After my minor set back, when I gained three pounds in a week, I decided to take this diet much more seriously. I started to focus more on small victories rather than dramatic results. And boy has it paid off.
My goal is to lose three pounds each week. My focus should be on two pounds per week, but I figured if I tried really hard to get to three pounds, than two would be easy. My weigh in last week set me at 219 pounds, and this week I am 214.4 pounds. I could not be happier with this result. Especially considering how hard I’m trying.
Some have asked, how am I doing this? And really I’m not doing anything overly special in order to accomplish my goals.
The first thing I focus on is taking in enough water each and every day. I try to drink around sixty ounces of water during the day. This is not including the liquid I take in when drinking coffee, soda, or wine. As you can probably tell, this sends me to the bathroom pretty often.
The second thing I try to do, is eat 3 meals at regular times during the day. Every morning I have a breakfast, and mostly it has just been one cup of cereal topped with 1/2 a cup of milk. Nothing special, nothing that takes too long. I eat breakfast every single morning at 9:00am.
I try to eat lunch around noon, and dinner usually happens whenever Eliza and I can get together to have it. She works, we have plans in the evening, etc. – all of which disrupt when we actually end up eating. We’ve been doing much better at eating earlier in the evening rather than right before we go to bed.
Eating all of these meals though, means that I have to watch what I eat. Generally I try to eat fairly healthy. Since I am counting my calories ( side note: I did a search online to try to find how many calories I should eat and I eat just under that ), I figure that why waste my calories on non-nutritious foods? I still eat snacks, and Eliza and I have a few little treats laying around. One trick is, for any treats you have around the house, make sure they come in small packages. We have a few snacks that are just about 100 calories. So most of my caloric intake during the day is from real food, and not wasted on much that isn’t good for me.
Besides that, I’ve been playing basketball or doing some type of activity just about every other day since "my minor set back". Eliza generally walks when I play basketball, so even if there is no one to shoot hoops with, I can always spend time with her. Oh, and by play basketball, I mean 2-4 hours of basketball. This is probably why I saw about five pounds of fat fall off me this week.
This puts my total weight loss at around eleven pounds. I could not be happier since my goal was to be at 210 by the July 18th weigh in. It appears as though I should be able to beat that goal, though I am not focusing too much on dates by rather trying to remain successful each day. My goal for next week? 211.4.
I figured, since it has been one full month on the diet. Perhaps it is time to show a progressive photo? I’m not sure how visible eleven pounds will be, but what the heck right?
June 27th, 2006 – 214.4lbs. (in Flickr group too)
Sorry about the quality, one of our digital cameras broke and I can’t seem to locate the other one, so I used my web cam for these photos.
Compare the above to my first weigh in and you might see subtle differences. Hopefully within a few months the changes will be a little more dramatic. But I am so happy with how far I’ve come so far.
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