Not much to discuss this week. Made some progress… 2 pounds.

I’ve got 23 weeks until I hit the 1 year anniversary of starting this. If I do a pound-ish a week until then, I’ll hit 65 pounds for the year, which wouldn’t be a bad number. To do the whole 100 by the one year point, I’d have to drop around 2.6 a week every week. That’s technically possible, but probably unrealistic. I’m hoping to hit somewhere in the 70-80 pound range by the February 2nd, 2010 weigh in and reach my goal weight by mid-June of next year.

We’ll see.

Not much to say. I had four meals where I cheated on the low carb, three for the sake of convenience, and one planned. Still lost 3 pounds for the week, which isn’t bad, but I’ve still got 2.5 pounds to get back to where I was when I chucked the diet out the window in late June.

Besides “momentum eating” (where once I get started, it’s just hard to stop before I’ve eaten too much), convenience foods are my primary downfall. Pizza, burgers, etc., the quick fix usually causes as many problems as it fixes. And the “healthy” options at many fast food places are either a joke or far less appetizing than the options that you know you should avoid.

That’s not to say that convenience foods can’t be eaten at all. It’s like anything else… too much of a good thing is bad. Convenience foods in limited amounts on rare occasions are useful, tasty, and won’t kill you. But if you’re eating convenience foods for half your meals (which I’ve been known to do), there will be unpleasant consequences.

The problem with convenience foods is that they’re so darn…. convenient.

After about 6 weeks off, I went back on a more restrictive low-carb diet to get my mind back in the game. Took a few days between when I was supposed to get started and when I did get started, though. During those few days, I shot up a few more pounds, so on Friday morning, I was weighing in at 250.

Come Sunday, the effects of the diet seemed to kick in and I was a regular guest in the bathroom. There was no pain or discomfort. There were no explosive situations. It just seemed that everything my body had decided to hold onto in the last few days was finally granted an exit visa, and it proceeded to leave in a calm, orderly fashion.

I’m going to stick with the low carb another week or two, not because I’m desperate to lose weight quickly, but because it provides a counterpoint to the “eat just about anything I wanted” rut I’d fallen back into and it feels easier to accept and implement the healthier choices I need to make when they follow a period of deprivation rather than after a period of playing it fast and loose.

We’ll see how it goes.

With all the festivities around the 4th of July, my wife’s birthday, and my dad visiting, plus how I’d sort of stalled in my weight loss, I decided to go “off my diet” for a bit. I didn’t plan to eat “badly,” but within a few weeks, I found myself falling into some old bad habits.. In 3 weeks, I gained 5 pounds, though some of that could be “water weight” that will come off fairly quickly when I begin cutting back on carbs and eating more healthy foods again. I’ve hovered around that 5 pound mark for the last couple of weeks now.

As of today, I’ve started back on a more restrictive low carb for a couple of weeks, just to sort of get myself back into “diet mode”. Then I’ll back off to more of a “healthier choices” mode again. I’ll get back to weekly weigh-ins and blog posts next week.

The most troubling thing about all this was how easy it was to fall back into old bad habits, especially convenience foods and late-evening snacking. And the troubling part is that avoiding these things is merely a matter of *not* doing something you don’t *have* to do.

Let’s say you got in the habit of skipping everywhere you went. But it started to negatively effect your life, because people thought you were freakin’ nuts. So you had two other options, running or walking. Both get you where you need to go, both give you a viable alternative to skipping. All you have to do is stop skipping and run or walk instead. But the moment you let your guard down, you find yourself skipping. It gives you some sensation you want, it gives you some form of reward, and that’s what’s hard to give up… the rewarding sensation you get from skipping. For all the negatives those behaviors cause, there is some rewarding or comforting sensation that comes with them, and that’s what makes it hard to stop.

It’s not just about weak will or strong will. It’s about having to resist that path of least resistance, about having to turn away from the easy road, the gratifying road, every time you’re hungry or even merely peckish, every time you’ve got two kids to manage all by yourself and feel like there’s no time to cook, every time you’re going over the delectable choices on a restaurant menu and they’re all more appetizing than a bunless turkey burger with sliced tomato instead of fries. If you let your guard down, it’s easy to choose the easy route. And when you choose it once, it’s easier to choose it the next time.

That’s the battle we all have to face. It’s not just making the right choice every time. We just can’t do it every single time for the rest of our lives. The battle is not letting one or two wrong choices turn into a spiral of wrong choices that goes on and on until we become so disgusted with it, we’re motivated to get back to the right path, but only after doing significant damage.

I can’t beat myself up about making wrong choices, but I do have to get better at recovering from them so I only make them occasionally instead of falling into patterns of them.

See y’all next week.

After the 241 weigh-in a couple of weeks ago, I quickly dropped to 239 within the next couple of days, then crept up to 243, then dropped to 239 again, then crept up to 241 again this morning. Ugh.

Seems like I’ve plateaued again with 241 as the point I’m wavering around. I haven’t been aggressively attacking it, though. I even had my first beer since the SuperBowl on Saturday night. Just one, but it’s been the first time I’ve had any alcohol in nearly 5 months.

Overall, my eating habits the last couple of weeks have been far from stellar, though still significantly better than before I started this journey. Still, I have been eating refined (i.e. bad) carbs with greater frequency and in greater quantity than I have in previous weeks and there are a couple of meals where I pigged out a bit. So whether it’s a plateau or I just found my “maintenance” point is probably debatable. I think I’m going to leave myself a little wiggle room this week, with the holiday weekend coming up, and then get more serious about the bad carbs and quantities again come Monday.