Weighing Every Day

Weighing Every Day 

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Every easily available public source on losing weight says not to weigh yourself every day. They all say to weigh yourself every week. The rationale is that if you weigh yourself each day, you may get discouraged when your weight fluctuates upward. But if you only weigh weekly, you're more likely to see steady downward progress. 

It's a motivational thing. Well, not all people are motivated by the same things. If they were, there would be cookie-cutter solutions for everyone to become fit and achieve a healthy weight. 

I don't remember when I started weighing myself every day. I do remember that I worked out what was the most consistent time of day to weigh (first thing in the morning, after emptying my bladder) and the most consistent clothing (the underwear I sleep in, because nude wasn't a comfortable option.) And I remember that if I didn't weigh every day, I wouldn't remember to weigh every week. 

In late 2001, it occurred to me that my weight measurements weren't working. I'd gain a pound, lose a pound, gain a pound, and not see a trend. I had trouble remembering where I came from. So I started recording my daily weights in an Excel spreadsheet, on 12/31/2001. That let me look back over the past week easily, and later on it let me graph the results to see trends. I learned to recognize normal peaks and valleys of fluctuations, and to see real weight gain or loss as the peaks and valleys got higher or lower, not as the difference between a peak and a valley. After some time, I conclude a couple of things. First, even if I weigh at the most consistent weight time of day, a weight change of less than 5 pounds might only be a normal fluctuation. Second, the weights to fear or celebrate were new highs or lows not seen recently. 

Nine and a half years and a lot of weight fluctuations later, I started with SparkPeople. Like every other weight loss program, SparkPeople says to weigh in weekly. I haven't read very closely, but I suspect the reasons for this are pretty much the same as every other weight loss program's reasons.

It took less than two weeks for the weekly weigh-in to start bugging me. That weight on my screen isn't what I weighed this morning! So I made an executive decision: I would customize my Spark program to daily weighing. I don't care if my weight goes up on some days; I'll weigh myself again tomorrow and long term, things will take care of themselves. 

Today I hit a new low, by a fraction of a pound. This one isn't a big deal, because it's only a new low since early December and it's only a fractional pound lower than the last new low since December. But I get to see it for a day, and tomorrow I'll see what I weigh tomorrow morning. I won't be surprised if I fluctuate up by a fractional pound tomorrow morning; historically, this has frequently happened after I hit a new low. 

There are two things I'm looking for in my weight measurements. Like most people trying to shed pounds, I'm looking for new lows. But more importantly, I'm looking to have lower upward fluctuations. It's a thrill to realize that the current disappointing high was a former exciting new low. That's progress. 

The morning before I signed up with the Spark, I weighed 196.4. The following morning I weighed 195, which lower than I'd weighed in the previous six months. Three days later, after a big day of eating out and two days of eating fast food on the road, I was up to 198. But . . . I didn't stay there. The weight graph goes up and down, but the trend line for the time since I started Sparking is downward. 

I care more about that trend line than about the specific weight on any given day. I get a better trend line from weighing daily than from weighing weekly. That, and I'm not sure I'd remember to weigh weekly if I weren't weighing daily. 

I understand that daily weighing won't work well for everyone. But it works well for me, and it's part of my plan. And I suspect that there are a lot of people out there weighing themselves daily, even if they only put their weight into the Spark weekly.

Bought Clothes Today

Bought Clothes Today 

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 

Buying new clothes is a traditional indication that a fitness and diet regimen is working. And thus it is, for me; but not in the way that is meant when the stereotypical dieter announces she bought new clothes.

I hate shopping for clothes, and it's worse when I have to go to the real mall instead of a big box store or a strip mall. I dislike driving into the mall parking lot even when I don't have to shop for clothes. But clothing does not last forever, and worn clothing must periodically be replaced. 

This isn't so bad for something like underwear, where I can pick some up with minimal angst at Walmart, paying a price that is clearly marked. But business casual pants and shirts for work don't come from Walmart. Mostly, they require a trip to the mall. In the case of the pants, that also means a trip into a fitting room because my waist has historically fluctuated in size. And, of course, there's the issue of comparison shopping for stuff that isn't totally comparable from one store to another, and digging through the marketing and current sale nonsense to figure out what I'm really spending. Yuck. I hate the whole experience. Thank God I don't need to shop for a business suit right now! 

