Let’s get right into things, with the preface that it’s been a mediocre week. As with last week, it wasn’t a “bad” week as in there was no sliding backwards, but there was relatively little progress made. Yet it was still significantly better than 8 weeks ago.
Food: Compared with last week, there was significantly less “cheating” this week. I’m not sure why I put that in quotes, but I’m not going back to delete them. Maybe it’s because the idea of “cheating” has such a negative connotation? Or the question is, upon whom or what am I cheating? It should probably be thought more of as “I simply over-ate and didn’t count it” from Week 06.
That said, I am seriously looking forward to eating +450 cal/day in two weeks. I’m not moving up my planned “pause” week for two reasons: First, I need to prove I can stick to my original plan; and second, I now have travel that week so I need the extra calories then for leniency and sanity’s sake (more on that later).
Looking at the actual data for the week, I came in at 98% of my calories, 98% of my fat, 102% of carbs, and 99% of protein. Again, my goal is really to hit everything to within 5% since nothing is perfect and there’s a certain measurement error in all this stuff, so I’d say I’m spot-on my goal.
Meanwhile, sodium intake was also down this week, I succeeded in going just 29% above my goal, about 2960 mg/day instead of my goal of 2300 mg/day. It’s friggin’ hard to cut salt back! I eat very little prepared food these days, but I still do things like put 20gm of cheese on my salad, or canned chicken or tuna on my salad, making a salad practically 1000mg of sodium (I’ve cut the cheese back to 20gm from 25 in order to lower both sodium and cholesterol). Or, if I have a bit of pepperoni or jerky to get in 10–15 gms protein, that’s ≈400mg in an ounce. Eggs? I add less than 1/16th of a teaspoon of salt, but that’s still over 300 mg of sodium because egg whites themselves have sodium. I cut the sodium in my pad thai down from 1510 mg/serving to 1180 mg/serving by lowering the amount of fish sauce, and I thought that still tasted fine, so I’ll try lowering it again next time even more. I am liking this highlighting in my food planner for sodium and cholesterol because it lets me more easily identify this stuff to then try to modify foods to keep those under control.
Exercise: I’ll say I did a bit worse than last week with exercise when the goal was to do substantially better. There were three issues this week: First, it got substantially hotter, with above-90° days. I’m not walking outside and sweating my arse off just from opening the door. Sorry, it ain’t happenin’. Second, as I discussed in practically every daily update, work busted my butt this week and I had little extra time. I still managed to meet my cardio goals, though, so I would say that was a “win” for not sliding backwards despite those issues. Third, I had the issues Friday evening so I cut out a day, but since I had only not exercised one prior day in the week, that’s what let me still get in cardio ≥40 minutes 5×.
Looking back to my goal, it’s to burn at least 1875 calories through exercise, since that should equate to about 0.5 lbs of fat. So with that in mind as the only metric, then the week was still a success. Yay?
So, total calories from exercise this week are down, though not as substantially as they might’ve been: 2407 vs 2618 last week. Though still down from the high of Week 04 of 3776 cals. Since daily calorie intake was a little lower, that’s 1373/day which is less than last week’s 1390 cal/day net.
Sleep: I napped a bit more this week, and the ≥8 hrs on Thursday and Friday aren’t quite true. I need to be going to bed before 2am. Period.
Measurements: I went into a long discussion about this in last week’s summary and then again on Sunday. The number that didn’t move is bodyfat percentage, but that’s okay because I was still ahead from last week. The average weight this week was down 1.6 lbs, putting me exactly on track for this week for an average weight of 216.1 lbs, down 9.3 lbs from the start for week-over-week averages. However, again looking at the trend in the week, it’s all over the place and went significantly up today. I need to average 214.6 lbs next week to remain on track.
I suspect I might do some drastic things if it doesn’t happen, if only to ensure it does happen and not lose motivation. By “drastic” things I mean considering cutting food substantially for a day, or lots of extra cardio, or something, just to get through to that.
That said, every day this week, I was consistently ≥10 lbs down from my peak when I started, of 227.0 lbs. So that is another “win.”
Gotta count my wins where I can get ’em!
Points: Points were lower this week than last, primarily because I did the rowing machine as extra cardio beyond my 15 minutes last week and I counted that as core exercises since it’s a full body workout. Didn’t do that this week, I focused on the elliptical due to time.
