Everyone’s allowed mediocre days, right? Today (well, yesterday since I’m writing this on June 06), I had a mediocre day. I’d been dealing with a large work load this week, and part of that was investigating some folks for possible academic fraud / intellectual theft, whatever. The investigation pretty much proved that it had happened, so I submitted my findings to the journal editor, and we went from there. Come Friday, we had a bit of back-and-forth.
Two to three hours later, I had my own paper rejected by the journal. Not for anything at all related to that, not for retaliation or anything: The issue was that I had submitted a follow-up paper to one that I wrote that just got accepted, but it was analyzing the same dataset. So the entire methods section was exactly the same (a few word fixes here-and-there), the background was the same, the “looking forward” was the same, and so one of the checks they run is a plagiarism check. The paper came back as 53% plagiarized, from my own work. So the journal editor explained that he really had no choice but to soft reject it with an invitation to resubmit. He suggested that I re-work the intro and outro and do a 1-page summary of the methods and reference the other paper.
So, it’s perfectly fine, I completely understand, it makes total sense … but it was a downer. Combined with not getting enough sleep the last two nights, and spending three hours in the kitchen, I took the evening off and just laid in bed for a few hours not doing anything (nor sleeping). I got up, I was going to exercise at 10:30, but I ended up just putzing about and doing nothing.
So, the only good thing about yesterday (err, June 05) was that I managed to eat to my goal and not over it.
I also got into a tiny bit of a discussion on Instagram in response to the above post. I agree with it. But I also disagree with it. It makes complete sense. But the problem is that weight is a big motivator. Despite what our brain might rationalize and try to say that there are plenty of other metrics to look at, we look at weight. And at some gut level that often overrides our rational brain’s rationalization, if the scale doesn’t move down, we worry and might give up.
And, that’s the problem: If I do worry today about the scale not going down, then I might give up. And that means that in 30, 90, or 365 days, if I’ve given up, that scale sure isn’t going to be lower, it’ll almost certainly be higher. So I worry about my weight and how quickly I’m losing it because if it doesn’t go down, then I might give up. But if I don’t give up, then this is correct: In a year, I’m not going to care at all if I had a week where my weight went up slightly.
In a year from today, I’m hoping to have finished my first cut, have gone through a small bulk phase, and be at the end of my second cut to be at about 170 lbs and 13.1% bodyfat.
That said, while we’re talking about the scale, my average for the week has gone down and is right on plan: 216.1 lbs. However, my weight today (June 06) shot up to 216.8 lbs, a 1.1 lb increase. Of course, I know (rational mind) it’s not that I gained 1.1 lbs of fat. It’s mostly water (I drank a lot yesterday since it was 90° and I have no air conditioning), and some carbs, and I didn’t exercise. But this is also the first weigh-in in 7 weeks since I restarted that is above where I’m “supposed” to be today. But I suspect I’ll cover that more in the week-end summary.
