me to lose a hard but reasonable 2.65 pounds a week.

Good, stretch yourself goals, right? Not so much any more. For 255 by October 8th, I now only need to lose 1.15 pounds a week. For 250 by the 25th, I now only need to lose 1.65 pounds a week. These are not the things ambition is made of.

Which might lead one to say "change your goals." The thing is, however, you don't really want to spend all your time shooting at a moving target. Part of weight loss has to be occasionally succeeding. I set my targets, and now it's time to head towards them, wimpy though they may currently seem.

My official, near term goals, therefore, are to be 255 pounds by Friday, October 8th and to get down to 250, marking a 5% loss of my starting weight, by Monday, October 25th.

What are we looking at long term? Well, my best friend from college is getting married this June (unfortunately, to a guy I despise) and I am on the hook to be a bridesmaid. Her mother is sewing the bridesmaid dresses for us, and has asked us to get measured and send the information to her by February 1st. This is going to be insanely tough for me emotionally, and I'd like to be as low as I can by then.

Depending on how things are going, I may end up just telling my friend's mom that I've been losing weight and am probably going to lose more before the wedding and just see how she wants to deal with it. If it means I need to get the dress professionally made closer to the actual wedding or even step down as a bridesmaid, that's life. If push comes to shove, I'm not going to put my life/health on hold for four months because of someone else's wedding (especially a wedding I think is such a terrible idea).

To get back from the bridesmaid tangent, what all this means is that February 1st is a goal date of mine, although I don't actually yet have a goal number. To get to 220, I'd need to lose almost exactly 2 pounds a week from now until then. To get to 210, I'm looking at 2.5. And for 200, I'd need an average of 3, which is almost certainly out of range.

I think my current plan is to shoot for 255, and then 250, as quickly as I reasonably can. From there, I'm likely to set a goal for either 237 (a bit over 10% of my starting weight) or 233 (no longer morbidly obese, and historically a big trip up point for me). The date will be determined by how soon I hit 250. If I do 237, my next goal is 233 (clearly), and from there I'll shoot for 220 and/or figure out where I can be by February.

This first week is the easy week. Weight falls off like water. Being at home tonight and Sunday, and dealing with food at the wedding tomorrow, are going to be my first real challenges. Let's meet them with aplomb.

In other news: 25th Happy Birthday to Mae Flowers of A Journey to Thin! She's amazing and has lost over 60 pounds.

Hot 100

258.8

Not bad. I'm down another .5 pounds day to day, and I've dropped an awesome 5.2 pounds since I started.

As of today, there are exactly 100 days left in 2010. Steve of Log My Loss is running, as he did last year, a Hot 100 challenge for the last 100 days of 2010. I, as I did last year, intend to participate. In the interest of mixing things up, this year I intend to, you know, actually finish the challenge instead of puttering out mid-November.

This year doesn't have last year's requirements that all goals be measurable, achievable, and entirely within your control. So it's just, basically, to make three or more goals that can last you till January, and to write about them each week.

1. Blog 5+ days a week. Blogging helps me stay focused and motivated. It forces me to spend a portion of each day really *thinking* about what I'm doing and why. Blogging help keeps me on track, and so I shall blog.
2. Go for a walk outside every day. Yes, even if it's hot or cold or raining or snowing or I'm feeling under the weather and really would rather not. Every damn day, I need to go outside and spend some time trudging through the fresh air. I can do it.
3. Act as if my weight can't hold my career back by doing what I should be doing and applying to new jobs. This might not seem quite like it fits in with a weight loss challenge, but for me it does. I've been using feeling bad about my weight as an excuse not to apply for jobs, and I shouldn't be. While yes, studies do show that obese people are less likely to be hired, there is no chance I'll ever get hired for a job I don't apply for. Ideally, I'd like to find a new job before this challenge is over, and if that happens I'll update with a new goal.

So, those are my challenge goals. You'll notice they're not quite weight centric. The only one that has a direct effect on the scale is #2, and even that's a pretty weak one. A walk of indeterminate length and intensity, even every day, is not the stuff big losses on the scales are made of.

There's a reason for this. It's not that I don't have lots of weight related goals: I do, and I'll probably discuss them in the upcoming future. But the issue is, I already have those. Those wouldn't be challenge goals, they would just be me continuing along my merry way and picking up challenge credit as I went.

So, those are my Hot 100 goals. If you want to try to close out the last 100 days of the year with a bang, it's not too late to join! They're accepting participants until October 1st. Just head over to Log My Loss for all the details.

The trick is to get back up

Well, it's been a long time since I wrote. Too long. And my weight's gone up. More than it should have and more than I'd like to admit, but not more than I will admit.

And so Saturday, I weighed myself, I recommitted, and I strolled through the blogosphere. Jo is in Onederland! Monica got a job! (That was old news, but I was reading through the archives and saw a mention to coworkers, plus you can never read too much of Monica's blog.) Katie J. is making all sorts of progress and now has the most beautiful picture as her icon! 266 is at a normal BMI! And Sue aka Mrs. Fatass is having the birthday celebration to end all birthday celebrations.

And me? Well, on Saturday I weighed 264 pounds.

Yes. 264 pounds. That's only 14 pounds lower than my original starting weight. How miserable.

But at the same time, in some ways, it also wasn't all that bad. I'd kept up a loss of just over 5% of my starting weight for a year and nearly two months. I work in health policy: the literature on obesity is bleak. Keeping 5% of my starting weight off for over a year actually makes me, statistically speaking, a success story. Imagine that.

Of course, that's not the level off success I want. I want Learning to be Less levels of success. (Who, by the way, is pregnant and due in just over a month. Congrats!) I want Diane from Fit to the Finish levels of success. I want to be what they are: namely, the awesomest kind of statistical aberration there is.

In my last post, on the last try, I said "Falling is okay, though. The trick is to get back up. And I'm going to get back up."

Well, I'm back up. I've been going for walks. (My gym shut down, and I'm not really up for finding a new one just yet.) I've been eating well. And I've been steadily progressing down down down the scale.

Saturday, 9/18: 264
Sunday, 9/19: 262
Monday, 9/20: 261.5
Tuesday, 9/21: 261

And finally today, Wednesday, 9/22: 259.3. 4.7 pounds down, a bunch to go.