Week 387 Update

It was 6:10 AM when I stepped up on Mr. scale. He promptly said "198.5 pounds!"

After having two good weeks of losing 8 pounds total, it only makes sense that I would run into a result like this soon. Whether you call it consolidation, or an adjustment, I'm left weighing 1.5 pounds more than I did last weigh-in.

Looking at my Weight Commander Control Panel Graph, It looks like I slid down a hill and then skidded off across a flat plain afterwards. Of course that's the solid squares. However, the hollow squares are bouncing around and not settling on any particular location. Going back to last Saturday, 3 of the eight hollow squares are below the line formed by the solid squares, 4 of them are above it, and 1 is right on the solid square line. Exactly half of the eight days, from Saturday to Saturday, I weighed more than the trend of the average, and for the remaining 4 days I was on or below the average. The one really aberrant mark was for Sunday's weigh-in, and that threw the whole average off a little bit. I'm not very concerned about that though, since on the evening before I had eaten fries, sausage, and sauerkraut at dinner. All of these are loaded with sodium, and certainly would've caused me to retain water. Since I only ate 26 points for that day, there's no way I ate enough calories to warrant a 3 pound increase on the scale. On Monday I dropped back down 3 pounds, as I cleared the sodium from my body.

However, that more or less non-event was not the whole story. At no point during this week did I fall below my weight last Saturday. While the trend reversal note in bright red on the graph is in part due to that 200 pound reading on Sunday, we still have the rest of the story to deal with. From Tuesday on, I was holding just at or above 197.0. So, even without the 200 pound reading on Sunday I would not have had a loss this week. The best I could of hoped for would have been a maintain.

The cause of the problems at the end of the week was more substantial than the one that caused the bump on Sunday. On Thursday, I took Dotti to Red Robin for lunch. I have stayed away from restaurants pretty much, since I have been back on track. Red Robin is not a restaurant where I find it terribly easy to remain on program. As it turned out, I had a meal that was 26.5 points, and I blew my day away, pushing my point total up to 45.5. That is by far the highest number of points I have had on any single day since getting back on program. (I started writing my points down again on August 8, 2008, and since then I had kept my points in the 30s or below until Thursday.) Since this was for Dotti's birthday lunch, and it will probably be some time before I go back to Red Robin, I will not worry about it. I just need to remember in the future that this is something that will cause me problems.

On Thursday, I weighed 197 pounds, and was poised to show a loss for the week I believe, before that excursion into the 40s for my points on Thursday. On the other hand, I don't think it would've been much of a loss. Also, at least some of what I'm holding onto this morning is probably water weight, caused by last night's salt in the popcorn, hash brown potatoes, and 2 eggbeater sandwiches. But as Dotti says, "No guilt, and move on." There was no serious damage done.

I did not eat enough to warrant a pound and a half increase, and therefore it cannot possibly stick around. My average points per day this week was under the upper limit for points I have been using. I just noticed that I have been using the wrong point range since September 27. Once I fell below 200 pounds I should have changed my point range from 24-31 to 22-29. So, by that standard I was over points for this week. Even if my maintenance point level were to be 29 points—something which cannot be the case, since I will be using 29 points as a target level to help me to lose weight—being a point and a half above that per day would not cause a pound and a half gain.

What I hope to see during the next week is a full recovery from the gain, by showing a pound and a half loss, and also an additional loss. I will see what the results are and if my estimate is correct, at my next weigh-in.

One of the really nice things about Weight Commander is that it doesn't just give you news—good or bad—but it also explains the "news," and gives you something to aim for, along with some hope. When I clicked on the explanation for why I have a trend reversal, Weight Commander explained that just today the value for my weight has caused my average to adjust in a direction that indicates a gain rather than a loss. Since I was showing a consistent loss up until then, this is a trend reversal by definition.

But it doesn't leave it there, it shows that if I weigh as low as 199 tomorrow, I will reestablish a downward trend. This is good news! I weighed less than 199 this morning. If I weigh the same tomorrow that I weighed today, I will have reestablish a downward trend already.

And after this piece of information, there follows encouragement, "It usually takes a couple of days to get back on track. Start right now—a little less food, a little more exercise. You can do it."

Now let's look at the Weight Commander Future Graph. For the first time in a few weeks, this graph is showing a gain over the next 90 days. On the upside, it only shows me gaining one-half of one pound! That means that, even with the scale not being able to make up its mind this past week, as to whether I was going to gain or lose, and with a gain predicted, it still shows that I will be under 200 by New Year's Day! Also, when you are speaking of three months out into the future, one half of one pound is negligible. It would get lost in the noise of day-to-day fluctuations. Essentially this is saying that I would maintain for the next three months.

Considering my previous two weeks, where I lost a total of 8 pounds, having a small reversal is nothing to be worried about, yet. Should I show another gain this upcoming week, then I would have real concern that I'm doing something terribly wrong. I know this week was not an excellent week on the eating front, so I hope to improve that next week anyway. Then, hopefully, the future graph will return to showing a loss over the next three months.

The 60 days Weight Commander graph puts things into a clearer perspective. If this were a profile of a three-dimensional shape and you laid a piece of paper along the high points of the graph, it would show a very consistent downward trend, even with today's reading at the end. There have been some very sharp drops and some corrections after the fact, but the overall trend is still a healthy downward one.

The 90 days Weight Commander graph also shows a healthy trend downward, if you take the high points on the way down. There are some peaks and valleys, some troughs and ridges, but there is no doubt that since early August the graph is moving down.

