Skip to main content

Fighting the Backslide

Well, the summer of unavoidable calorie bombshells is over, and while the good ship Cheapo held up through most of it (look at that beautiful flat line in late August), by the end of the summer of nonstop weddings and travel, I caught myself at 167 pounds. That's 9 pounds higher than my target weight. I actually probably crossed the 10 pound Rubicon at one point, giving back a full 25% of my total losses (yeesh) had I had the nerve to step on the scale immediately following the last wedding of the summer in which I practically single-handedly destroyed the buffet. Destroyed!



My clothes were starting to feel a little tight and I subconsciously found myself reaching for my larger fitting clothing. Not good. I've slipped out of my Navy SEAL lite training program. Also, not good. I missed a few consecutive days of calorie logging - red flag.

Since I hit my 158 target earlier this year, I gave myself a little more leniency with weekend indulgences, but the 80% rule should be highlighted and underscored in red. If you try to turn it into a 60-70% rule without sufficient step count/exercise offsets, you will gain weight pretty quickly. What I've also figured out is that if you try to start living 80% again, you're still going to be stuck in neutral as I was through all of September.


Needless to say, I was getting fed up with stagnating in the mid-upper 160's. Even worse, it gives you even less leeway if you have another big trip planned where you're away from your kitchen and planned meals, as I do at the end of next week for a 10 year wedding anniversary trip to Italy. It's only 5 days, but a lot of caloric damage can happen in that time. I could easily be going into Thanksgiving season with my weight over 170 again.

After last weekend, I decided to stop messing around and hold my calorie intake down to pretty rigid 2500 per day (which I kind of broke last night with a Halloween candy binge - oops, but that was just one day).


But, where I've been making up ground is on the step counter side of things:


My goal is to eclipse at least 20,000 steps every day until the Italy trip. I'm not sure what that translates to in Fitbit steps, which adds in fake steps for cycling and random wrist movements like folding laundry, but I'd estimate that it's probably at least north of 30,000 Fitbit steps per day for you wrist-mounted Fitbit users at home, just to give you some perspective.

It's not that hard if you go for several short walks per day. My goal is to leave the office with 10,000 steps under my belt, so when I get home and give my dogs a long walk, I'm 3/4 way to 20,000 steps. Just doing random stuff around the house will usually get me another 2-3k steps, and then I just go for a brisk walk in the evening, and I'm there.

I can't emphasize how helpful it is to turn your lunchtime into a walking break. If you're a cheapo, you're already packing a lunch. If you scarf that down and then just find a loop to walk for about 45 minutes, and it makes a huge difference in your daily step count and will give your plan the boost it needs to break through the stagnation floor.

Comments

  1. Admiring the lossNovember 11, 2018 at 11:28 AM

    Keep it up Rich. I have faith in you.
    Enjoy Italy...responsibly.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Updates (2/9/2018)

Week one of BUD/S training is going OK. I can do everything but all the sit-ups (and of course the swimming, due to the lack of pool). The best I could bang out with sit-ups were 2 sets of 20, 1 of 15 and 1 of 10. But, at least I haven't experienced any soreness yet. Just the little bit of additional activity has me losing even slightly more weight. I'm holding my weight under the 40 pound loss benchmark on the scale every day now, and I'm feeling really good. I've almost forgotten how much I enjoyed running, which I'm sure has a lot to do with how much less of a strain it is on my body. I'm not going to lie - it was nothing short of exhilarating holding down the weight button on the treadmill for as long as it took to reduce the weight setting from 198 to 157- my weight from the last time I set it. It was definitely a bizarre experience. After the PowerWatch bust, I decided to try out another activity tracker watch. So, I ordered a Garmin Fenix 5X. It's...
Post a Comment
Read more

Low Tech, The New High Tech

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller. Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Chopping Down Costs & Fat

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my...
Post a Comment
Read more