I’ve been in the 220lbs-224lbs range for the past 3 weeks or so with no improvement. I’m not surprised. While I’ve been going to the gym fairly regularly, I was going well over my 2000Cal goal nearly every day. I don’t think I was hungry once the past couple weeks. And as we recall, you need to be hungry to lose weight.
So what happened? Life got busy. Half of the reason I haven’t blogging here (the other half is guilt). And while I wasn’t too busy to keep me from the gym much, what happened is that after a long stressful day of work I wanted to reward myself. Kim and I ate at Fellini’s (Italian) like twice a week and ate out about half of the other days. That’s what fat guys like me do: reward ourselves with food.
I was also getting content with my body. I’m no stud yet, but I’m building up some muscle and not nearly as disgusted by myself as I was when I was 15 pounds heavier. So I haven’t been as motivated to “stay good”.
Even so, it sure would be nice to be at 210 down in Mexico (on our honeymoon next month). That would take a monumental effort to lose 10 pounds in one month. To weigh in at 215 would be a great feat, as that’s about as light as I’ve been since I hit 6’2″.
In an effort to get back on track, I am starting a challenge for myself. I’ve tried these before with very little success, but I think I know why. Old challenges were of the form “this much weight lost = this reward”. This time around, I’m going to reward myself for smaller goals, which are both more immediate and easier to measure.
This challenge is going to focus the 2 pillars of weight loss: exercise and eating less. Each day that I go to the gym for 1hr or more, I will award myself 1 “point”. For each day that I eat 2000Cal or less, I will award myself 1 “point”. At a potential 2 points per day, I could get as many as 60 points in 30 days. I’ll run the challenge from April 3rd to May 3rd. If you think of a point as 500Cal burned or saved, that’s about 8 pounds in one month. Aggressive, but doable?
So what are “points”, other than pounds lost? I thought I could turn points into a bankroll for a poker run in AC. One point would be like $10 or so. Maybe less, since 30 points (and kind of poor showing) would still give me $300, which I could play with at a $3-$6 hold’em table all day.
But I’m not sure I need some other motivation besides looking good. So I think I’ll just let points be points. And try to get a high score just to fuel my own ego and self esteem.
50-60pts = I’m a stud.
40-50pts = Nice effort.
20-30pts = I suck.
00-20pts = I suck real bad.
I got 2 points yesterday and weighed in at 220 pounds this morning. Am I back on track?