Week 2 day 5

92.5kg. Yesterday I bought for lunch a toasted sandwich (haven't bought one of those for years), muffin and coffee, costing $11.50. I also bought a large quantitiy of whey powder, costing $89.90. It will last 2-3 weeks. My weight increased a bit, back up to 92.5kg.

Week 2 day 4

Another loss, 92.3kg. Yesterday I was depressed so I had a drink and piece of cake when I was out, then I went and bought some meat patties for eating at work. The 100g thing went well.

Meat patties 22.60
Coffee and cake 9.70

Week 2 day 3

Weight: same as yesterday, 91.5kg. Some of you may be wondering why I'm having high energy food when I'm on a diet, especially two days in a row. The answer is simple. If I don't have food that I enjoy now and then, I'll give up and put on weight again. So long as I continue to lose weight, I'm ok with it.

Yesterday I spent $9.20 on a coffee and slice, and 60c on an ice cream.

I'm seeing how many days in a row I can eat 100g of protein. Today I plan to eat whey powder.

Week 2 day 2

Today I weighed 93.5kg, which means I get a reward coffee and slice. Yesterday I planned to walk up the hill overlooking my city, it's a 3-4km walk with a rise of about 500m. Well I walked about half of it, and then it started to rain. I hadn't checked the weather, because it doesn't rain here very often. I decided that I wouldn't do the walk again until I've lost about 10kg because my thighs were rubbing together a lot and it was annoying.

I spent money on a coffee and slice (I decided to treat myself before hand), and drink for the walk. After that I attempted to go to see a film, but my account had no money to pay for the film, so I went swimming instead. By then though I'd bought and eaten popcorn and a drink. Had I not bought the food I'd have enough money to pay for the film.

Coffee and slice 9.20
Diet lemonade 1.00
Pop corn 2.00
Sprite 600ml 3.90

A short introduction to RSS

I read over 100 blogs, on various topics. Some post daily. Some haven't posted in over a year and I'm hoping that the author will start posting again. How do I keep track of all of these posts? RSS. Basically, RSS will tell me when there is a new posting in a blog that I read. Let's have a look at how it can be used.

Suppose I want to see which blogs have been updated. How do I do this? With Internet Explorer 8 I click on Favorites on the top left of the browser, then the Feeds tab.




If you are running Internet Explorer 7, this is slightly different. Click on the orange star on the top left of your browser, then again the feeds heading.

Notice that some of the blog names are bold. This means that there are new postings for me to read. You'll notice as well that I have created different catergories for different blogs that I'm reading. By clicking on the bold text, I can read either the whole blog posting, or a short summary, depending on the settings the author has specified. This page is stored on my computer, which means it can be read when offline. By clicking on the links provided, I can go to either the individual blog posting on the blogs website or the home page for the blog, to see read the whole blog if I want.



It's pretty easy, and once you start with RSS, you may wonder how you managed before.

How do you set it up? Again, it's easy. When you're at a blog that you like, look for an orange symbol in the top right of your browser.




Click on the orange symbol, and you'll be taken to a page confirming you want to subscribe to the feed. Click on that link.




A dialog box will come up asking where you want to save it, you can create different folders for different subjects. For the moment, however, just click Subscribe and you're done.




That's it! Now probably once a day (depending on the settings) Internet Explorer will look for any updated posts in blogs you like reading. You can change the frequency of how often the browser looks for updates. Note that you probably shouldn't set it to very small time periods (like 15 minutes) as it costs the website owners a lot of money when many people do this. There are two ways: right click the blog name on the list in the RSS viewer or with the settings for Internet Explorer as a whole.

RSS has many uses, I've probably just scratched the surface here. One particularly useful thing to know about is when you want to track a particular news item.

Go to Google and click on News. Type in the details of the news item you're interested in. If it includes a name, put quote marks around the name and keep all the letters in lower-case.



Click on Search News. See how the results has a orange symbol? Just click it like before, and you'll have your own individual newsfeed on this subject.

Week 2 day 1

Again yesterday I wasn't able to post due to lack of privacy. Anyway, I seem to be getting into the whole weight loss thing, my weight is dropping rapidly. I'm not sure why it increased earlier. Eating lots of protein seems to be helping a lot.

Today I weigh 92.7kg.

