I had a way

“The only danger with slow and steady is that you might eventually gain 2 pounds in one week somehow and undo 3+ weeks of work...” – Joe, 07/13/2012

Hmm.

I weighed in at 222.2 pounds this morning, a gain of 2 pounds from last week, bringing my total weight loss to 9.8 pounds.

Flabbergasted? Sure, especially since I am looking and feeling the best I have so far on this journey and my workouts were good this week. Did I have a 7,000 net calorie gain? Of course not. There's no doubt I had a loss. You can look at the numbers. But somehow the quoted fear has been confirmed – that 0.6 per week would backfire into a week where I gained it all back and undid 3-4 weeks. This was probably a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I would be wise to apply more positive self talk next week. Is psychology truly a factor?

Honestly, today's results aren't as discouraging as I might have expected, because I just have a strong sense of them being preposterous (what more can I do, you know? If it's meant to be, it will be). Also, these results don't change my short term goal. That is to be able to claim a 15-pound loss by the six-month mark, which happens to be a Wednesday. If I can't say I've lost 15 pounds by August 22, the first six months of this journey will have been a colossal failure in terms of results. If I can achieve the 15 pounds, I think that's respectable. No one's going to criticize someone who loses 30 pounds in a year. That is healthy and should-be-permanent weight loss.

By the way, I have a policy of not posting +x.x in the blog post title. If I were to do that, in some way it feels like I would be accepting it.

So what does all of this mean? Well, it means I have to lose 5.x pounds in the next 5 weeks, bringing my total to 217.x. I hope I can do this. Obviously, it requires a bounce back from what is hopefully an aberration and an inaccurate reading today, and then a consistent 1-pound loss over 5 weeks. NIH says I can achieve my goal by eating 2,840 calories per day over the next 35 days, which is laughable. We've seen that calculators don't work, and we've seen that I've been eating far less than 2,840 calories per day and not experiencing the scheduled results. If I ate 2,840 calories per day, I would balloon back to 232 and more.

Daily calorie totals for the next week will be posted here. This is going to be fun.

Ellie Goulding – Lights - Single Version