10th consecutive weekly loss

Weight: 78.9kg, a loss of 700 grams from last week.

Ten weekly losses in a row. That's not bad. I've got a good feeling about what I've achieved in the last 10 weeks, and fingers crossed, I won't have any gains. Things are looking good.

However, on the exercise front, things aren't looking good. I still haven't restarted it. It's been about 3 weeks since I've been to the gym. A service that I'm paying for, whether I use it or not. Bad weight loser.

Getting onto the subject of the Giving Yourself The Best Gift challenge, a challenge that I seem to be on but not putting much effort into, apart from posting updates once a week. We're on week 8 at the moment. Here are the action points that I'm not doing:

• At the start of each day, plan my day with losing weight to be one of the most important things to achieve for that day

• Write down what I eat if it is not on my 'list', writing that on my blog

• Exercise as often as time and energy permits

• Get quality sleep. That means going to bed at the usual time, rather than staying up late

• Ensure that I have at least one full day of food at home, so I don't run out of anything

I've not achieved any of these, which is worrying. Yet I still continue to lose weight. I think that this creates unrealistic expectations of how much I can lose, and when the planets go out of alignment those losses don't occur any more. The other two action points I don't need to worry about at the moment, since I'm still losing. If I lose my weight loss "mojo", I plan to head over to watch the weight loss videos at made by Antishay at Youtube. They are quite helpful for motivation. Not so much as being inspiring, but there are hundreds of them there, and I would expect to watch 3 or 4 a day to help restart my mojo.

I've been reading weight loss blogs regularly now for about 6-7 years now. They fascinate me. Every weight loss blog goes through a cycle. First, it is created, but usually you don't read it when it's that young because there aren't any links to it. It's more likely to be deleted/go idle at this stage than any other. As time goes on, more people link to it on their blogrolls, and you start to read it, and when you see the name on some blogroll, you recognise it.

There is always one blog that gets linked to the most, one that I consider to be the centre of the weight loss blog universe. When I started reading weight loss blogs, Renee Gets Fit was probably the centre then. It's still being hosted, although hasn't been updated in over 4 years. I guess Renee is still paying for the hosting for sentimental reasons. Who knows. Now, it seems that Jack Sh*t, Getting Fit and Bitch Cakes are at the centre. I don't know which has more links to it, they probably share the top position.

There are about 2000 active independent weight loss blogs out there, as an estimate, based on blog rolls. An independent blog is my name for one that lets the owner link to sites not in the same domain name. The alternative would be a website such as Extrapounds, which is more of a community of people who are commenting on blogs within the same domain name. The average lifetime of a weight loss blog is about 2-3 years, from start to end.

I wanted to know more about the whole weight loss blog thing back at the start of the year, so I made a list of about 200 active blogs. 100 posted their weight in February, and I started tracking these, recording each month how much the owner weighed, if they posted a number. I'll do the analysis next week.