Daily Wahnsinn

As mentioned yesterday, I was a little anxious about today’s weigh in. While I exercised a lot, stuck to my daily points and generally ate very well, I wasn’t sure whether I’d drank enough water to countervail the potential water retention. Well, apparently I did. I was down 1.4 lbs this morning and stand now at a weight of 144.4 lbs. I’m extremely excited and proud. With every pound I lose, I’m setting a new lowest ever weight as an adult and it feels good. I’m so close to goal that I can almost taste it. I have less than 15 lbs to go and less than 4 lbs until a healthy BMI. I don’t think I’ve ever been at a healthy BMI in my life. (I know that the BMI concept is flawed, but I still think it’s a fair guidance for a rough weight range.)

What’s been working for me:

• Lots of exercise. I exercised pretty much every day, mostly running which is a high intensity form of exercise.
• Calculating my activity points differently. When doing Weight Watchers, you can look up certain activities, enter the time you spent doing that activity and then it gives you the points you’ve earned based on your current weight, age and gender. That said, Weight Watchers’ calculations seem to be off by a few points, mostly they over-estimate the intensity, i. e. they give you more points than you’ve earned. You can try and estimate the intensity yourself, but that can get hard. Was that yoga class 20 minutes low intensity and 40 minutes moderate intensity or was it 25 low and 35 moderate? Last week, I’ve been using my heart rate monitor during all of my workouts and then I’ve used a formula I heard mentioned by Weight Watchers leaders to calculate my points based on the calories I burned. (1 Activity Point per 80 calories.)
• Staying within my points limit. Ever since the Weight Watchers change for their 2012 program, I’ve been downgraded from 29 to 26 points. This week I tried sticking to the 26 for the first time since I had stuck with 29 over the Christmas break. Anyway, when they announced the decrease in points just before Christmas, I had a minor freakout because I felt like I was still hungry all the time on 29 points, so how would I do with even less? Answer is, I actually did fine. I cut out on a lot of mindless snacking in the afternoon. Fact is, I’m not a snacker. I come from a culture where people don’t generally snack. Believe it or not, people can also lose and maintain weight on 3 big meals rather than 5 small ones. Because, you know what, you do not kill your metabolism if you don’t eat every 3 hours. Just like you don’t make it faster by eating every 3 hours. For me, snacking meant that I added calories to my day that I didn’t really need. I ended up just as satisfied eating 3 larger meals. I always end up eating all of my activity points but other than that, I stayed within my daily limit. Apparently that worked. I ate cake twice this week. Hm.
• Bring my own food. I brought lunch to work every single day last week and I also prepared my own meals at home at night. I only ate out once on the weekend and the fact that I planned, portion controlled and knew exactly how much I was eating made it a lot easier to stay on top of things. I didn’t eat perfectly, but I ate pretty damn well. Despite the cake. Twice.

I got this.