Weight Loss

While the week started as usual, weight status quo, it suddenly changed. From July 16th to the 25th I held steady at 170. Sure, it was my goal weight but let's be serious. I wasn't convinced that's where I wanted to stay, unless, of course I developed bulging muscles on my upper body to match the massive leg strength I'm known for.

When the dam finally burst I lost 1.5 pounds (25th), 1 pound (26th), 1 pound (27th) and another .5 pound on the 28th. This is a total of 4 pounds in less than a week. It kind of makes you stop and wonder if something's going wrong. Weird that I worked very hard to get here and now find myself second guessing when the process works.

Even so, I suspect that I have about five more pounds to lose. When I started the weight loss program at Nutrisystem in February I researched possible goal weights. A BMI that was appropriate for a man my age and height would put me between 156 and 160. "Bah!" I said. I believed I could never reach that weight. After all I haven't been there since high school. So, I set my goal weight at 170. After Trey's wedding in May of '07 I weighed 172 for a brief moment. That ended as suddenly as it happened because I headed off to Camp Nebagamon for the summer and didn't stop eating till February of this year.

I calculated my body fat percentage at around 16%. I know that calculating your body fat percentage is actually a very poor second choice to other methods but it's the choice I currently have available to me. I'm sure that this calculation is very low so it gives me lots of room to move here. I'm not shooting for anything under 10% but that's still several pounds of fat I have to get rid of. If you use these numbers the 160 pounds is very reasonable. If I find that I am somehow able to rebuild significant muscle mass (not Schwarzenegger size, just some definition) that number will change but as it stands now it seems acceptable. I can still see the subdermal deposits of fat (though noticeably reduced) and vanity insists that I keep working.

My experience Sunday with being undernourished on my run is a challenge. I'm finding it difficult to allow myself to increase my calories in any significant way. I still log my food daily and am absolutely chained to the numbers I see there. I'd like to push it to 2000 calories a day (up from 1900) but last night when I figured my totals and saw 2000+ instead of 1900+ I wasn't able to eat the final snack I had planned.

Dahna is helping with that by preparing very tasty new recipes that include whole wheat pasta. I have such an irritating history of losing and gaining that I don't trust myself yet. I know I need to get past this but there's still work to be done here. I just keep remembering that I weighed about 200 pounds when we went to Florida for Thanksgiving last year. By February I weighed 230! I'm searching for the middle ground here.

It will be interesting to see how that adds to the effort to both control my weight and improve my running.