Or: wherein Dove journals about her adventures in trying to be healthier and lose some weight. (If talk about weight loss is uncomfortable for you, in any way, please avoid this thread? I am going to be recounting stuff like my current weight, and my end-goal, and how much I've lost/gained. I don't want to stress people out or trigger them, but I also don't want to forget stuff.) Okay, so - growing up, I was The Skinny Kid. The one who wasn't exactly underweight, but always got told to "eat up, you're so thin" by my grandma, and had to have waistlines taken in so that my jeans would not fall off my butt. I also tended to be quite happy eating veggies and fruit, for snacks, and I didn't go really heavy on junk food. Combine this with a teenage metabolism, and I ended up with a sincere belief that what I really needed to do was gain some weight, and also that I could eat whatever I wanted without any serious consequences even after I discovered the joys of junk food, even after I moved away to college. The thing is, I got a lot more sedentary after I moved away to college. I stopped needing to walk a kilometer home from school, like I had in high school, because I lived on campus. There was still a lot of walking involved, but - maybe not as much as I used to have. And things got increasingly sedentary from there; these days, I spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer. About a decade later: I'm a good...50 pounds or so heavier than where the BMI says I "should" be. And mostly I don't worry about what the BMI says, because that thing can be kinda inaccurate. But I'm also a very sedentary person, these days, and I know that weight-related problems run in the family on my mom's side. (My dad's side of the family is almost offensively thin.) And I know that my diet isn't exactly the healthiest, either. So, I'm going to be using this thread to try and keep track of how well things are or aren't working, as I work on losing weight. And also motivation, and hopefully some advice on things like exercise schedules and such. Things I do know: * losing weight is going to be really hard. Keeping it off is going to be harder! Especially since my goal weight requires me to lose, like, a lot of weight * the safest, healthiest amount to lose at once is about 1 pound a week, till I have hit the point where I am happy with my weight * once I've reached a happy point, I need to switch to maintaining that * daily weigh-ins are probably a bad idea for me, they feel like it'll lead to me being fretty over minor fluctuations; I will weigh myself once a week, at the most, where possible * I'm going to need to rework my lifestyle for this Things making this easier: * my matesprit also wishes to lose weight and we're going to be doing this together * I like fruits and vegetables * I like Just Dance and Wii Fit Things that may make this harder: * chocolate is frigging delicious, yo. so are a lot of baked goods * Wii Fit (and Wii Fit U) require a weigh-in when you start the thing up As of today, I am at 186 pounds. My current short-term goal is to get to 176 pounds. My ultimate goal is to get to, or reasonably close to, 130 pounds (where the BMI thinks I should be); I'm okay if I don't hit exactly bang-on, but I would like to get within at least five pounds of that and then maintain from there. Mainly, I just want to not have so much of a gut that I need to suck it in to look at my own junk; that would be nice. I'm also working on fixing my sleep schedule, so I spent a lot of yesterday evening / early this morning (approximately an hour and a half, according to my Fitbit) playing with Just Dance so that I can tire myself out a bit and exercise. My arms are a bit sore, now, and I'm wondering if there's a more advisable schedule. (I didn't do an hour and a half all in one sitting, of course - it was a lot of "do a song or two, take a break and drink some water, do a couple songs, water break, noodle on internet, return to dancing". So that's an hour and a half that stretches out from 11 pm to 3 am. I was sleepy-content after having showered, and the soreness only started after I woke up. It's a familiar "hey, you haven't used these muscles in a while!" soreness, so I'm not too worried about it.)
It's the sort of thing that creates problems for some people and works for others, but a calorie counter was really helpful to me the last time I decided to lose weight. It helped me get an idea of just how much I ate on a typical day and how I could tweak things, and I wasn't particularly fussed if I went over my limit on occasion. I basically treated it like a budget: stick within in in general, but treating yourself once in a while is fine.
