Monthly Weigh In - April

This was a tough month, but I was able to stay on target, despite multiple days of fears I wouldn't (rant below). Down another 6.5 pounds for April)

	01 Jan	01 Feb	01 Mar	31 Mar	30 Apr
Neck	16.25	16.25	15.75	15.375	15.125
Waist	44.75	43.25	41.5	39.5	38.75
Bodyfat%	33.5	31.5	30.1	27.3	26.5
Weight	208	200	193.5	186	179.5

Methodology and Stress:

Warning from here down is long and rambly.
I haven't really discussed the Weight loss thing too much here since this is supposed to be a running blog. At least in my head it is. :) But I'm running out of semi-interesting things to say when I run the same 3 mile route 2 of my 3 runs a week.

One of the things my running is supporting is my weight loss. My goal is to be back at my high school weight of 165 (which was more muscular then, but we'll work on that later). Preferably before I start hauling my ass along the roads training for the marathon. The current plan is for me to transition to running 4 days a week after mothers day, and then I'm going to start Hal Higdon's Marathon Novice plan, with 4 extra weeks for life built in, the Beginning of July. So I may not reach goal before that, but I can certainly shave off a few hundred calories here and there and be down to goal, or possibly lower if I believe what the healthy weight predictors say I should be at, by the marathon November 30. I may use some of my buffer weeks to make goal, or since the first couple of weeks of the program aren't that different from my 4 day a week plan, I may just continue on through July.

To make that more clear, I have a food log and have a goal to stay 500 calories below my maintenance level each day (I averaged 520 below last month, with 5 days where I couldn't accurately track because we ate out, so I'm assuming I was at maintenance). I also don't replace the calories from walks and runs. (roughly 31 miles of walking, 44.5 miles of running, estimated at 100 calories a mile). I've read I really shouldn't be at a significant calorie deficit during marathon training because of the physical demands on the body. Wherever it was I read that certainly implied that I should be at maintenance and be replacing my run calories as well.

I'll admit I'm anally retentive with some things, and this weight loss thing is no exception. Some days it gets really old obsessing about calories and walks and runs and progress. I want to be done with the weight loss side of the lifestyle change thing so I can get to a maintenance level so I can eat more. I'm not hungry most of the time, but it's the psychological pressure of knowing that if I don't meet my goal, or have a bad day that it just means more time doing this.

I'm going to have to keep my food log for the rest of the year at least to make sure I'm eating enough, and the right things when I'm training for the marathon, but it seems like it will be different as I look ahead, mainly because the boundary will be less... hard, somehow.

I really try to stay off the scale except once a month (with an unofficial weigh in on the 15th) during the process, because when I started I was doing daily weigh ins and driving myself nuts. (I'll probably go to This month, I did my 15th weigh in and had made no progress. Not possible! So I wandered through my spreadsheets and banged another one together that added up calorie deficits and walks and runs and the projected total calorie deficit. I should have been down like 2.5 to 3 pounds. Same thing the next day... A couple of days later, it was all gone... I just don't understand this body thing my brain is driving around. It was totally stressed out. I can't say I was going to quit, but I spent hours recalculating maintenance calorie levels on the off chance that I wasn't really in as much of a deficit as I thought, reading about weight loss plateaus, etc... I just want to be done...

What I call the maintenance level is essentially using some of the many tools online to calculate my sedentary calorie level. Specifically the one I originally settled on is here :For Men, For Women

My food log has the calculated value in 5 pound increments and I adjust my target calories down as I lose the weight. This keeps me closer to on track because you need less calories as you weigh less. As I discovered when I was in panic mode there are a number of different ways to calculate your maintenance level.  I think I'll talk about that in another post...

If you're still here, thanks for reading.  :)