November Weigh-In Results and Workout Progress Report… And October Too!

I have an official weigh-in at the start of every month. I share the results right here, along with data about my exercise accomplishments, but I didn’t share anything last month. It slipped through the cracks. Whoops! So now I have two months to catch you up on. Let’s dig in!

It’s a mixed bag of good and could-be-better news, but the overall headline is:

Better Late Than Never: July Weigh-In and Workout Progress Report

I weigh in once a month. I was in Michigan when the new month started, so this month’s weigh-in didn’t happen until I came back, on the 6th. Then, I wanted to write and publish my vacation posts (read them here and here), so that explains why this post is a little delayed. But… better late than never!

Here’s what the scale said when I stepped on it:

June Weigh-In Results AND May Workout Calendar

I was not expecting this. I went into my monthly weigh-in feeling confident that I’d be down – after all, I’d had a killer month of exercise (more on this later), and I had just completed the physically demanding San Diego TOWERthon – but when I stepped on the scale, that was not the case:

Up two pounds. My initial reaction was

July Weight Loss Chart Update

I wasn’t planning on posting during the long holiday weekend, but I couldn’t sit on this post any longer. I had my once-a-month weigh-in at the beginning of the week, and the results were fantastic. I postponed this post so I could share my Fitbloggin recaps (read them here, here and here), but I can’t postpone any longer! Here’s what the scale said:

Down SIX POUNDS during the month of June!  I tend to make

The Damage…

…has been done.

It’s the first day of May, and that means it’s time for a weigh-in. Wanna see what two weeks of uninhibited eating and no exercise did to me? Here, take a look at my scale:

That right there is a fifteen pound gain. But, believe it or not, I’m pretty sure there’s good news too.

From The Vault

Hey everyone… HAPPY HOLIDAYS! It’s been a crazy busy week for me, but thankfully it’s over and chances are by the time you read this, I’ll be on a jet plane, off to visit the family for Christmas. I still have cleaning and packing to do, so I gotta keep this short. But the other day, I realized that I just hit a big anniversary – two years ago this month, I surpassed a major weight loss goal, when I hit 150 pounds lost for the very first time. I’m not the greatest at math, but I’m pretty sure that means I’ve kept off 150 pounds for two years now!

Sunday (!) Weigh-In

After a couple years of only weighing myself on Tuesdays, I must admit it’s a little strange to now weigh myself on different days of the week. I decided a few weeks ago that I’d switch my weigh-ins to the first and fifteenth of every month, instead of every other Tuesday, to better accommodate my new plan involving my weight loss chart, which I’m now only updating at the beginning of every month. It seems so convoluted when I type that all out, but it’s really just the way things have evolved!

Chart Update & Chart Thoughts

It’s been three and a half weeks since I’ve updated my weight loss chart. The last time I posted an update, it was a completely different month! My 2012 plan was to weigh myself every 2 weeks – often enough to keep tabs on my progress, but infrequently enough so I don’t become obsessed with the scale and weigh myself a ridiculous amount of times, forcing myself to move the scale to the trunk of my car.

So how did three and a half weeks pass with me stepping foot on the scale? Good question. I can honestly say that the scale slipped my mind last week, when I was due for a weigh-in. I think that because my weigh-ins are spaced further apart, I feel less pressure, and am thinking about the scale less often.

This is a good thing. I’ve been torn the past few weeks months half a year, because I don’t want the results of my weigh-ins to dictate my week or my life. On the other hand, I want to continue losing weight, and I’m trying to continue losing weight, and I want the progress reports that only a scale can provide. Yes, yes, there are lots of ways to measure success, and I embrace them, but I will always need a scale.

The past three and a half weeks are the perfect example why. February has been kind of up and down for me. I’ve been in a bit of a rut – there have been stretches where I’ve let depression get the better of me, and periods where I’ve really worked hard on eating well and exercising. As I was stepping on the scale yesterday morning, it occurred to me that I didn’t have a prediction for what the outcome would be. A lot happens in three and a half weeks, and while this week I’ve felt pretty good about my choices, it hasn’t been that way all month long.

The outcome ended up being this:

Up 2 Pounds. I’m not distraught over 2 pounds. But it confirmed something that I pretty much already knew, which is that if I don’t pay attention to my scale, the pounds will return. They’ll creep back, slowly but surely, and before I know it, I’ll be 25 pounds heavier… 35 pounds heavier… 50 pounds heavier… I’ve dieted enough in my life, and gained back enough weight to know this is FACT. I suspect many of you have had similar experiences.