The stereotypical dieter would tell you how pleased she was to be able to get into some size (the number wouldn't mean anything to me), and how she liked the new clothes, and perhaps what a great bargain they were or how much money she saved. This would be a victory celebration for her, because she met her goal or made significant progress toward it. It would be an indication that her program is successful.

I've been on the Spark for a bit over 2 weeks. I'm down about 4 pounds from when I started. That's better than a kick in the pants, but it's not a major success on the scale or a new wardrobe weight change. 

I bought the same size belt I have been wearing, because one just wore out. I bought the same size shirts I have been wearing, because I need to replace some that are wearing out. I did buy 34" waist pants instead of the 36" I'm wearing; but this has happened before, without watching what I eat. I can still wear the existing 36" pants, but they're wearing out and it's about time to replace them. The stuff I bought looks okay, perfectly acceptable for business. If someone described what I bought as "cute" or "stunning" or any of the other adjectives women use to describe clothes they like, I'd wonder what was wrong with it. 

I did maybe save some money, though it's hard to tell what's a real saving on something I buy seldom, but which is always on sale. The nice cashier found a way to turn a $133 purchase into a $91 purchase, on the same credit card that I'd intended to use anyway. But the financial stuff isn't really a Spark success. I've been managing a budget for years, and watching this type of thing is nothing new. 

The Spark success is that I actually went shopping for clothes, got what I needed, and got home without a lot of stress. I picked a weekday after work, and decided I had the energy to deal with an unpleasant but necessary task. (That, and the extra steps for walking through the mall would put me very comfortably above 10K steps today.) Instead of making excuses because I just didn't feel like going anywhere near the mall, I went and got done what I needed to do. 

The unpleasant but necessary task of shopping didn't have anything to do with fitness and weight loss; the clothing that I am replacing would have needed to be replaced even if I were still muddling along 4 pounds heavier and less in shape. But getting it done had everything to do with motivation and getting my act together. I run out of things to do for the Spark program, and look around for what else I can do that is productive. Today that turned out to be clothes shopping. 

 That's a real, if small, success of starting the Spark system.

Donating Blood

Donating Blood 

Monday, July 25, 2011 

Today my regularly scheduled blood donation rolled around. I used to do this on Saturdays, but the Red Cross center where I donate kept changing its weekend schedule, and I'd run into it being closed for major holidays. So a couple years ago I switched to Monday afternoons, because it's open every Monday and I can schedule at real 8 week intervals instead of having to hit the shifting 1st and 3rd or 2nd and 4th Saturday. 

If I donate 6 times in a year, the Red Cross sends me a cute little pin proclaiming the fact. This is my record of how long I've been doing this. I counted six such pins just now, for 2004 through 2009 excluding 2006. I think I got sick around one donation in 2006, and that resulted in not giving 6 times. Oh, and 2010? The calendar fell just right and I have a nice pin with a 7 on it for 2010. It will be back to 6 in 2011.

The little pins are one of the things the Red Cross does to try to motivate repeat donors. Some of the other things I have from Red Cross motivation efforts include a small blanket, and very nice baseball cap, a red plush "life saving bloodhound" plush toy, and a heart shaped stress ball. Of course, none of this stuff is why I give blood. I give blood because I can, many people cannot, it's a socially responsible thing to do, and there is always need. Today there was a sign up for a blood shortage, with reminders of recent news on local tragedies where much blood was required. 

There's also a promotion, give blood in the month of July and get a coupon for 1.5 quart container of Friendly's ice cream. 

Today was my first blood donation since starting with SparkPeople. The preliminaries went a lot like other blood donations, very routine. Then there was this coupon. And the post-donation canteen. In the past, I would have had juice and cookies. Today, I took the bottled water and read the nutrition information on the offered snacks. It wasn't a very hard decision to stick with the raisins, easily the healthiest thing offered. 

Standard advice includes drinking an extra 4 glasses of water after blood donation. I've never paid much attention to that or tracked how much I drank. But now I have the Spark. No problem, just treat my minimum water for today as 12 glasses instead of 8. 

 I'm new to the SparkPeople system, but I've been donating blood for quite a while. I know how my body reacts to a blood donation. It was less trouble than I expected to get in 30 fitness minutes and 10K steps on a blood donation day. In fact, I may break 14K steps before I go to bed. It was surprisingly easy to stay on track for both food and exercise while working around the blood donation. The only thing I didn't get in today was strength exercises. 

