Uncharted Territory

Uncharted Territory 

Sunday, September 04, 2011 

Friday morning I weighed in a 184.4, and duly noted it as a 20-year low. Saturday I had no change, weighed 184.4 again. This was overshadowed by my inability to run as much as I thought I should and realization that I needed to pace myself. 

Sunday: This morning I weighed in at 183.4. Stepped off the scale. Weighed again. Same answer, down a pound from the day before, which was itself a 20 year low. 

So I put the weight into Excel, and changed the 2011 graph to add the point. It might be a smidge below trend line, but not far. This is probably a real weight loss. Then I updated the range for the long term graph, and I got a nearly horizontal wiggly line with a lot of white space below it. Huh? 

It took me a while to figure that one out. Turns out that Excel's hidden algorithm for scaling line graphs takes a range from 221 to 184.4 and sets the minimum vertical axis number at 160. But if the range is 221 to 184, Excel assumes that I want to see how that all relates to a bottom of zero. Because I've upgraded to Office 2007 since the last time I fiddled with graph settings, it took me a while to figure out how to manually set the minimum; but I did get my readable long term graph back. 

This could easily turn into a rant about Microsoft, but that's not where I want to go with the thought. 

It's not just that 183.4 initially made my long term weight chart blow up. 183.4 is off the chart historically in that I *don't remember* just when I last weighed that little. I remember struggling to come down from the unreasonably high weight of 185 some time in the mid to late 1980s, but I don't remember what I weighed in which year from 1985 through 1990. I recall a couple of key weights from 1991 - 186 before I moved, and 191 after I unpacked the scale. 

There's other stuff I don't remember, too. I don't remember what kind of scale I was using back then, or whether I had standardized the time of day to weigh or the clothing I weigh in. For sure, any scale I used was only accurate to one pound, and may have had a bias of being heavy or light by a pound or two. I remember a couple scales with such a bias, but I don't remember whether I was using a biased scale the last time I weighed this little, or which direction any bias might have been. 

I'm now in uncharted territory. Any further weight losses are into territory where I can only say very roughly that I used to weigh this little more than 20 years ago. 

I don't think I really believed I could lose weight below 185 when I started with SparkPeople. When I set a goal of 175, I forget what time frame SP set for it, I think some time in early 2012. That looked way aggressive to me, so I changed the goal to July 4, 2012. 

Yesterday I backed that goal up to April 15, 2012. That now looks like way far out, at the rate I'm losing; but I'm okay with that. Now I'm becoming concerned that I might be losing a shade more quickly than I ought to for the last 10 pounds, and perhaps I ought to slow that down a bit. 

That requires some thought. I've been comfortable in the eating range, and exercising quite a bit. The exercise is going to get toned down as fall commitments like choir and bell choir start up, so I'm reluctant to add calories to the diet. And there are a couple of social eating commitments coming up that may blow a couple of specific days of eating. But I want to keep the running training, which would mean the exercise I will be getting won't be comparable to what I got in past fall seasons on the fitness bandwagon. 

Decisions, decisions. Which way do I go? I don't know for sure, because I'm in uncharted territory.