Do you wanna know my first reaction when 239 popped up on the scale display? My mind went to this blog, and my readers, and I thought, I’m a fraud. I’m a weight loss blogger that isn’t losing weight. I’m going to lose my credibility and people will think less of me.

I KNOW that’s complete bullshit, but I thought it anyway. I KNOW my readers are a group of incredibly supportive, loving, wonderful people who come here for a ton of reasons, and can relate to what I share and how I share it. I KNOW it’s human to make mistakes. I KNOW I’m brave to write about mine. I KNOW I shouldn’t hold myself to a higher standard than anyone else in my shoes just because I made the decision to share, very publicly, how I’m succeeding and how I’m struggling.

Furthermore, I KNOW that there’s not much I can do that would cause people to think less of me. I KNOW I’m loving, smart, handsome, funny, giving, insightful, clever, unique, special. I KNOW I can count, on one hand, the number of negative comments I’ve gotten, and still have fingers left over for nose-picking and bird-flipping. I also KNOW that what other people think of me is none of my business (to paraphrase RuPaul), and that it should be the least of my concerns.

But I still think it. I wish it was the positives that flooded my brain, but more often than not, it’s the negatives. And I’m really tired of it.

So I’m going to go into this weekend reminding myself of the positives. I’m going to remind myself of all my extraordinary qualities I mentioned above. I’m going to talk to the people in my life that I care about and love so much, that make my life so full of light and laughter. And at the top of that list is the guy I see in the mirror.

KEEP IT UP, DAVID.

PS. My current weight loss is 163 pounds, and that’s FUCKING AMAZING!

My Scale is on the Move!

My scale is on the move, and I’m not referring to the numbers that I see when I step on it. What I mean is that my scale is physically in a totally new place.

For the longest time, my scale had a comfortable home on the floor of my bathroom:

Then, a couple months ago, I caught myself becoming a little too obsessed with weighing myself. I was stepping on the scale every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, and in an effort to put some distance between me and my scale, I found a new home for my scale, on the top shelf of my closet:

See it? Tucked in amongst my shoes?

My scale had a good long run in my closet. Once a week I would pull it down, move it into the bathroom, have my weigh-in, and return it to my closet shelf.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself becoming obsessed with the scale again. I’ve been holding steady, weight-wise, for the past few weeks, and I’m working hard to get back to my all-time low, which is four pounds less than I currently weigh. I’ve had great workouts over the past few days, and have eaten well, too, and have found myself getting fixated on the scale. I think I must have weighed myself 6 or 7 times over the past few days, and that’s out of control. Everyone’s weight fluctuates up and down a few pounds over the course of the day, and I caught myself over-analyzing these little fluctuations, weighing myself after bowel movements, justifying little gains and losses…

…and none of that is healthy. It’s all mental mind tricks, and I need to squash it. That my scale was out of my bathroom made no difference, either – I was happy to pull it off the shelf multiple times a day, use it, and return it.

So now I need to find a new home for the scale, one even more removed from the bathroom. And I think I found the perfect solution. The first thing I did was put the scale in a box:

And the box went into the trunk of my car.

My car lives in the parking garage in my building, a full flight of stairs away.

Now, in order to weigh myself, I’ll have to come all the way down to the garage to get my scale, and bring it all the way up back into my bathroom. I won’t be tempted to weigh myself in my garage because I like to weigh myself naked, and, well, I’m not stripping down in public!

My normal weigh-ins are on Tuesdays, but since I moved my scale to my trunk yesterday, I’m going to give this whole system a go and skip my official weigh-in this week. In fact, since I need to refocus on my attitude and stay focused on my eating and exercise, I don’t think I’ll weigh myself again until 2012. Since I’m leaving town in about a week for the holidays, that’s not a big stretch anyway. I love my weight loss chart, and l love updating it, but I can’t let the numbers run my life. Nothing is gonna run my life but me.

Keep it up, David!

A Message From Wolfgang, Chart Update, and MORE!

There are a few topics on the docket for today, and I’m gonna start by sharing something that is so unbelievably cool, it made me jump up and down.  Literally.

1) A Message From Wolfgang! A couple weekends ago, my friend Felise treated me to a wonderful lunch at Spago, in Beverly Hills.  You can read my blog about it here. If you didn’t know, Spago is the flagship restaurant of the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group, and if you don’t know who Wolfgang Puck is, you need to crawl out from under your rock!  He’s a huge celebrity chef, with cookbooks, tons of restaurants around the country (both fine dining and casual), and he makes frequent television appearances.  You may have seen him last weekend on TV, as he catered the Governors’ Ball after the Academy Awards.  Anyway, we had a fantastic time, and ate a delicious meal at Spago, and guess who saw my blog about it? WOLFGANG! I woke up this morning to find this video message from him, to me.  It literally took my breath away – how cool is this?