Lesson of the day: I can keep up the plan and keep streaks alive even on blood donation days. Oh, yeah, that ice cream coupon? I think I'll give it to my daughter. I don't need to eat 1.5 quarts of ice cream. 

519 Calories

519 Calories 

Sunday, July 24, 2011 

Today was my church's annual Service in the Park, preceded by Breakfast in the Park. This is a wonderful social event where long term members get together and chat before worship, and have a breakfast featuring scrambled eggs, coffee, orange juice, and of course muffins, cinnamon rolls, and sometimes bagels. There is always plenty of food. People are encouraged to eat as much as they like, and sometimes to take leftovers home.

Social eating is one of my problems. I've known this for quite a while. 

I'm new to tracking food, today being my 14th day at it. The safest thing to do about Breakfast in the Park would be to not go--either skip church this morning, or don't arrive till after breakfast. That didn't work, because I had agreed to sing and needed to be there before breakfast to rehearse. So, this year's Breakfast in the Park was a test of my ability to negotiate a social eating situation with no limits on portion size. 

I took a guesstimated 2 eggs worth of scrambled eggs, and a guesstimated 2 ounces of ham. I planned on having 2 mini cinnamon rolls, then broke down and ate a third. After the second 12 ounce cup of coffee (virtuously taken black, as opposed to with creamer in prior years), I switched to drinking water. Magically, the glass of water in my hand filled the social need to have something!

After the service, I got the nutrition data for the cinnamon rolls. The breakfast added up to an estimated 519 calories, out of a daily range from 1870 to 2220 suggested by the Spark. If I'd managed to skip that last mini cinnamon roll, it would have been 429, not that much higher than my typical self-prepared breakfast in the 370 to 390 calorie range. 

Then I got to thinking. What would I have eaten if I weren't tracking? I would have had multiple helpings of scrambled eggs with ham, and the first helping would have been bigger than what I had today. I wouldn't have counted mini cinnamon rolls. There would have been milk or half & half in the coffee. And there would have been another muffin or two after the service. I wouldn't have come in under 1500 calories, and I might have gone as high as 3000. Of course, I would have been full enough that I wouldn't need to eat lunch . . . but "breakfast" would have been more calories than my breakfast and lunch put together were today. There's a good chance it would have been more than my actual total eating today. 

If Breakfast in the Park had been the first Sunday after I started tracking, I might not have been as successful. That second week was important for getting used to tracking everything, and the natural adjustment to being more mindful of what I eat *because* I am going to track it. 

And if I don't blog about it now, I might not be as successful the next time I'm in a situation like this. Writing about it helps firm up in my mind what I did that worked, so I have a better chance of repeat success, or even a modest improvement. If I remember this morning well enough, perhaps the next time I'll be able to resist that third mini cinnamon roll in favor of using those calories for a serving of yogurt later in the day.

A Half Ounce

 A Half Ounce 

Saturday, July 23, 2011

A few years ago, I wanted to lose some weight. I was totally unwilling to track what I ate, so I focused on exercise and training. Of course, the groups that I found dedicated to training told me stuff I didn't want to hear, like, "You can't out-train a crappy diet." 

Still in denial, I tried to clean up my diet a bit without keeping track. One of the things that I ended up doing to save money was take my lunch to work. It had to be cheap, portable, something I would actually eat, and keep for a half day without refrigeration. The healthy part of my most common lunch was a hard boiled egg, a quarter cup of almonds, and a third of a cup of raisins. (Let's not talk about the pop-tarts, okay?) 

Fast forward, and I found SparkPeople. I bought the pictured food scale, which is probably the best $43 I've spent this year. And I weighed my standard almonds that were sitting in baggies waiting to be part of future lunches. They came in at 1.5 or 1.6 ounces. I trimmed them to 1.5 ounces and called it good. 

Another week, and I set a weight goal. Implementing that on the site, my recommended calorie range dropped from the maintenance range I was given when I didn't have a goal. So, how to bring the actual consumption down? Well, the standard serving for almonds on the site seems to be 1 ounce. My sister uses a half ounce. How about if I trim my portion size, since I usually end up munching almonds longer than I want to at lunch?

