Bird Flight

This post marks the end of the first week of my fitness and weight loss efforts. If you haven’t already read it, please see the other post I posted today that describes my weight loss plan/strategy and tool(s). Future posts in this series will only contain the type of information I provide below, which includes my weight change amount, the amount of exercise I did, a reflection of my week in regards to my diet and fitness, and the interim goal I’ve set, and how close I got to it. I will always include a hyperlink at the bottom of these weekly posts to my plan/tool description post. Here’s my first installment:

Week’s weight change:  – 4.4 lbs (-1.995 kg) – Yay!

Week’s exercise (above & beyond):  95 minutes of walking total (in 6 days)

I was hoping for a nice weight loss this first week, but not 4.4 lbs (1.995 kg)! Wow! I’m sure that some of it is water weight. I do feel I’ve lost some puffiness. I met the 65 fluid oz (1.9 liter) daily recommended water consumption goal most days, or at least came close. Anyway, I am proud that I made it to today, tracking all of my food and drinks carefully; using a scale, measuring cup, or equivalent. I know it’s so important to count everything! From past experience, my first diet week usually brings the biggest weight loss. I don’t expect many future weeks to be this good. According to my designated plan, my usual weekly loss should hopefully be 2 lbs (0.9 kg).

Though my exercise time this week may seem little to some, believe me when I say it’s more than I’d been doing.

When I diet, I usually pre-plan all of my meals in advance, even sometimes for two days, making minor adjustments, as needed. That also helps with grocery purchase planning and staying within my daily calorie, carb, fat, and other limits. It’s actually sometimes difficult to even reach 1,200 calories by not exceeding one of these other limits. Sometimes I have lots of fat grams left, but don’t use them because by eating something fatty, the carb amounts also increase, and vice versa. Out of these first six days, I stayed within my calorie limit four of the days. The other two days I went over by just a small amount, which I’ll explain below. Myfitnesspal allows extra calories for exercise, but I try not to use them, if possible.

One of the biggest challenges I had this week was late night and very early morning hunger. I blame one of my bipolar medications for that. I had such hunger even before the diet, but with the reduction in my eating, it is exacerbated. I had to plan in filling snacks right before I went to sleep, and have some kind of easy to grab snack for the middle of the night. My past late night snack was always a fat-free low-sugar yogurt. That didn’t cut the mustard this week. I tried eating some pretzel nuggets. That worked well the first night, but then a couple of nights I ate too many. I tried having small Atkins snack bars in my bedside drawer, but I ended up eating two one night, which was too many. I’m still trying to find some good solutions for this issue. I do always keep a tall glass of water on my nightstand.

One day I splurged on a high sugar and fat packed vanilla cupcake. That was stress/self-medication eating. On that day, my new therapist announced that she was forced to end her practice at the end of next month. I like her so very much, and am sad and disappointed about this. Now I have to look for a new therapist again, only two months after finding her. Anyway, I fit that cupcake into my daily eating plan, and walked 30 minutes round trip for it.

Now that I’ve completed my first week, I’ll set interim goals. I won’t divulge my final long-term goal other than to say I want to reach mid-way into my normal BMI (Body Mass Index) range.

Interim goals:  Lose 2.2 lbs (.997 kg) by April 27, 2018 (2 weeks from now). Definitely doable. That would get me into the “next weight bracket”. When I say “next weight bracket”, I mean like going from the 130s to the 120s in pounds. No, I’m not in the 130s, believe me. As for exercise, I’d like to do at least as much as I did this week for the next two weeks, and then maybe increase it a bit.

To read about the weight loss plan and tools I chose for this effort, click My Fitness and Weight Loss Plan Described. You can also read my very first post introducing this effort at Long haul healthy weight and fitness efforts – creation of a Friday post series.