Health and Fitness, October 2015

[Harriet]

How is your health journey going? Have you had any successes, learned about your needs and how your body works?

What are the new plans, the goals, the schedules you are paying attention to for October?

Do you have a calendar event coming up, which may inspire you to greater fitness?

We'd love to hear and encourage!

[Twins' Mom]

Posted over in the Sept thread this morning...

Actually, we have two November calendar events - a week out of town (part of the week is study sessions/meetings for dh) and then Thanksgiving with the NY relatives. The week away is a fancy smancy resort. I'd like to be a few pounds down by then...leaving on Nov 1.

I'll be out of the "obese" in two pounds but perhaps could be 5 lbs down total.

[helia]

I do have a potential calendar event. My payroll supervisor is getting together a group of us employees of the school to run a race together on Nov. 8. I would just do the 5K while others would do the 15K. Having an event to work toward really motivates me.

I learned yesterday that running faster causes me to cough. I don't have time to jog today, but I'll go again on Friday and just go my regular pace and see what happens.

The weight is not really coming off. I'm actually at a healthy weight for my height, but I'd still like to shed a few pounds as I think my frame is more on the smaller side for my height. In terms of weight, I'd like to lose 2 pounds this month. There, I put it out there. A concrete weight goal.

[LadyMaverick]

October goals -

SLEEP 7 hours. Since making sleep a priority, I have been improving however I am not meeting my goal yet. I slept an average 6 hrs 12 minutes in Sept. I have to take a nap to get my sleep time that high. My sleep efficiency is at 96% so I utilize the time in bed well. I just need to make sure I spend more time in bed.

Log all foods in MFP. I have a 90 day streak in MFP but my focus has been on breakfast and blood sugar for the past few months. I now have 18 breakfast menus planned with portion control to keep blood sugar in correct range. I will continue to tweak these breakfast menus but my confidence level is rising as I rotate through them. I need to branch out and pay more attention to other meals. Once I consistently log entire day of calories, I can then use that information to establish how many calories I can eat in a day to reach healthy weight. Right now I am just grabbing numbers from the sky - 1200 calories and I lose weight but I struggle to maintain that low # daily. Yesterday FitBit said I could have 2858 calories due to the amount of steps but then I gain weight. I suspect my daily calories needs to average around 1400 calories to lose weight.

10K steps a day. I averaged 8689 steps in September. 10k average is a huge goal for me because I take Sundays off (usually only get 3-4k steps) which brings my average down. 10K is a goal that inspires me so I don't want to decrease it.

[Kathryn-in-Canada]

Helia: you need to be focusing on inches not pounds. You are very fit; as you work out harder to lose weight you are probably gaining muscle and the scale doesn't look like it is budging.

That's my excuse for August and September!

Earlier I said I had taken those months off but in fact I am down 3 lbs since the end of July so it wasn't no progress, just slow progress. Physically, my progress has been huge during that time, upping my daily steps, cutting my daily discomfort level, and increasing my walking speed and endurance. I like my reflection more. As winter comes, I'm finding more and more clothes that are moving to the giveaway pile since they hang poorly on me.

So lots and lots of progress.

[Twins' Mom]

I have dropped another pound according to scale this morning (no confirming it by weighing in for three days, for me, Kathryn!) Another .8 lb and I will be back to starting weight when first set up MFP account in June. A 1.1 lb loss from today's weight will put me into the "overweight" range, as opposed to "obese."

In looking at my spreadsheet, I am up 7.4 pounds from the day I started tracking my weight a little over a year ago. Within that year plus a few days, I was down my 2.6 pounds at one point from the beginning weight, and up by 12.4 at my highest point after R osh H ashana last month for a range of 15 pounds. I was only at the highest weight once, and dropped the next day by 1.6 pounds so it's a bit of an aberration, but otoh I often simply skip weighing in when I know the number is higher.

I would like to be 6 lbs down from now when we leave on Nov 1 for a week in Palm Springs, CA but I don't know whether that's reasonable for me, given the slowness of my loss and my propensity to go off "program."

[Kathryn-in-Canada]

Twins, try upping your protein. I found that made a huge difference with the rate of my weight loss.

On WW over a decade ago, I could count on losing on average 1.5 pounds per week. But in the last few years, that dropped to about half a pound a week, or 3 pounds every 4 weeks. Then I upped protein and the rate increased *as long as I stick with the program*.

As I've said, I'm not really going for lower carb but I do have to lower carbs to keep protein up at 25% of my calories. On days I don't make a real effort to be careful but do fill in the food diary, I see 60 - 65% of my calories coming from carbs so obviously they are my go-to food group.

One thing that is weird about this is sometimes you find yourself making very 'bad' decisions.

Dd said her dh gets frustrated when she'll say she has to have a salad with chicken for dinner because she had an apple at lunch. And more than once, I've found myself switching from a piece of fruit to a cup of tea and piece of dark chocolate because it has fewer carbs.

In my experience, though, it isn't just calories in, calories out since I eat every one of my calories (so am consuming 1400 - 1800 calories per day depending on my activity level.) I can lose weight (albeit more slowly) when I go over my daily calorie allotment by over 300 calories a day, day-in, day-out. The protein makes some sort of difference.

LadyM: what was the longer term result of the colagen isolate protein powder you were trying?

[RunKitty]

I agree about the protein making a difference. I think another factor is getting enough sleep.

I am also curious about the longer term result of the collagen, Lady M.

[Kathryn-in-Canada]

Scale was roughly 173.5 yesterday morning (but had had a lot of sodium over the past week so was disappointed but not at all surprised.)

Scale pointed to 170.5 this morning. I'm still adjusting to lower numbers so at first I thought the needle was just above the 175 line, not the 170 line. So my high protein day (despite being over 100 calories over my calorie goal for the day) shifted the weight down again. In both cases, I was weighing under the same circumstances, so the big jump was obvious.

I have 5 pounds to go to get to my next goal - to lose 26 pounds by the 6th month mark. That's half of the 52 pounds I need to lose. I just realized I've tasked myself with losing 1 pound a week on average for a year. If every day was like yesterday, I'd lose it a lot faster but over the 9 weeks of August/September, I only lost 3 pounds so keeping to the average is my goal. Slow and steady. Which also gives me time to appreciate my body (and some favourite clothes I have at each weight) along the way. Last time I lost a lot of weight, my self-image seemed to be 6 months or more behind the mirror.

I'm starting to get worried I have don't have a strategy to keep the weight off. But that's worrying about something well in the future!

[Twins' Mom]

I bounced back to the same weight I had on Sat a.m. so I guess it wasn't an aberration, thank goodness.

Not getting in quite 10K steps most days but close, and I'm not eating most of the extra calories I get for my steps.