Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Your cheatin' heart...

Back in January, I started out on this whole thing with weight loss first and foremost in my mind.  I was fat.  Really really fat.  I still am for that matter, but not in the same league that I was at the start of the year.  XXL shirts wouldn't fit unless I went through an elaborate stretching procedure with them, my elastic waist "fat pants" were on the verge of not fitting, and my body was just plain running out of places to put the fat that I was continuing to pile on.

However, as the pounds came off, and as the months went on, this mindset shifted a bit.  Weight loss is still important, but overall fitness has been what I'm feeling the best about as of late.  To anyone who's been reading my latest posts (which I suspect is a very small, albeit elite and obviously highly intelligent sect of the human population), you've surely noticed this trend.  Talk of what and how much to eat, pounds lost, and so on have taken a back seat to talk of accomplishments mostly consisting of my foray into running.

I think this is mostly a good thing.  After all, healthy and fit is what we're going for here - right?  However, I think I need to re-focus a bit.  See, a problem I've had in the past with all of my weight loss attempts is to "rest on my laurels", and this eventually leads into a full-on "off the wagon" slip.  And when I go off the wagon, I go OFF that motherfucker.  I actually chop the wagon up, start a fire, and use it to cook and eat the horse.

I'm starting to get a lot of positive feedback from people.  I'm down 82 pounds at this point, and people are definitely noticing.  I'm getting a lot of compliments and encouragement, and it does feel great, but I know myself - and this is where something in my brain starts to say "Yeah - you ARE awesome!!  Let's get McDonald's on the way home and chase it with a birthday cake."

There's some warning signs starting to surface, too.  I'm still drinking water, but I've been starting to cheat back to diet soda every now and again.  Also - there are a few times in the last couple of months where I've eaten some of my calories for the next day the night before.  If there is something that will do me in here, it's eating at night - I just CAN'T CAN'T CAN'T do it.  I think I've got to think of myself like an addict with this one - zero allowance.

And here's the big one - I opened up the door to cheating on my daily calorie allowance about three months ago.  My son and I love to eat at this Brazilian grill place.  It's expensive, so we only do it about once a year when the right Groupon comes along.  Servers come to your table with different spits of meat, all you can eat, and they're all tasty.  I figured if I was going to pay an arm and a leg for this, I really didn't want to restrict myself, so off I went.

That single "cheat day" doesn't bother me too much, what does bother me is that I've had two or three cheat days since for no reason whatsoever.  People will say that regularly scheduled cheat days can actually be a good thing, but I don't think it's a place I should be going right now.

You can also see it's made my weight loss more erratic.  Look at my weigh in data before any cheat days:

Now look at the trend line that has three or four cheat days in it:

You can definitely see a difference.

So - here we go - keep focused - stay vigilant.