An update from yesterday’s unofficial weighing after my evening walk (ankle’s mostly back to normal) – I’ve lost a further 2.5lbs. We’ll see if that lasts out the week (it should as long as I don’t have any mad weekend binges)
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Author: latepaul
Week 6
Lost: 1.2lbs
Lost so far: 16.1lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 2.7lbs
Weight: 278.6lbs (19st 13lbs)
…that and ankles apparently.
Which means this: I had a good week. By friday night after my exercise walk I was down 5lbs on last week. I knew the final number wouldn’t be that low because it was partly dehydration from the heat+exercise. Saturday I battled with myself over whether to have some alcohol – not so much the thing itself as what it says about my will-power. I compromised and had a few beers. Plus some extra treat items – but stuff I had in already rather than stuff I’d bought – so relatively low in calories compared to what it could have been. I was determined to still lose weight so yesterday was a regular diet day with, if anything, a longer walk than usual. After that I was about 2.5lbs down. I was happy with that.
Today I awoke with what felt like a lightly twisted ankle. Basically fine but not good to walk on. So the extra 0.5-1lb that can disappear in sweat as a result of a long walk didn’t happen. So I’m down on last week (good) but still up on two weeks ago (not as good, but oh well). Still that means if I have a good weekend next week I should be up for a reasonable loss.
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Less is More Week 5 – Actions
Week 5
Lost: -1.6lbs
Lost so far: 14.9lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 3lbs
Weight: 280lbs (20st)
So it’s not been a great weekend. A misjudged attempt at a ‘freebie’ after 4 weeks of keeping to the letter of the law. A pizza and a bottle of wine seemed like a reasonable treat. But that turned into a pizza and a bottle of wine on both Friday and Saturday and some other left-over treats on Sunday.
I had a lot of time to think about what to say about this, how I feel about it, as I was pounding out the laps around the park, trying to make up as much as possible with tonight’s exercise. But in the end I thought there’s a lot I can say but it’s my actions that will tell. Next week I will lose it back. I need to in the same way that I need to stick to my daily calorie count or not stop at 5 laps when I’ve said I’ll do 6. Because once I start to let myself slip where does it stop?
In a way that’s the problem with ‘freebies’ they’re too undefined. I think my next treat night will have well defined parameters.
Week 4
Lost: 3.8lbs
Lost so far: 16.5lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 4.1lbs
Weight: 278lbs (19st 12lb)
So I don’t plan to make a habit of this but as I finished my first (lunar) month I thought I’d compare my progress with last time. On Lesamy Week 4 I had lost a total of 21lbs although I was at 296 – 2lbs heavier than where I started this time. Whilst I’d lost more I hadn’t quite gotten up to the same levels of exercise. I was doing a 22min x 2 walk during the week and 30min x 2 at weekends. Currently I’m doing ~80+mins a day (including walk to and from work) weekdays and up to 2 hours at the weekend. I’m not sure I’ll keep that up (as mentioned last week) but the fact I’m even able to shows that as well as not quite putting all the weight back on, I hadn’t quite lost all my fitness.
The really effective period of Lesamy – from the start to my lowest point – was about 9 months – 37 weeks. I got down to 226lbs – averaging about 2.4lbs a week. So we’ll see where I am in another 33 weeks/8 months. My goal is to hit 224 in a year and average 1.5lbs/week.
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Less is More Week 3 – Unsustainable?
Week 3
Lost: 3.4lbs
Lost so far: 12.7lbs
Weight: 282lbs (20st 2lb)
Gotta love these early weeks and the big weight loss.
So I’ve been concerned about a couple of things this week. One is that I repeated my weekend bonus scheme from last week (2300cals on Fri, 2100 on sat and 1900 on sun). The other is that I was doing 6 laps of the park for my evening walk – combined with walking from work and back to my house that’s 1.5-1.75hours.
So on the one hand I’m concerned I’m doing too much exercise whilst eating too many calories at the weekend – hang on you’re thinking, don’t those two sorta cancel each other out? Well sort of but they have something else in common – they’re both probably unsustainable.