Thursday I adjusted all my baggies of almonds down to one ounce. Friday the first one ounce bag of almonds went to work in my lunch. Munching the almonds seemed to take a more appropriate length of time, and I didn't even notice the difference in hunger level. Wow.

Let's do the math. A half ounce of almonds (pictured above) is 81.9 calories. 20 work days in a month, times 12 months a year, times 81.9 calories is 19,656 calories. At 3500 calories per pound of fat, that's about 5.6 pounds. 

That's more than half the weight I gained from June 30, 2010 to June 30, 2011. 

I also noticed that the site says there are 24 whole kernels per ounce of almonds. I'm seeing more like 27 or 28; I guess the almonds I buy are a little smaller than the ones used to compute the average. Did I mention that the food scale was the best $43 I've spent this year? 

A half ounce. Not enough almonds to notice on the hunger scale. But enough to make a difference, over the course of a year. 

 Measure. Everything. You. Eat. Absent measurement, you can't make intelligent adjustments, and some of those adjustments are going to be really important.

Acclimatizing

Acclimatizing 

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Two weeks ago, I was on vacation. I spent some time outdoors in the summer, and the time I spent in air conditioning was in places that only cooled to 80 or 78 degrees. I got used to it. 

This week, I felt COLD at work. It wasn't really any colder in the office, I'd just acclimatized to a warmer temperature. The last couple of days, I ended up taking breaks to walk around the block so I could warm up. 

Not so coincidentally, my vacation coincided with starting on the SparkPeople site and starting to track, in detail, what I eat. I was so not looking forward to this; but it's hard to argue with my sister's results, as compared to the erratic results I'd had just trying to get more exercise and not eat totally stupidly.

The first few days, there was no calorie limit. IIRC, the first day I tracked on the Spark I ate over 3900 calories. Big day eating out. The next two days I came in close to the top of my maintenance range, on the road eating fast food. After that, it was eating at home where I have more control . . . but did not have the best pantry for eating well. 

Then a few days ago I actually set a weight loss goal. Bit the bullet, and blew away what I'd tracked so the goal would work with the Spark. Of course, my target calorie range went down by a couple hundred calories per day. But a funny thing happened; it wasn't all that hard to adjust to the new calorie range.

I had acclimatized to eating less, under the discipline of recording everything. Of course, this discipline also changed what I ate; I became more conscious of "expensive" foods and picked what I thought might be filling enough on the calories I had left in the day. 

Yesterday, it changed a bit more. I had to go to the store for more skim milk anyway. (Who'd have thought that I'd be able to acclimatize to skim milk in a week?) I'd been having trouble getting my protein grams into the recommended range, so I wanted to look at low fat cottage cheese and chicken breasts. Aldi had decent prices on both, so I bought some. I hadn't bought cottage cheese in maybe three years, and I hadn't bought chicken in longer than that. And I only had one meal left in the day, anyway. But I did it. Bought the cottage cheese, bought the chicken, and dutifully recorded the nutrition data in my favorites. Had a bit of cottage cheese to make my protein numbers yesterday, and baked the chicken breasts yesterday evening. 

Today I used the first part of that chicken. I built an experimental chicken burrito out of a flour tortilla, 40 grams of chicken, a half ounce of shredded cheese, and a tablespoon of Taco Bell hot sauce. I had chopped up 75 grams of chicken as a serving, but 40 grams was what looked right on the tortilla. You guessed it; I've acclimatized to weighing and measuring my food. I don't know whether I could have started this before I became an empty nester; but I can certainly do it NOW. (No, it wasn't the best chicken burrito in the world; but it's a starting point for learning to build a better one.) 

The tools are ever so much better than they were in the late 1980s, the last time I tried to monitor food intake and follow a plan. The internet didn't exist then, everything was paper and pencil, and portion sizes were a mixture of guess and mystery. Now, I have a lot of nutritional data on SparkPeople, plus the ability to enter my own; a web program that automatically calculates the numbers for servings that don't match the standard size; and an electronic food scale that measures to the tenth of an ounce or in grams, whichever I need. Absent these tools, I would not be ready to track stuff. The fancy tools don't make easy; they make it *possible*. 

I'm not yet acclimatized to the idea of buying fresh fruits and veggies. In my old world, they were a terrible idea because I wouldn't use them before they went bad. But I did buy some baby carrots today. I understand them, and I will use them. The time for fresh fruits and veggies is not yet, but the idea has move from the realm of "That Will Never Happen" to the realm of "I Need to Figure a Few Things Out First." I've got some ideas on how I could make some selected fruits and veggies work for me, but the ideas still need some development. 

