I have made updates of my weight loss journey every 100 days, and today, I have been logging my calories for 900 days. Usually I check in with a graph of my current weight loss progress on Happy Scale, which normally shows a little line, just trundling along. But, this time, I don’t have a new graph to share. My last recorded weight was on December 17, 2020.
I took a break from the scale. I needed one. I like to think of weight loss as driving (and, I’ll explain that more in a minute), but, sometimes, just like while driving, an accident a mile up the road can delay you, you can get caught in a freak snowstorm, or you can be cruising along, and, out of nowhere, have a tire blow out. That is to say, there are plenty of things outside of your control that can affect your weight loss, and, for the past 100 days, I’ve been running a gauntlet of environmental hazards: my sleep schedule got blown to pieces (as my work schedule became 180° different), my cat needed a bunch of emergency medical care, I was sick with COVID-19, we went into massive lockdown (again), and, on top of all of that disruption, I moved to an entirely different region of the Netherlands (away from where I had been living for the past 2 years).
Even during times when my life is NOT actively imploding from several different sources, I am not one for large calorie deficits (see my day 700 post). Instead, I picked (for my daily calorie goal), the amount of calories I would need to maintain my goal weight, if I were sedentary.
That means, unless I make it a priority to exercise (which, let’s be honest, wasn’t happening with any regularity over the last 100 days, for obvious reasons), I’m running a 2-250ish calorie deficit. That is NOT a deficit that will produce super-dramatic results on the scale anyway, and, when combined with the few weeks in there (1) when I was living off of hardboiled eggs while sleeping on an air mattress in my old place, (2) it was Christmas, (3) I had the ‘Rona, (4) point 1, but replace ‘old place’ with ‘new place’ and ‘air mattress’ with ‘3 hour commute’ and... ...yeah. There was nothing to see on the scale anyway.
So, while driving along the highway of weight loss, weighing myself daily, a practice that has taught me a lot about myself -- and been generally otherwise useful -- had started to become like a radio station that was losing reception. I’d have a few days off from work, eat normally, and the “radio” (scale) would “come back in range” (show me a reasonable, if not downward, trend), then I’d work a reverse-16 shift, and I’d be up a kilo, listening to screechy, scale-static. Just as I would do if I were actually in a car: I turned the damned thing off.
Unlike the rest of my journey, which has been generally free from massive life changes, the last 100 days in particular have felt like I am an astronaut who has crash landed on an alien planet. Everything was different than my normal routine, and weighing myself everyday just wasn’t giving me useful information anymore. So, I intentionally stopped weighing myself.
Even though my goal is to reach a healthy BMI, I know that I only TRULY reach that goal when my habits are good, and my lifestyle supports keeping me in that weight range. This isn’t a trip from point A to point B, and then I’m done. This is my life, and my life, as long as I’m alive, is always in motion. You know, the typical “life’s a journey, not a destination,”-type thinking. Well, it is. I'm riding this sweet Lambo 'o mine for as long as possible!
So, that is to say, my (weight-loss/lifestyle choice) car is ALWAYS going to be on the highway. It’s not headed to a specific destination. I just want my car to keep a directional heading: moving towards “consistent healthy choices for my body.” I'm not interested in a dead-end of “145 pounds.”
In keeping with my analogy for my healthy lifestyle being like driving (even though you're probably tired of it by now), it makes sense that my day-to-day weight is like the radio: nice to listen to, but not essential to actually driving. The essential thing is monitoring and maintaining a safe speed: monitoring my daily calorie intake (I use a digital food scale and my fitness pal; there are other apps out there). I find the awareness and attention to what I’m eating critical to the success I've had so far.
Speaking of maintaining a reasonable speed, for me, while sitting inside the car, the difference between traveling at 65mph and 75mph is not obvious. That’s why there is a speedometer (a calorie log) there, to check, and make adjustments as need be. I think managing our calories work the same way.
We all know it’s easy to tell the difference between driving 10mph and 65mph. We know when we have only had a banana or something for breakfast (and now it's dinner time), and we know when we have just finished our third slice of birthday cake. That's not our problem. It's the normal, day-to-day stuff (are we going 65 or 75?) that needs our attention. This attention amounts to checking/weighing to be sure that we didn’t use too much pasta in the dish we’re making for dinner, weighing out the hummus because it’s calorie dense, and so on. The difference between 65 and 75 mph becomes really important here: if we make that 10 mph difference 100 calories, well, if you’re just speeding a LITTLE all year, that extra 100 calories a day turns into a 10 pound gain.
Many people feel reluctant to start calorie counting because they’re worried that they’ll become “obsessed” with the numbers. Well, are you obsessed with the speed your car is going just because you have a speedometer?
The answer to that can be maybe -- and turn into 'probably,' especially if you see a cop. All of a sudden, that speedometer is the most interesting thing in your car. When we start a weight loss regiment, sometimes, we can park a cop on every road we mentally drive. We go from normal people, to people convinced we have 15 warrants out for our arrest, and are driving a stolen car (with no fewer than 20 kilos of cocaine in the trunk). We grip the wheel. Sweat a little. We make sure the needle on the speedometer is on the limit exactly; feathering that throttle like a NASCAR driver. We keep checking the rear view (and pray to god that we don’t accidentally make eye contact with the calorie police: that would be the tip off that we are actually guilty... ...of something!). In other words, we panic.
At this moment in time, I would just like to remind everyone that the calorie police aren’t real. No tickets are issued for eating 1700 calories in a 1600 zone. No jail time is served for enjoying a Christmas dinner. Your log is just your log. There are no calorie police. There is no calorie jail. There is just you: deciding on how many calories to eat, and adjusting up or down, depending on road (or life!) conditions. You are the driver, and you get to pick the speed that's comfortable (and safe!) for you.
At this point, I am undecided as to whether I am going to stay with my break of weighing myself every day - the data junkie in me likes to fill up boxes with numbers. But, I’m being realistic. I have finally just gotten out of the weird work schedule, as well as gotten back to my exercise routine this week (training for a 10k, along with kettlebell/dumbell home strength training). So, I know that the scale isn’t headed down any time soon, as my body readjusts to the influx of exercise, and my muscles begin repairing themselves/holding on to water.
What I am sure about is that my current routine, eating around 1600 calories (a little more if I ran more than 5k that day), and logging them carefully, alongside my reinvigorated exercise routine (seriously, just lose a 3 hour roundtrip commute, and the kilometers have time to run themselves!) is exactly what I need to be doing to make healthy choices for myself. I am also pleased to have found out that even if I turn the radio down (or off) in my Lambo; I don’t miss very much; I can fill the space with good conversation with friends, or just enjoy the time alone.
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