Thanks, Wolfgang, for the amazing video – it made my day!  I can’t wait to go to another one of your restaurants… I have my eye on WP24, which is Wolfgang’s newest restaurant (I think) in Los Angeles – it’s on the 24th floor of a skyscraper downtown, and I love a restaurant with a view!  (Check out this blog as proof!)

2) Weigh-In and Chart Update. It’s been two weeks since I’ve last had a weigh-in, and two weeks since I’ve updated my chart.  I opted to skip my weigh-in last week, because I’ve been on a plateau since the beginning of February, and I didn’t want to start obsessing because I was seeing the same number over and over again.  The past two weeks I’ve been eating well, and working out, so I was hopeful that this plateau might be over.

I was wrong.  I got on the scale, and there’s that same number again:

Ugh, my scale is kinda dirty, isn’t it!  I really should do something about that.  Maybe tomorrow.

I won’t lie and say my initial reaction was something other than disappointment, because it was.  I’ve been working hard for the past month.  In February, I worked out 23 out of 28 days, including 5 classes at Slimmons and 3 boot camp classes with Craig.  My eating has been good, too.  Plateaus are frustrating!

You know what changed my mood about the whole thing, though?  A couple hours later, I was running around the house, gathering things so I could go run some errands and then hit the pool, and I caught, out of my periphery, a glimpse of myself in my bedroom mirror.  And it stopped me in my tracks.  For a split second I thought there was someone else in the room, and then I realized that it was me.  I had seen myself from an angle that I wasn’t used to seeing, and holy crap, I looked good!  That’s what ended up setting the tone for the rest of the day.

Before moving on, here’s the updated chart:

Which brings me to…

3) Pool. My workout at the pool was kick-ass!  Here’s what I did:

• 1,000 yards warm-up (2oo free, 200 IM, 200 kick, 200 pull, 200 IM).
• 1 x 500 freestyle – I used to swim the 500 free competitively in high school, but don’t think I’ve tried to swim 500 yards without stopping since my interest in swimming resurfaced a few months ago, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.
• 2 x 100 free at 80% exertion, followed by 1 x 50 free all-out sprint.  That’s 250 yards, and I did it 4 times, so 1,000 yards total.  Wrong! On one of the sprints, I caught myself not sprinting, so I made myself re-do it.  So 1,050 yards total.
• 200 cool down (mix of free and breaststroke)
• GRAND TOTAL: 2,750 yards, in 1 hour and 5 minutes!  That’s 110 lengths of the pool, and just over a mile and a half.  My best swim workout to date!

4) Rainbow Carrots. The last time I was at Whole Foods, I picked up a vegetable I’ve never seen before.  I don’t think I ever mentioned it on the blog, but I’m mentioning it now…  Rainbow Carrots!

They’re carrots, in other colors besides orange.  I didn’t know carrots came in other colors besides orange.  They don’t come in tons of other colors (or maybe they do and Whole Foods’ selection is lacking), but I bought some purple ones and some yellow ones.  Here they are, next to one of their common orange cousin:

They’re a little smaller than the orange ones, but who cares.  They’re also almost twice the price of the orange ones ($2.49 a lb for rainbow, versus $1.29 a lb for orange), but I just noticed on my receipt that I was changed $1.29 for all of them!  Score!

Most of the time, I just eat carrots raw.  I love them, and they’re easy to cut up and store, and it’s super easy for me to grab a handful as a snack as I’m heading out the door, which I do often.   I also don’t bother peeling carrots.  Do you?  I find it time-consuming, and have found that with a good cleaning, they’re fine.   So I chopped off both ends of each carrot and cut them into sticks.  Here’s some of all three colors:

I love how the outsides don’t necessarily reflect the insides.  Right in the center, you can see a carrot that’s purple on the outside, but yellow on the inside, and the two yellow carrots I cut up have different colored insides altogether.  Call me a nerd, but I think that’s kinda fun!  Who knew vegetables could be so mysterious?

As for the taste, they taste like carrots.  Perhaps a touch less sweet, but basically the same.  If I were blindfolded, I wouldn’t know the difference, I’m sure.

I’m heading back to Whole Foods tomorrow or Friday… I wonder what new produce item I’ll pick up this time!

Keep it up, David!