1.5+hours is a lot of time every day. On the one hand it’s not like I’d be doing a lot with the time otherwise but on the other it also wipes me out for the rest of the evening. I think it needs to settle down to 1hour/day.
The problem with the weekend bonus scheme is that I can get away with it at the moment because I’ve got that early big loss, I’m doing a lot of exercise and I’ve had virtually no freebies. In a month or two when an hour a night is what I’ve settled down to and I may have the odd meal out or whatever I may struggle to still lose anything if I’m also having extra at the weekend. So I think I need to phase it out. Certainly the next time I have a freebie I’ll have to give it a miss that week.
Still, hard not to be pleased with the progress.
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L.i.M. – New Units, New Goals, New Look
So I’ve re-vamped my spreadsheet and I’m now officially working off pounds as my main unit of measurement for Less is More.
I’ve also decided on a few specific goals, to wit:
- Target weight is 168lbs (12stone) by June 2012, 224lbs (16stone) by this time next year.
- I’m aim to keep my average weight-loss at 1.25-1.5lb/week – actually slightly more than I need.
OK, so it seems “a few” is really “two”. I did have others but they’re really the how not the what. Plus they haven’t changed that much (1800 cals/day except for an occasional treat day of 2300 unless I’ve had a freebie that week).
I’ve also created a new ticker & graph. I’ve used tickerfactory again because I wanted to get on with it and the one other site I found after a brief search was taking too long to load. It’s up on the “weight graph” page right now and I’ll be putting on my weekly weigh-in posts.
Not really related but something I did at the same time was to tinker with the appearance of my blog – changed the theme, adjusted the widgets on the side and added back the old banner pic (it’s a time-delay shot of Canary Wharf I took.)
That’s all for now – just didn’t want to wait until monday to announce it.
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Less is More Week 2 – Keeping At It
Week 2
Lost: 2.3kg (5.1lbs)
Lost so far: 4.2kg (9.3lbs)
Weight: 129.4 (20st 5lb)
A good week as you can see. Obviously a lot of the success is down to the “early windfall” that you get when starting/re-starting a diet. However I am pleased that I keep to my regime much better. First week truth be told I had a bit of a binge at the weekend and was fortunate still to lose weight. Since that pattern of keeping the diet+exercise during the week but letting go at the weekend was what killed off Lesamy I knew I had to address that. I did so by tweaking the formula a little. I allowed myself a higher budget of calories on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (2300,2100 and 1900 respectively). More important probably was that I made sure I did my exercise (I have the blisters to prove it!).
I don’t know if I’ll carry forward the same thing next weekend and in the future. I may just allow myself one higher budget day if I’ve had no freebies that week, or I may have say 500 “weekend calories” to distribute as I see fit. The important thing is to set it in advance (even if only a day) and stick to it – not constantly adjusting it upwards.
I’m also thinking of creating a new ticker/graph. I may see if there’s better sites out there. Also I’m considering dropping Kg and measuring in overall pounds for a number to graph and stones and pounds for my own readability.
I said when I finished 1974 that I’d wait a while before starting the follow-up because I needed something lighter and I’d heard 1977 is darker.
It is.
Darker. Grimmer. Bleaker. Tougher.
Maybe it’s not that much worse than 1974 but it feels it. Maybe because you get to a lot of the tougher stuff earlier. Maybe it’s because I read it in a day (partly the pace pulled me in, mostly I wanted to read it before lending it to M. who’s asked to borrow it). Maybe because the ending is… not the ending I was hoping for.
1977 is a fictionalised account of the search for the Yorkshire Ripper. Two of the minor characters from 1974 – a policeman and a reporter – alternately narrate chapters of the story. They’re unreliable witnesses but they’re also morally compromised because of their own involvement with prostitutes. As with 1974 a complex web of crime, conspiracy and corruption unfolds.
