Weigh-in, 6/29/07 - Maybe I won't be 280 by Christmas

Um, I was a little cranky yesterday...could you tell?

A decent night's sleep and a couple liters of water later, my outlook is a bit brighter. My weight still isn't down to where I'd like it to be this week, but it did drop 3 whole pounds since yesterday--200.8.

I'm torn on whether or not this means I should stop weighing in every day. I do it because it helps me focus and tends to discourage straying from the path. Nothing like a 3-lb gain mid-week to make you lay off the cookies, you know? However, it does have the potential to bring on the crazy when the mood is right...or wrong, depending on how you look at it.

Another thing I'm torn on: whether to change my bike-building goal. Here's my dilemma...I have this beautiful, feather-light bike frame sitting in my office at home, doing nothing. It begs to be built and ridden. Every time I pass the doorway, it calls to me. Not to mention, I paid over a grand for the thing, and I can practically hear it depreciating.

I set the 30-lb goal because I figured it was perfectly reasonable to lose that much weight in 6 months. Now, though, at 10 weeks in, I've lost a grand total of 2 tenths of a pound. It's hard to keep at it when the number on the scale doesn't seem to have any damn correlation whatsoever to my level of effort, either. At that net rate, I could have grandchildren before I have a new bike.

Part of me wants to buckle down and stick with it. I'm so bad at following through on things, and just once I'd like to reach a goal that I set for myself without relaxing the terms. Then the other part chimes in and says that the only reason I set this goal in the first place is because I wanted to give some structure to my bike savings, and if I could also lose 30 lbs in the process it would be all the better. Then I signed up for that duathlon, and it totally upped the stakes for me. While it would be nice to be 30 lbs lighter AND ride the new bike for the duathlon, what I REALLY wanted was the latter. So, when I continued to lose weight excruciatingly slowly, I found myself with two conflicting goals.

The bottom line is, what started out as an incentive meant to keep me on track has devolved into a constant source of frustration and discouragement as October looms closer. The losses I need to keep on track each week just keep getting bigger--at this point, we're up to 2 lbs/week, minimum. While I think I could lose 2 lbs/week if I dropped to 1200 calories and an hour of exercise/day, there's no guarantee. So, I think I'm going to scrap this plan and go back to my original--building the new bike when my old bike's odometer reaches 5,000 miles, regardless of how much I weigh at that time. That still requires that I put 400-500 miles on the Pilot between now and September (I don't remember the exact number on my odometer), which will require some diligence...especially considering that my work schedule is going to include weekends for most of the next two months.

To pay for the upgrade, I'm throwing $10 into the savings account for every hour I work out. At an hour/day, every day, I'd be ready to build in mid-September. With some long rides and some rest days in there, it should come out just about the same. I think this action-based plan is going to work better for me. Hell, maybe I'll even get some results, while I'm at it.

Hmm...I guess I wasn't really all that torn after all. :)

Song o' the day: Trust Me (link removed)