On Sunday I bought a can of coke, $1.50.

Week 1 day 6

I missed yesterday's post due to a lack of time and lack of privacy, I'm hoping to not miss too many posts over the ten weeks. I seem to be getting into the swing of things in terms of eating, however the graph shows otherwise:




Today I weigh 93.3kg but I should weigh 92.35kg. I'm hoping to head in the right direction from now on. I'm posting what I buy, yesterday I bought

Frozen veges $5.21
Croissants $4.69

The croissants were on a whim, probably due to me being cold and busing home. The solution is to fix my car and I won't be cold nearby supermarkets. I want to have a budget of $60 a week for food, but due to the cost of protein, I'll be over my budget for the total period that I'm losing weight. That's not too much of a problem if I am under budget after I reach goal weight.

Today I start having 100g of protein a day. I've had it before, there is no real problem with it, apart from the cost.

1kg lost, 27kg to go

It's taken a bit of time but now I am ready to post regarding how I'm going with my four day thing. Here is what's happened so far:

Friday 4th 94.0 Bought coffee

Sunday 6th 93.8 Saw Orphan, a good film and quite scary. I find these types of horror films best when the situation is something that can happen to you in real life, like what happened in Single White Female

Wednesday 9th 93.6 Had a haircut, I won't be getting another one until I reach 90kg

Saturday 12th 93.6 Bought coffee

Wednesday 16th 92.8 Sort of a recreational day, went to see The Ugly Truth, then half an hour later saw The Taking of Pelham 123. Then I went swimming in the evening. I really must try and go swimming more often, it's relaxing and makes me feel good about my body

So I have lost 1kg. This means I get a reward, which is a walk up a hill overlooking the city where I live. I've never done this walk before (I've walked up most of it, but in bits, and not all at the same time). I have no idea how long it'll take, but I'm guessing 4-6 hours. The reason why I consider this a reward is that it reminds me of someone from my past, we used to walk up bits of it together. This was when I was slim. She is no longer with us, so it helps me think of her.

Week 1 day 4

92.9kg, down just a little. Today is the day when I start organising my food, preferably the day before, as well as writing here what I've bought, and the cost so I can budget for it.

Week 1 day 3

Today I weighed a bit more than yesterday, back up to 93kg. I'm not worried really since I'm getting used to the whole weight loss thing and being organised with what I eat.

Week 1 day 2

Today I weighed 92.8kg, which means that yesterday I probably weighed about 93kg. Yesterday's eating went ok, except I forgot to eat my vegetables. I'm like that a bit, I can forget to eat some foods. Hopefully I can get into a habit so I'll continue to remember.

Apart from that little problem, I ate some tuna, a banana, an apple, and some low carb crackers with cream cheese on them. The day before I over ate, so probably I was relying on a lot of food still inside me. I suspect today will be a bit different. I'll be having a reward coffee and slice because I have lost another 500g.

Week 1 day 1

After deciding to lose 130g a day for 70 days, it occurred to me that maybe I was making a mistake, and it wasn't such a good idea. The reason was I seem to have problems with expected rate of loss goals, they always seem to fail. If I dropped the rate to 100g, which is something I know I can achieve, it would be easier. It would also extend the weight loss period only by 3 weeks, hardly anything given how long I've been overweight. However, I'll just try it and see what happens. The problem with such a system is that life becomes boring, and I don't handle stress as well when I'm on a diet.

Today I didn't bother weighing myself, because I'm going low carb and I know that my weight will drop a lot over the next day or so. I'll weigh myself tomorrow and just imagine that todays weight is 200g above that.

As for food, I'm aiming for lots of protein. The problem is that it's expensive. I guess when I reach goal weight, I can cut back and see if I can spend less money on food, to see if the net cost of being on a diet is no more than what I normally budget for.

Incredible weight loss

A few days ago I loaded up my blog reader with lots of weight loss blogs, for something to give me inspiration to lose weight. Then last night I noticed that Lose 20 pounds in 10 weeks had posted something new. I hadn't really read Sunshine Momma's blog before, I just grabbed some blogs off someone's blogroll with the intention of reading them later. By coincidence, when I read her blog I realised that she only had one day to go in her 10 week test. How much weight did she need to lose? One pound. Today the first thing when I got up was to check her blog. Did she make it? Yes. Congratulations!

