Responding to weight bounces

Today is weigh-in day, which I do on Wednesdays so as to minimize the “weekend weight gain” effects.  The news this week is mixed.

As you can hopefully tell from the picture, my weight is up a pound and a half.  This is the first real increase since I started the project (the other “rise” on the graph was merely a recovery bounce from a week of stomach flu and dehydration).  I’ve also re-grown a half-inch on my waist and hips.  Not good.

I say it’s a “mixed” week, though, because some other key indicators still look good:

1. My blood sugars are generally running well within normal ranges, even with a gradual decrease in my insulin doses
2. My blood pressures are continuing to be considerably lower than a few months ago, now running more often in the 120-something over 70-something ranges; not ideal or enough to cut out any meds, but a great improvement nevertheless
3. My body fat percentages seem to be generally running a percentage point lower than they were just a couple of weeks ago when I first got the monitor.
4. My general sense of conditioning at the gym — how hard I feel I’m working, how much weight I’m lifting comfortably, etc., are gradually improving and are the best they’ve been in a long time
5. Most important, I’m continuing to get to the gym regularly and continuing to monitor my calories/food intake daily; I’ve had NO misses on any of that in weeks or maybe even a couple of months now (except when ill with the flu.)  And I almost never eat more calories than my software recommends for a day; almost always, I come in a few hundred calories under (which I think is probably okay — the software seems to overestimate how much I need.)  Finally, I pretty much never walk around feeling deprived or hungry, even with all this exercise and diet control.   This is really excellent.

These latter are really the most critical changes — they are all indices of overall health, which is fundamentally more important than belt size.

Nevertheless, anyone who is working on weight loss will instantly realize that it’s always disappointing when the “most important measures,” your scale weight and belt sizes, don’t keep going down.  It feels even worse when they go up a bit.  (And of course, in the long run it might also be argued that the only really good way to improve my health is to really knock them pounds off.)  And in  a sense, the fact that I am actually sticking to the program might even trigger more anxiety: “Even THIS isn’t enough???”

So what do you do when things bounce up instead of going down?  I’m focusing on a couple of things.

First, keep things in perspective. Occasional rises in weight and even “bad weeks” are entirely normal.  If you assume that this is a long-term project, one that will last at a minimum 12 months and possibly twice or three times that long, a week or even several weeks of weight increases or plateauing are entirely predictable.  In that sense, things are really going “according to plan.”

That doesn’t make it easy to take.  Some of my readers have written about how discouraging it was for them to see themselves go up instead of down on the scales as they worked on their programs.  But, they pointed out, you stick with it, and things will eventually turn around.

Second, assess what you’ve been doing right — and what you need to change. I actually predicted that this week might not pan out so well, because of the Easter holiday.  I didn’t get to work out so much on the weekend (just a half-hour on the elliptical on Saturday because with all the holiday laziness I got there late, just before closing time.)  Plus, there was a big family get-together Sunday, and so after we had a late (and slightly large) lunch, we ended up being at a large dinner in the evening.  (I really maxed out my calories on Sunday — the one exception to my “I’ve been good” summary all week.)

From this I know that I basically made a few bad calls over the weekend, which I suspect is human but which I also don’t generally do.  I also have noted the other day that I’m needing to increase my vegetable servings… which will be one good way to help balance my diet and probably cut out some of the less-good calories.

So this week I have lots of reasons to feel optimistic, and a few things to work on (veggies, keeping up the workouts, which I’ve been wanting to tweak upward a bit in intensity. But just a bit.)

Let’s see what that yields next week.

Weigh-in day and stoking your motivation

This morning it’s my weekly check-in, which as I mentioned before, I prefer to do in mid-week, just in case there were any unfortunate but temporary eating “mishaps” over the weekend.

Today the news is all good.  My weight is down a pound; my waist is down an inch and a half; chest is also down a bit.  Body fat percent is hard to be clear about because I just got my new meter this week, but it’s a half percent lower than the past few days.  And my blood pressure is holding at some good numbers.

Excellent.

And rare, to have all those numbers lining up in the “just where they should be” category.  It’s often the case that you put in a week or two and nothing much changes.  Which leads to an important discussion: maintaining your motivation for weight loss programs.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are at least seven psychological factors that one can attend to in order to make a weight loss program work.  These factors have emerged over the years, both as a result of the hard work of people who’ve tried to lose weight, and developed by psychologists who’ve researched weight loss.  (My advisor in grad school, now retired, spent most of her career researching weight loss.)  Maintaining your motivation is among the most important factors.

Motivation can often be defined as “desire,” but really it’s the sum total of your thoughts and emotions about why you want — or need — to lose weight.  Generally, the more powerful your motivation, the more likely  you’ll be to stick out your program, or to start one.  And the more likely you’ll be to tolerate the bad weeks, the weeks when you go off the wagon, when you gain instead of losing weight.

Psych of weigh-in day and the “cat drop metric”

Today is “weigh-in day” and so there is some need for psychology.  So just a word on how that tends to go.

Many folks working on weight loss are familiar with the basics here:

1. Your weight fluctuates — it can actually bounce around as much as five or so pounds from day to day.  So the usual advice is: don’t weigh yourself all the time and get highly reactive to the results, because it’s easy to get discouraged if, say, you weigh the same or even more today than yesterday.  (Especially if you’ve worked your buns off and missed a favorite dessert last night in hopes of a big change today.) (Also, don’t weigh yourself on Monday morning, unless you spend weekends at Camp Lejune or in a monastery living on broth.)

2. If you’re doing a lot of exercise, you’ll probably be adding muscle, and muscle weighs lots more than fat.  So while you’re actually losing fat and replacing it with muscle, which is a much more efficient tissue for weight maintenance (muscle needs more energy to live; fat is basically storage and hardly needs any), you may be disappointed by the scale’s results.

This is all state of the art science and also common sense.  Still… it’s kind of disappointing, isn’t it?  Because for those of us who are chronically tormented by our weight, we still would feel better if the scale said “LESS!!!” every day.