Hometown 20 Report - Week 6

Last week's weight: 175.5
This week's weight: 174.5
Change: -1 lbs.

Details below.

Week 6...man. I'm over halfway through this thing. Counting from the estimated 185 pounds that I was the last time I was in my hometown, I'm also over halfway through the "Hometown 20". Unfortunately, only 3.5 of those were actually lost during this challenge, with 9.5 left to knock out in the remaining 5 weeks. To meet the goal, I'll need nearly 2 lbs/week now. I'm still optimistic, though. :)

Let's see how it went this week.

Food

1. No more than 1500 calories per day, Mon-Fri. 1000-calorie limit before 6 pm, Mon-Fri. 3/5 days, if my journalling is accurate. Both of the other days were under 2000, which is also pretty good...for me.
2. Free Saturdays. ONLY Saturdays. I'm mostly good with this. Sundays are hard. Friday nights I have pretty much under control.
3. 3L of water daily. I'm pretty sure I met this every day but Sunday. Saturday requires more than 3L with the long ride, I'm discovering. I'm getting a little dehydrated, and it takes me a couple days to start feeling normal again.

Exercise

This week is 4 16-mile rides, 4 2-mile walks, one 3+-mile walk, and one 35-mile ride. Good God, that sounds like a lot. :) I know right off that the 35-mile ride is going to be 33 miles... And so it was. My mileage ended up at 95 miles or so, give or take some fractions of a mile. (I could tell you the exact number, but I left my training journal at home. Yes, I have one.) I may have skipped one 2-mile walk, but I don't think so. I ended up with, as previously mentioned, 10 hours and 10 minutes of exercise.

This week's schedule includes 108 bike miles, 11 walking miles. At an average speed of 14 mph on the bike and 3.5 mph on the walks, that's 10 hours and 51 minutes.

Accountability

1. Journal everything Mon-Fri. No, really--everything. Mostly good. I may have skipped a bite here and there. I also rocked the exercise log, thanks to the addition of a paper training journal (really just a freebie spiral notebook from some office machine company).

So, the week wasn't too bad. I lost a whole pound, which was less than I wanted but more than I expected. I also discovered some unpleasant truths about limiting myself to 1500 calories/day. Namely, that I want to eat the world when I try to do that. So I'm not going to try this week. I'm going back to 1700, not because I think I can lose 2 lbs/week at that number, but because that target doesn't make me want to dive headfirst into a sea of Doritos. It's all psychological at this point.