The Fitbit I'm using comes with an app with a calorie counter already, which I am taking advantage of, and I was using a different calorie counter app prior to getting the fitbit. (I like the fitbit since it makes it easier to track how much activity I'm getting in a day.) So this is definitely a good suggestion, and one I'm already following! :D I'm actually noticing that I tend to eat way less than what I maybe should? The calorie tracker for Fitbit thinks I should, rn, have eaten about 200 more calories than I actually have in order to be "in the zone" (which, as best I recall, is its term for "hey, you're on-target for your current goal" - so in this case, "you've eaten enough to sustain yourself and lose weight without making your body think we're in the middle of a famine"). There's the occasional day where I'll go overbudget a little, but there's a lot more days where I'm underbudget and I'm not entirely sure how to fix that without accidentally going too far in the other direction.
In general, the calculations a calorie tracker makes is an educated guess based off height/weight and self-reported activity level. The Fitbit has a leg up on those in that it has an idea of how much you move, but there's still some other factors. For example, how much body fat you carry compared to your "lean body mass" (everything else); someone with more lean body mass will burn more calories than someone of the same weight and activity level who has more body fat. Keep an eye on your general weight trend*, and if you're not dropping weight at an unreasonable rate or finding yourself feeling drained a lot, don't worry. If things are going too fast, on the other hand, it's pretty easy to do something like adding crumbled feta to a salad (yum), drinking chocolate milk instead of plain, or just making up some trail mix. *Overall trends are important because it's not uncommon to drop, say, two pounds one week and then stay at the same weight the next. or to go up because you're retaining water due to hormones/yesterday's workout.
I will be keeping an eye on the general trend, and I already work to avoid fussing too much about being underbudget / overbudget on any individual day. Because that's just one day, and it won't affect things massively in the long run. I have no idea what my body fat percentage would be, and I've explicitly avoided trying to track it with the app. My concern is more unintentionally undereating, and making weight loss harder on myself as a result, because I know that bodies tend to hoard fat when they're not getting fed enough. This is a thing which nature designed us to do, because the ancestors who were better at staying alive during famines were the ones who managed to pass on their genes more successfully. On the other hand, in order to lose weight, you do kinda need to lowkey underfeed yourself. I'm mostly just looking at a couple months of calorie tracking, from when I initially got the fitbit to when I shoved it in a drawer because I couldn't remember where the charge cord had gotten to and I didn't have spoons to give any fucks about weight loss right then (we were finishing up a move), and it's 90% yellow/orange "hey, you're under budget", with like 10% red "hey, you went over budget on this day". What I'd rather have is 90% green "hey, you hit the target" with 10% "hey, you went overbudget on this one day". That's probably going to take a lot of practice, though.
Today was a learning exercise. Things I learned: if I do not set a timer or something, I will absolutely exercise for almost an hour on Just Dance. In one sitting. I am not entirely sure that's the greatest idea, really. I'll need to make sure to set timers, next time. Or do the Just Sweat option, where it cues up a song list tailored for a specific length of time, instead of heading for the World Dance. Especially since the World Dance mode doesn't seem to have a "fuck it, I'm done" option that lets me return to the main menu; all I can do is sit in the breakroom and wait for it to time me out. I was reasonably healthy with my food choices today, although I'm having a last-minute nom an hour before bed, because dinner wasn't filling enough. To be fair: dinner was two slices of peanut butter toast with banana slices on top. So I can see my body's argument here. I'm doing a low-spoons nom: instant noodles kimchi, with a handful of frozen veggies and an egg. Amusingly, this takes me over the day's calorie budget by three calories, or at least that's what the app is telling me right now. I don't really care; getting healthier is going to be a process, and I'm not going to be perfect on every day (or even most days, I suspect). Things I need to do: find a kitchen scale. Get more fruits, to create a wider variety to nom; right now we've only got clementines and a couple of bananas, which isn't much in the way of variety. Also, I need to get some salad the next time we go out grocery shopping.
I need to figure out how to clean the fitbit. The band itself isn't that tricky - I can just swab it down with a q-tip and soap, making sure to keep water way the heck away from the electronic bits. It's cleaning the electronic bits that I'm not sure on how do, and it really needs doing. Possibly a babywipe would work? Alternatively, q-tip and rubbing alcohol? Also, the veggies worked out fine, but the egg didn't look like it was cooked through properly, so I didn't touch it. I'm not sure I'll combine the two again.