Looking Ahead 1 Week: Work shouldn’t be quite so bad this coming week, so again I’m hoping to work on just slamming through this last week of cutting before my pause for a week. Really really need to be doing weight-related things. Cardio will likely remain the same (unless weight doesn’t go down, then I’ll do an intense day or so), and looking at the forecast, only Tuesday is a day where I might walk outside based on the temperature.
I also need to focus on going to bed on the previous-day-side of midnight.
Circling back to food, I’ve had to make a couple modifications to my plans. First off, when I broke back into the lettuce I bought on May 06, one was moldy, so I had to throw it out. I also must have miscalculated when re-doing the food plan after moving beef-stuffed cabbage rolls back by a day, for I had salad planned twice next week, and I only had enough lettuce to last through to today. So, I put in left-over turkey chili from 2 weeks ago that’s been in the freezer. I also did a bit of shifting in order to let myself have another kardemummabullaror two. I should finally get through my Doritos that I bought back on May 06, I’ve been extraordinarily good about not eating them since I had a “Come to Cheesus” moment a few days after buying them where I was just pigging out. I’ll get another ⅓ of the way through chocolate I bought in December.
But perhaps the biggest change with food is that I’m going into a different phase of my food plan, “Cut v. 6.13.” The occasion is that I should be at 210±5 lbs next week, not 220±5 lbs. That means calories go from 1740 to 1680 per day, fat drops from 58 gms to 56 gms, carbs and protein from 152.5 gms to 147 gms each. Minor changes, really, but over the course of a week, that’s 420 calories fewer, so things are slightly harder to fit in the plan. I also only have two red highlights in there with respect to sodium, but that’s a pre-packaged soup I’m finishing off so I can’t change it. One red highlight on cholesterol, but that shouldn’t be a big issue because I think I’ll be eating less of that meal anyway … TBD.
Looking Ahead >1 Week: The stick in the mud is that it now looks like, in two weeks, I’ll be headed across the country. It’s a good thing. But it’s a bad thing. It’s my mom’s 70th birthday, and neither her mom nor her mom’s mom made it to 70, both dying of cancer at 69. We’ve had this planned for a year, but with COVID-19 we weren’t sure it would happen. She’s less nervous now about us visiting, but it means driving from Colorado to Ohio (18 hours) instead of flying (3 hours). And my bf’s mom lives in Michigan, so we will drive up to see her afterwards. Meaning a two-week trip.
As I identified in my very first blog post here, travel is my downfall with respect to fitness. I’m never home long enough to get good habits that last the duration of the trip, the trip screws everything up because I can’t track stuff, etc. etc. etc. They are excuses, but they are understandable reasons. I was highlighting the fact that I’d be home now for the longest I’d been home in over 15 years. It’s still 15 weeks home (though I re-started this fitness half-way into that period). And after this, my next trip will still have me home for at least 16 weeks (if it’s not cancelled / moved to a virtual meeting); if it’s cancelled or moved to a virtual meeting, or I just opt not to go, then I’ll be home 20 weeks straight.
Also, this trip is to a house and not a hotel, and it’s not a work trip. So I’ve already talked with my dad about letting me cook while I’m there so I can still stay within my food plan. We’ll be driving so I can bring my scale and bring a bunch of food (protein powder, jerky, nuts, etc.) and food scale no problem. My dad has also struggled with weight/fitness issues given his life as an academic with a crazy amount of travel, so he knows the issues, and he has a Bowflex Revolution® in the basement and an elliptical. Being at my bf’s mom’s house for a few days would be a bit of a bigger issue, so the cardio would probably need to be outside walking around and then bodyweight exercises inside.
So … I’m excited to travel for all the right reasons. And it’s about my mom and not me. But I’m also nervous about losing momentum and quitting. That’s what happened last year: I was great for 8 weeks, then a 1-week conference screwed me up; I was home for 3 weeks and sort of recovered but then two weeks of travel in the space of four weeks and that just killed it … especially considering that I was then home for 4 weeks and then had 9 weeks of travel over the next 10 afterwards. Dead horse, you were beaten over and over.
I need to not let that happen.
Oh, and I’m also not excited about the 42 hours of driving.