In the past two weeks, I've also acclimatized to more exercise per week than I had for the first half of the year; but that part was easy. I've been there, and I understand exercise. Controlling the diet is totally new, and acclimatization there is the surprise.

Weight Goals

Weight Goals 

Thursday, July 21, 2011 

When I signed up for the SparkPeople site, I knew I needed to lose some weight. I didn't have a clear idea of how much. Never mind, you can change it later. So I started without a weight goal. 

10 days later, I've done my reading and thought about it. I weight 155 in high school, 165 as a young single guy, and my weight went up from there after I got married. In high school I was a totally non-athletic type with no upper body strength. At age 49, I took up weight lifting, and even after a year of no regular lifing I'm stronger than I was at any time prior to my 49th birthday. So I have some muscle mass that I didn't have when I was thinner, and I don't really know where I can go down to. 

Read some more, thought some more. Top of healthy guideline for BMI would be 182 for me. I got down to 185 last year, and felt pretty good. I could also still see a small roll of fat around my waist at 185. Looked at some ideal weight pages on the internet, and found two methods that calculated my ideal weight at 170 or 177 for medium frame, which is probably what I am. 

Okay. My goal is 175. I can change it later if I need to, but that gives me something to shoot for. Never mind that I bounced off 190 once, and failed to maintain 185 another time. I wasn't tracking food then. Give this a shot. From today's weight, that would be losing 19 pounds. I know I can do the first 9, because I managed that before. 

Got that far, and couldn't find how to set a weight goal on SparkPeople. The FAQ pointed me at a link that didn't exist to change my weight goal. Dig further. To set a weight goal when I don't have one, I have to reset my goals. Fair enough. But this also blows away the food and exercise I've tracked to date. Dumb design, but if that's the way it is I'd rather do it before I have a long time period tracked. 

So I reset my goals, accepting that it would blow away data I'd rather keep. Did it twice, because it turns out that I can't have a weight goal unless I change my focus (on the site) from "live a healthy lifestyle" to "lose weight." That's a psychological blow. The health comes first, the weight is a side effect. I could not care less how I look in a swimsuit, and I view shopping for different clothes as a disadvantage of chainging weight in either direction.

Went through that dance. Got to keep my favorites in nutrition and my food groups. Lost my favorites for exercise tracking. My Other Goals, which consisted solely of tracking steps by day, remained. At least that's something. I re-created today's food and exercise from memory, so at least I won't have the issue of the program thinking I didn't do anything the first day because I happened to sign up in the evening. 

Time to stop lying to myself about how much muscle mass I gained by lifting weights. I'm not a body builder, and I didn't add 20 pounds of muscle mass. I might have added 10. I remember being 175 and thinking I was overweight; we'll see whether I still have some flab around the middle when I get there again.

Leftover Soda

 Leftover Soda

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 

When I went on vacation, I left a pair of two-liter bottles of soda in the fridge for my daughter, who was feeding the cat while I was gone. I expected it all to disappear. A couple days after I got back, I noticed that most of the last bottle remained; she had put it in the door, where I don't normally keep soda. 

Today I finished eating with calories to spare and didn't really feel a need for more food. Fair enough; I don't need to eat more if I'm not hungry. I'd had all the water I need for the day, and I decided to have a glass or two of soda to use it up. 

Well. Two glasses of diet soda later, and I was craving something to eat. My sister had pointed out the relationship between soda, even diet soda, and eating more a few weeks ago. I'd confirmed it through personal observation, pre-spark. Now I had done something dumb, knowing what I already knew. 

So I did something that was hard for me to do. I opened the bottle of soda, and poured what was left down the drain. I rinsed out the bottle, and I'll claim my nickel the next time I go to the store. Childhood training sticks with me. It was hard to waste more than half a bottle of perfectly good diet soda. 

But I really, really don't need to artificially feel like I should eat more. Even one liter of diet soda was more than I should drink just to use it up. I ended up eating a bit more this evening, even knowing that the feeling was artificial; I don't need to do that two or three days in a row.