The thing I remembered about Peace’s writing whilst reading 1977 was the frenetic pace, the surreal, confusing and slightly irritating prose style at times, the fact that you sometimes don’t really know what’s going on or who’s who, the fact that almost everyone is not a nice person and/or (usually and) a victim of human ugliness. All these things were true of 1974 and they were all down-sides but the things that made it worth reading were a kind of morbid fascination with the gruesome crimes, I’ll admit some titillation at unacceptable behaviour (think Life on Mars x100) and, perhaps most of all, the page-turning need to find out what happens next.
Well 1977 has these same strengths too but whilst I’m still fascinated and titillated, I’m also a little weary of the darkness. Crucially also, when I neared the end of the book I realised with a growing sense of anger that I wasn’t going to get all the answers to my questions about the plot. Don’t get me wrong 1977 has a conclusion to its own story, stories in fact – but there are also on-going elements which reach into the next book(s). I think if I’d realised that up front I’d’ve enjoyed it more. 1974 was much more self-contained.
At this stage I can’t see me wading through two more books of such tough material (with the uncomfortable feeling that part of me is enjoying it in the wrong way) just to find out what happens. Maybe – but it’ll be while I think.
So –
6/10 – more of the same is not necessarily a good thing.
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Less Is More (is Lesamy mk II) – week 1
There’s a line in the first episode of Studio 60 where Danny Tripp, the recovering addict who’s just failed a drugs test talks to his partner about slipping up. He says,
I had twelve years, now I’ve got eight days
(or something like that I may have the numbers wrong)
Anyway I sort of know how he feels.
Which is to say I have become the cliche.
Which is to say that about 3 months short of 2 years after I started Lesamy I’m almost back to where I started. Ok I didn’t put all the weight back on. But I am back to wearing a lot of my ‘fat’ clothes (which I only still have because I never got around to giving them to the charity shop) and crucially I’m back to getting out of breath when I climb the stairs.
*sigh*
*shrug*
I was going to post all about how it happened. About the point where my motivation failed me and the stages of decline after that. But, well all that’s in my blog really. You can take it that since my last Lesamy update I more or less went back to eating how I used to two years ago. And of course not exercising.
The crucial thing now is to somehow find that motivation, that commitment, that stubborness to not give up that I managed to maintain for several months but haven’t had for longer.
Anyway I’m starting again. I’m counting from where I am now(*) which I think will help me “start over”.
So:
Week 1
Lost: 1.9kg (4.2lbs)
Weight: 131.7 (20st 10lb)
(*)ok, technically where I was last week.
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Nation, Terry Pratchett
This week I listened to a radio adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s ‘young adult’ novel Nation.
It’s the story of Mau – a boy from a Pacific island tribe who is returning from a rite of passage and so misses a tidal wave that destroys most of the rest of his tribe, the ‘Nation’. He meets Daphne a minor English royal whose ship is wrecked by the same wave. Together with a few other refugees they begin to build/re-build a life, and I guess, society on the island.
I enjoyed this. I liked the relationship between Mau and Daphne. She has a slightly irritating habit of being the sensible down-to-earth straight-talking girl whilst all adults and most males are silly and/or stupidly wrong. He has the annoying habit of sounding a bit twee – an attempt to make his language seem unsophisticated but not stupid I think.
The strangest thing about it is the relationship with the supernatural. On the one hand there’s a story thread about how Mau doesn’t believe in the gods, he thinks that they are stories made up when we don’t know or can’t find out the real reasons for things – he does come to the conclusion that whilst they may be fiction, they can be a useful fiction because they allow you to stop asking big questions about why are we here and get on with doing the things you need to do to survive. On the other hand there’s Locaha – the spirit of Death – and the voices of the dead (the ‘grandfathers’ speak to Mau and the ‘grandmothers’ to Daphne) and they appear to be real. So you have this odd juxtaposition of Mau talking about why he doesn’t believe in the gods shortly after having returned from a visit to the land of Locaha. I think those arguments get a little lost.
However near the end a character observes that no matter how much science we study we still speak of ghosts – so I guess he’s just being consistent in the idea that we always want supernatural in our stories.
7/10
In case you’re wondering I’m not counting this toward 6000 pages because I’m not doing that with audio books this year.