A Bitter Pill To Swallow

I meant to write this post yesterday but I got called in to work and ended up spending my whole day (and most of the night) there. Although I don’t particularly enjoy working on my day off, it does provide me with some weight loss benefits. When I have to go in to work, it’s because a piece of equipment is broken and needs to be fixed immediately. The work is usually intense with lots of moving around and little time to stop and eat. From noon yesterday until 3AM, my diet consisted of 1 Whopper with small fries (my only option at 10PM) and a Fiber Bar. I also drank about 80oz of water, so I did pretty well yesterday. What I liked the most about it is that I was so busy I didn't even think about eating.

Anyway, I wanted to spend a little time writing about what happened to me last week. As I said in my weigh-in post, I felt liked I got kicked in the teeth. Earlier in the week I had written a post about making sure you win those little battles. I was feeling pretty good because I had quite of few of those little wins and I was feeling like things were all starting to come together. But with those feelings came another foe that sometimes strikes without warning… complacency. When things are going bad, you spend a lot of time thinking about how to make things better, but when you are doing well, there’s this tendency to stop pushing yourself because you are already doing well… more on this in a moment.

When I hit the scale I was extremely disappointed. I felt like I squandered what was a good thing and it made me sick just thinking about it. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a loss over a gain anytime; usually when I comment on other people’s blogs, I encourage people to see any loss as a good thing. For me though, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t lose a lot of weight, it was more about missing the opportunity that was right in front of me.

After starting the week off well, I started to get that feeling of being on the right track. With that, my focus waned and complacency rolled in. Being an engineer, I’ve since spent a good deal of time analyzing what went well and what went wrong for me last week:

What went well

• Early in the week I had a lot of small victories. I managed to go all week long with chocolate cake in my house and had the will power to refrain from eating it.
• I also got all my exercise in and I actually increased my elliptical workouts from about 1.6 miles to 3. 
• Finally, I kept to my goal to stay off the TV and PC until 8PM each night. Unfortunately my overall activity level didn’t really go up much because I didn’t work out in the morning so I filled that empty evening time with making up missed morning workouts.

 

What went wrong

• By late in the week my portion control was off. Instead of 4oz of protein, I was eating 6oz. Every meal had just a little more than normal and over the week it definitely added up.
• I didn’t drink water like I usually do. TLEstrogen Has been posting some good stuff about the importance of water and she's absolutely right. I didn’t drink bad stuff, I just didn’t drink anything.
• Lastly, my weight workouts weren’t as intense as they should’ve been. I’ve been having problems sleeping lately and as a result, I haven’t been getting up to work out. All week long I had to do my workouts in the evening and I know that I never work out as hard when it’s in the evening.

The results on the scale showed why I can't get complacent.  I accept responsibility for my actions, and in hindsight, the results were not surprising; they were just difficult to see.  It was indeed a bitter pill to swallow.

So this last Saturday was a bad day for me, but I decided to try something new to deal with it and I found it seems to have worked really well. After the morning weigh-in I was feeling pretty bad. I knew it would be hard to gain any motivation and I also knew that further negative behavior would just make me feel even worse. Instead of trying to fight it, I decided to give myself a day off. For all of Saturday, I didn’t worry about diet and exercise. Instead I spent the day playing with the kids and just hanging out at the house. It might sound funny, but by allowing myself a down day, it lifted my spirits and by Sunday I was back at it. I didn’t eat badly on Saturday, but I also didn’t worry about what I did eat. Those people that actually know me would say I’m a bit of a perfectionist; I think I put too much pressure on myself to do the right things all the time. To be honest it really felt good to just forget about it for a day.

Now I feel refreshed and ready to get back at it and the timing is perfect because I have some things to look forward to on the horizon. First, this is week 6 of my current workout. After 6 weeks I said I would take a week off from lifting (it’s good to let your muscles have an extended recovery periodically). After my week off I will start a new workout plan so I’m excited to do something a little different.

The second event I have coming up is a 30 day challenge with a good friend of mine. I’m going to do a separate post on the specifics, but for now I’ll say it’s going to be extremely tough to do and there’s potential for a decent amount of money to end up changing hands. This kind of challenge is right up my motivational alley! I’ll have more about it in the days to come including the rules and a side by side comparison of the challengers so you can see how we match up.

Lastly, I wanted to give a little recognition to someone who’s been fighting the weight loss battle for years and lately has been doing really well. Weezel lost another 3.5 pounds this last week bringing her total since January to 13.5! This is a great accomplishment especially when her profession has her working around food all day long. Although she doesn’t have a blog about weight loss, she does have a real interesting fiction blog called What Scares You?, and a recipe blog called What’s Cooking?. Weezel, I’m proud of the fact that my blog has inspired you, but you deserve all the credit for all the hard work you are doing. Keep it up, I have no doubt you’ll get there!