The correct response to having a gain is to focus on the basics during the upcoming week. My focus will be to keep my points in my range, first of all for my average points per day, and secondarily on a day-to-day basis. I will strive not to go over my limit each day, but if I should go over, I will work very hard to correct for that, and to go lower on my points on following days to bring the overall average down into my correct point range.

The 1 year Weight Commander graph shows a less optimistic view of things, if it were taken alone. The overall trend is upwards; if you drew a line through the starting point and the ending point, nearly everything lies above the line. Not only that, the line has a slope that tilts upward. If it were not for the past few weeks of consistent losses, this would be quite depressing. As it is it represents a struggle that has really gone nowhere for a whole year. However, I am determined that this will not be the end of the story. I am focused on continuing that downward slope that is so pronounced on the final weeks of this graph.

As I'm sure you know, the number of calories that you burn for any given activity, will vary with your weight. The more you weigh the more calories you burn for a certain number of minutes doing a certain activity. Weight Commander helps you to know how many calories you would burn at your current weight. Since I weighed 198.5 today, the calories burned in 10 minutes chart indicates that for walking, which is my primary exercise, at 4 mph I will burn 83 calories every 10 minutes.

In walking nearly 25½ miles this week, I walked for 460 minutes. That makes 46 ten-minute blocks of walking. If I had walked at 4mph, you could calculate the number of calories I burned by multiplying 46 x 83, which gives you 3818 calories. Since one pound of fat is the equivalent of 3500 calories, I would have walked away 1.09 pounds of fat this week.

My actual walking pace this week was lower than 4 mph, coming to 3.33 mph on average. I'm not quite back up to the pace I used to walk at 4 mph or better. I hope to be up to that pace soon. My primary goal at this time is to get the miles in.

So, I was burning something more than 46 calories (the number for 2 mph) and something less than 83 calories (the number for 4 mph) for every ten minutes I walked. Therefore, my calories burned would fall somewhere between 2116 (46 x 46) and 3818 (46 x 83). The difference in calories burned between 83 and 46 is 37. My pace is 66.3% of the difference between 2 mph and 4 mph. Multiplying 37 x 66.3% gives us 24.5 additional calories per 10 minutes. Adding that to 46 (the number of calories burned at 2 mph), it will give you 70.53 calories per 10 minutes of walking. Multiplying that times the 46 blocks of 10 minutes I have walked this week will yield as its result: 3,244 calories or just under 1 pound.

It is an eye-opening experience every time I look at the small number of calories that I burned when compared with the amount of effort I put into doing exercise. It takes a lot of work to burn off overeating. That is why I always focus on not overeating first and then exercising as a addendum to the eating regime I am using. This way I know that I am always on the right path for losing weight. If I eat the correct number of points each day, it doesn't matter how much exercise I do as far as the scale is concerned. The only thing that exercise can do is to decrease the number on the scale over time. Of course, from day to day, I can have retention of water as my body is healing from exercise; joints can swell, muscles can swell and hold water, and I can increase the number on the scale—but that does in no way increase the amount of fat in my body. If I don't eat too many calories I will not gain weight. If I eat fewer calories than I am burning each day I will lose weight over time.

I enjoy these kinds of mental exercises showing what I'm burning when I'm out doing some activity or other, but I very seldom use it to decide how much I am going to eat. Unless I do an extremely large amount of exercise I don't factor that into the number of points I eat each day. I consider any benefit I get from exercise to be merely "icing on the cake," is it were: an added benefit that will only speed up my weight loss.

If you consider the amount of food I ate this week and the amount of exercise I did, I should be ahead of the game overall. Or in other words, I definitely should not have gained weight this week, but should have shown at least a small loss. As long as the numbers add up in that way, I feel I had a good week no matter what the scale says. I'll just see if I can do even better next week.

Moving over to my Excel spreadsheet, I see that my 90-day projection based upon the change in my weight over the last 14 days, is still showing a loss. It puts me at 191.57 pounds 90 days from now. So this is a little more optimistic than the Weight Commander prediction, and it would leave me not too far from my goal 90 days from now if this is the way things actually go. I of course am hoping for better than that, and fully expect to do better than that, especially if I can continue my walking program that I have begun. The second projection I have in Excel, is the one based upon changes in my 14 day average weight. This projection shows me weighing 172.80 pounds and 90 days. I feel this more optimistic number is probably more accurate, because the small fluctuations that I had this past week could easily evaporate into a good loss next week, if my evaluation of the process is correct. I don't believe I overate significantly last week, and if I did not overeat and I still gained a pound and a half, that means that pound and a half is water and not fat. Once I get rid of the water my weight will drop that amount plus the amount of fat that I have, or at least may have, lost over the same period.

In a weight loss and weight control program it is always good to take a long view. I've used the example before of driving a car. With a car you don't look straight down at the road as you are driving; instead you look off into the distance and judge your course from how the road goes ahead of you. If you're driving on a freeway, with long straight stretches, you find you still have to make small steering adjustments to keep your car moving in a straight line, and even when you maneuver around a gradual curve, you don't make herky-jerky adjustments; by applying a gentle pressure to the steering wheel you move your car around the bend gently. If you only look down over your hood straight at the road you would find that, assuming you didn't get hit or hit somebody because you are not paying attention to the road ahead, your car's motion would be very erratic. It would be jumping left and right as you corrected for the little changes in direction that always occur on a road, and you would be totally lost when you came to a major turn as to what to do.

Having a plan in place with a set number of points (or calories) that you are going to eat each day, is the equivalent of looking off in the distance. You just aim at eating the correct number of points, and assume that's okay. You don't look at the scale and decide whether what you're doing is good or bad simply because the scale goes up or down. You have to believe in your program. If you believe in your program, then you can know that you are doing a good job—everything's okay, if you hit your points.