The theme for today was “recenter.” Brought to you by, “re-examine” (okay, that’s a compound word).
Symptom: Scale weight is slowly creeping up.
Re-examine: I’ve been doing some sneaky pieces the last few days.
Recenter: Let’s estimate it, get it out of the way, and move on with a deep breath and just deal with it.
Food: The total items and the calories and macros are what they are because it’s my best guesstimate of some of the bits & pieces from the last few days. Fortunately, while I was exercising tonight, my bf hid the food that I was snacking on that I had brought home from work (“hid,” as in, put in with the chicken feed). So hopefully that won’t be an issue. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised I’d done as well as I did until the middle of Week 05. But I do need to cut back a bit on fats over the rest of the week, otherwise I will go over for the week; right now with what’s planned, I’ll hit 102% calories, 106% fat, 102% carbs, 102% protein. And my secondary goal (if I go over >100%) is to not be >+5% over.
Otherwise with food, the caution highlights in my food tracking spreadsheet highlighted dinner tonight: cholesterol was 229 mg that shot up to 259 when I actually measured out the chicken and egg yolks, and sodium was a whopping 1700 mg. Not much I could do about the cholesterol, but I was more judicious with fish sauce and I had switched brands of dark soy sauce so actually put those numbers in, and I brought sodium down to 1120 mg. So, sodium for the week is estimated to be 132% of my 2300 mg goal, as opposed to 140%. #SmallVictories
Exercise: When the scale ticked very slightly up this morning, as it has the last few days, and after I made my symptom and re-examine observations, I decided that I’d do at least an hour of cardio today. It’s not because I consider the cardio as “compensating” for the food as a trade-off because I think that’s the wrong way to think about it and leads to the idea of, “If I do a half-hour run, I get to eat a doughnut!!” (which is also using food as a reward, which is bad) Rather, it’s an acknowledgement that I am not dropping weight, it’s because of higher food intake, and so basic thermodynamics says that if I exercise more today, I might get back on track sooner. See? Different! Completely, totally not the same thing.
Exercise Tracking Update: Something I spent, well, admittedly, too long doing last night was a bit of a re-design of my cardio tracking. Well, supplement. Until last night, I had … well … it’s easier to show:
That repeats or I add new blocks, and if I do more than 2 of any particular type of exercise in a week, I just insert more rows. The problem with this system is that it’s hard to see a good summary on a weekly or daily basis of what I am doing. My food spreadsheets are actually similar, but there is a daily summary page that lists every day and every macro/micro, graphs them, does a moving average, etc., so I can really get a good overview. There’s also another summary page that just lists the averages by week and color-codes so I can see if I hit or missed goals. I wanted the same for cardio, and actually also core exercises and weights (which I’ll migrate to eventually).
So last night I made a Cardio Summary page. One row per day, and groups of columns for each kind of cardio exercise I do, and the time, distance (if relevant), calories, pace (if relevant), calories/min, and VO2max (if measured). The screenshot above feeds its data into the new sheet, screenshot below (some columns hidden because there’s nothing there):
What I really like about this is that I can see at a glance when I actually did stuff. Like, “Okay, there was a week where I didn’t really walk, but I did the elliptical every-other-day and the rower a couple times, too.” It was really hard to get that higher-level view with the other method. This also makes it easier to feed calories into my high-overview sheet that summarizes everything (I’ll probably post that at some point in the future, unless someone comments and wants it now).
Summary: So, some issues were identified, but hopefully now I’m back on track. This was a hiccup. It’s not a reason to giveup.
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