Recording Every Day

Recording Every Day 

Tuesday, July 19, 2011 

Managing weight and fitness the SparkPeople way has some things in common with managing money. Since I've spent a few years obsessing about my budget, I find it instructive to compare and contrast the nutrition and fitness tracking with money tracking. 

On a budget forum, a newbie once asked if I recorded my transactions every day. Ever the smart ass, I replied, "No. I only record transactions on days that I have them." The idea was to get the newbie to realize that if he didn't spend his money on that latte or Shiny New Toy, he wouldn't have to record it. The system was giving him an incentive to make better spending decisions.

I notice the same thing with recording food. Today is my ninth day of recording what I eat, and I've chosen not to eat stuff several times because I'd have to record it. Sometimes the element of running down the nutrition information for, say, a Milky Way Simply Caramel bar is off-putting; sometimes the simple idea of seeing that I ate *HOW MANY* servings of something that is allowable in small quantities is a deterrent, even if the food in question is already on my list of favorites. 

The funny thing is that this mental game works even though I know that nobody else gets to see my food log, and the people who see me at work don't care if I walk to the vending machine to get that Simply Caramel bar. 

The same psychological trick works on the other side of the calorie ledger. Today I wimped out of my lunch walk due to heat. I didn't want to arrive back at my desk dripping in sweat, so I cut it short. I told myself I'd make up the cardio in the evening. Now, I've told myself this many times in the past and not followed through . . . before recording exercise on this site. 

Today, I went to the gym after work. This was the first gym visit in quite a while. It would have happened some time or other, but the impetus now was to get some strength training recorded. Since it had been quite a while, I knew I needed to limit how much I did. Because I had cut the cardio short at lunch, I deliberately limited my time with weights to allow a half hour on the treadmill. Warm up with a few Turkish getups, do some deadlifts, renegade rows, and lat pulls, and leave enough gas in the tank for a half hour of cardio. 

A treadmill is the second most boring form of exercise known to mankind, behind only the exercycle. But I managed to put in a half hour, in spite of not owning an iPod and expecting the pumped in music to really suck. (Turned out the pumped in music wasn't bad. Management has improved the selection while I've been away.) 

As I was walking out of the gym, I realized I could have walked on the street because the evening was cool enough. I just hadn't thought of leaving the gym to walk while still in my exercise clothing. Oh, well. Maybe next time. For today, I have my 30 minutes of cardio recorded to keep that streak alive.

The other thing I noticed, when I came home, was that I had no spending transactions to record, for the second day in a row. Hmm. Looks like the Spark system is contributing to prudent money management, as well as to health. Time was, I'd stay away from the vending machines for money but not for health; this week, the reverse is true. 

Recording. Every. Day. Doing this for food has meant that I don't need to record every day for money . . . because some days I don't spend any.

Top Priorities

Top Priorities

Sunday, July 17, 2011

My sister, ONEKIDSMOM, tells me that she can accomplish just about anything, including losing weight, as a project. She wrestles with maintenance, when keeping the weight off becomes an ongoing process rather than a project with goals to strive for. I see her point, but it's slightly different for me. I can get my top priority done, and usually some other high priority stuff; but everything can't be on top.

There was a time in my life when I didn't need to think about managing my weight. It took care of itself. That didn't last forever, and the end of that situation happened when other stuff was topping my priority list. Weight management got onto my priority list about a decade ago. 

I've tracked my weight daily, with a few missed days, since 12/31/2001. The impetus for starting this was that I was at my highest weight to date at that time, almost 220, and I reasoned that keeping track might help me lose. Well, it did . . . for a while. But while I was trying to get enough exercise, weight management and fitness weren't really top priorities. The results reflected this. Whenever Life Happened for an extended period of time, the weight crept up. And because my natural inclination is toward sedentary forms of amusement, climbing back on the fitness bandwagon after Life Happened wasn't easy and didn't happen as promptly as I might like.

So if weight management has been on and off my priority list over the past decade, how is it that I have nine and a half years of data that produce a nice graph showing whether I've been bad or good? Well, weighing myself first thing in the morning after using the restroom, before eating anything, and wearing standard sleeping underwear isn't much work. It's less work than, say, brushing my teeth. So that fits into a routine that can get done even if doing something effective about the weight gets shoved off the priority list. 

The conundrum is, how do I manage my weight and fitness in spite of Life Happening? I don't have this solved, but over the past decade I've put some pieces of the puzzle together. 

