“They” say that the definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. It’s an interesting maxim that is sometimes useful, but as a scientist, I would disagree that it’s insanity, and I think there needs to be more nuance: You should test things repeatedly under the same conditions so that you’re confident in the result, and then change a variable at a time to see what effect that has on the result.
What’s this got to do with me and fitness? Well, eating and not tracking things well, repeatedly, has tended to result in me not losing, and often gaining, weight. Tracking things “religiously,” staying within certain goals, and exercising, has tended to result in me losing weight and most of that being fat.
With my travels and guests in May, and then travels in June, I fell off my plus-sized wagon yet again, but I honestly wasn’t really making much progress yet, anyway. So, taking this post’s title’s last point first, I’m “restarting” things yet again.
Now that I’m back from Australia. The good news – and what I call a “win” – is that while I spent 3.5 weeks in Australia, I did not lose weight, but I did not gain weight. I stayed within a very stable band of 226.4–228.2 lbs (well, kilograms converted to pounds so there’s a bit of fine detail lost in there). Given all the food I was eating – and tracking!! – I consider this a “win” because I should have gained a significant amount of weight given that I averaged a (guesstimated) 2400 kcal/day, practically 50% more than my goal.
I didn’t want a situation like in 2020 where I just stopped tracking so didn’t know how bad it was … instead I tracked and did know how bad it was. But, the saving grace was that I averaged 1725 kcal of exercise per week, and that included swimming and a lot of walking. So, the exercise mitigated the eating, and it was a net zero.
Since I got back a week ago, I’ve not done too much; today was the first day I exercised in a week (I walked). The issue has been some pretty bad jet lag. I need about 8–9 hrs of sleep per night to function normally. I was getting about 4 hours. Then, yesterday, I was in bed 10 hrs and slept about 9 of them. And it seems like my body said, “Oh, right, now that you’re sleeping, we can tell you that you’re very sleep-deprived! Welcome to headaches and dizziness!!” So I slept twice more yesterday for two hours each. I did the same today: In bed about 10 hrs, slept about 9 hrs, and two hours after getting up, napped for another two. I’ve avoided the second nap so far, but the afternoon has not waned.
And so, with the summer heat settling in, I am living up to this blog’s overall title and “Yet Again” re-starting my fitness goals. I have a solid 8 weeks of being home now, and the bf has agreed on better meal prep/planning for the both of us (we’ll see if that actually happens, it certainly didn’t this past week). Of course, we also brought a suitcase (yes, full suitcase) back full of candy from Australia (OMG TimTams! 🤤).
With that said, expect my usual posts starting again next week (hopefully). And, I’m going to follow up this one with a new “what my goals are” post, since I haven’t done that in a long time.
My Fitness Blog 