I'll let you into a little secret. No one in the weight loss blog sphere seems to have noticed it, but after tracking lots of weight loss blogs over the years (and by tracking, I mean recording dates and weights) guess what the average weight loss for a person with a weight loss blog is? Pretty much zero.

When I say pretty much zero, I mean that sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's negative, but in general it's governed by the people who actually lose weight consistantly, but they are so rare they are hard to find.

Inspired by Sunshine Momma's great performance, I'm challenging myself to lose weight at the rate that she has done. Normally, I'd shy away from these sort of "you should lose at xyz rate" things because I've tried them in the past and they generally are unsuccessful. However, I'm going to try one more time and I'm hoping that Sunshine Momma's success will keep me inspired.

Starting tomorrow, I'll aim for the same rate.

The rules that I've chosen are:

Eat as much protein as I can afford
No treats, except one each 500g lost
Try and not eat too much fruit
500g frozen veges each day

As well I'll be trying to:

Post daily
Graph daily
Post everything I'm eating (but not the amount I have eaten)
How I'm feeling about it

If I get 1kg behind, then I will drop the goal loss of 130g/day to 100g a day, sometihng that I know that I can do for a reasonable amount of time.

Measurements

I thought that it was time to measure my body before I lose any substancial amount of weight. I'll take photos tomorrow. All measurements are in cm.

Neck at half point 41
Neck at base 40.5
Chest at armpits, not inhaled 101.5
Chest at nipples 104
Chest at narrow between breasts and stomach 96
Stomach maximum above belly button 101.5
Belly button waist 105
Hips and buttocks (just above scar) 106
Thigh maximum 59
Thigh half point 53.5
Thigh just before knee 44 (all thigh measurements are with knee on furniture)
Lower leg at maximum 40.5
Just above ankle 24.5
Bicep arm straight 31
Forearm half point 24
all arm measurements are with arm straight.
Total measurements 972cm.

Introduction

Today I weigh 94kg, the highest I've ever weighed. This is not a good situation, obviously. I have a weight in mind - 66kg, which I was at for a year when I was 33 until I broke my arm, which caused a domino effect of gaining weight. Now, at age 45 I still want to be 66kg, and think I've figured out the way to achieve that. I've lost weight, put it on, wasted time, spent money on high protein foods, spent hours over the years running kilometres. All for seemingly nothing.

Looking at weight loss, some things become obvious. Almost all people can lose weight for a week. Some for a month, but very few people can lose weight for a year. I knew about my high school reunion - but what happened when I had 10 years to prepare for it? Nothing. I was still too heavy.

My motivation idea is simple, and based on one principle:

Most people can lose weight for something 4 days into the future.

My system is based on that simple principle. I have 3 motivations which will ideally help me lose weight:

Motivation 1: every week I am allowed (in fact I want to encourage myself) to go and see a film. But only if I weigh lower than I did the previous time I saw a film. If I don't weigh less, I can't go.

Motivation 2: every week I am allowed to go swimming (and again, I will try to encourage myself) but only if I am at a weight lower than the previous time I went swimming.

Motivation 3: when I buy coffee from the supermarket, I am only allowed to buy one bag and only if I weigh less than the previous time I bought coffee from the supermarket.

These 3 motivations are the foundation of this system, with the coffee one probably having the strongest effect on me. They were chosen based on something that I can enjoy and like to have, but I can go without them if possible.

These are good motivations, but together I don't think that they are enough. I need some others to help me as well, or else I'll just cruise along and not really bother, so I've got the two following motivations to speed things up:

Motivation 4: if I have not lost weight on a Monday compared to the previous Monday, I throw away a t-shirt/polo shirt. I do this until I have only 3 shirts left.

Motivation 5: I am only allowed a haircut at specific weights. If I don't achieve that weight, I can't get a haircut.

With these 5 motivations, I think I'll be successful at getting to goal. As to how long it will take me, I don't want to speculate. I've been burned so many times in the past, I don't want to create dates I'll know I'll miss. However, I've chosen a date which I think I'll be able to achieve goal by: 1st July 2012. I've chosen that date because it's roughly 1000 days away. I'm hoping that it'll be sooner than that, hopefully it will. I'll update this date as I feel ok about it coming closer.