The first ugly truth I realized was that I need to make some time to get exercise for the sake of exercise. This goes against my natural inclination. I can handle walking somewhere that I might otherwise drive, and I like taking the stairs instead of the elevator. But doing something only to get the exercise never made sense to me. Sigh. If I gotta do it, I gotta do it. First I put in a walk on my lunch hour, which turns out to be a pretty good stress reliever in its own right. At the tender age of 49, I added weight lifting. I haven't stuck with that consistently, but learning was fun. A bit after that, I dusted off my vintage 1972 bicycle and got it functional. I really like bike rides for pleasure, but can't do this year round. Some years have been better for bike rides than others. Long term, my exercise routine has been erratic. Sometimes it's a priority, sometimes it's not. And when it's not a priority, not much of it happens. 

I avoided the second ugly truth for years. As the weight lifting community says, "You can't out-train a crappy diet." Dieting in a traditional sense, meaning tracking everything I eat, appeals to me even less than exercise for the sake of exercise. I've gone the non-quantitative route of trying to control what I eat. That works okay when fitness is a top priority, and falls apart when Life Happens and other priorities dominate. 

The most recent random Life Happens event was a vacation to visit family. My aforementioned sister is thin. She's thinner than I remember her being since before high school. The results are impressive, and we talked a little about how she did this, what she still struggles with, and what surprised her along the way. The striking thing is, she's found a reasonable way to measure both calories in and calories out. The calories out is a gizmo like a Body Bugg, but with a different name. The calories in is SparkPeople.

I looked at the Body Bugg. I could do that, but . . . it costs money up front, and there is a subscription cost. For it to be worthwhile, I'd need to be able to compare the calories out to the calories in, and that means tracking what I eat. Oh, @^*%. Sis has a ton of background knowledge making tracking easy for her. I don't. But Sis is also an analytical geek, and could explain to me a) How the SparkPeople site works b) How to get from needing to build *everything* to having enough stuff set up that tracking is reasonably easy, and c) How to find where other Sparkers have already entered a lot of nutritional data I'll need. 

That lined up with a full week off work to learn the mechanics and get some standard foods into my favorites. Under gentle prodding (for my own good, of course) I signed up with SparkPeople and started tracking. It's not as painful as I thought it would be. Computer technology and a large community have ameliorated much of the setup work for tracking. 

So . . . tomorrow I go back to work. It will be my first day Sparking on a normal schedule. I don't think I could have got through the site learning curve on a normal weekend, but I think I've done enough in the past 7 days to have a streak of recording what I eat last through the work week. 

Time will tell if if will last longer than that, or if it can become so routine that it keeps being done the next time Life Happens and something not fitness related gets shoved to the top of the priority list.

Traditional Newbie First Blog Post

Traditional Newbie First Blog Post

Friday, July 15, 2011 

It would seem an unlikely time to sign up for an unlikely web site. I'd seen SparkPeople referred to on other web sites I frequent, in connection with food tracking. I had never seriously considered looking at the site, because I don't track food. Don't want to, and the one experiment I had with it in the 1980s was not a long term success. The site is totally unlikely for me. 

Then there's the moment. I was on vacation, visiting family. My sister, ONEKIDSMOM, talked me into looking at how things work. The site says I started on 7/10/2011, but I only registered that evening. Tracking started 7/11/2011 . . . the last day of my visit. A day of big meals eating out. The day before a two day road trip home, with all meals eaten from fast food. Starting a new discipline in this total break from my normal routine doesn't seem like the sort of thing that could last. 

But . . . I'm between 5 and 10 pounds heavier than I was a year ago. A year ago, I was at my lowest weight in 20 years. I was as fit as I've been in my adult life, and it felt pretty good. But it didn't maintain itself automatically. 

I've gone the route of exercising and just trying to eat reasonably without keeping track. It's done well for me, but hasn't worked consistently. Life happens, the exercise falls away, and the eating goes out of control. Maybe not out of control a lot, but enough to gain 10 pounds in a year. Something has to change, and the SparkPeople site got my attention. 

So far, so good. The act of recording changes the decisions that are being recorded, for the better. Eventually, if I keep this up, I should have some idea of what kind of food intake I should be aiming for, and more control of myself in getting there. 

The sixty four thousand dollar question is, will I keep this up? The first test will be next week when I go back to work and have commitments and pressures I don't have on vacation.