dianaschnuth

Heck, yeah! Eat that, you damn one-month plateau! Ungh! *bitchslap*

*ahem* Sorry.

This week, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been watching my carbohydrate intake more diligently. I’ve been shooting for 125g of carbs and at least 25g of fiber, for a total of 100g of net carbs (since fiber isn’t digestible, y’know). I’ve been going a little over, but it’s apparently the intent that counts. I’ve continued to track my food on SparkPeople, but I’ve been manually tabulating my sugar, as SparkPeople has issue with letting people see how much sugar they’ve eaten. Can’t have people avoiding fruit, after all, since fruit has sugar in it.

At any rate, I’ve kept my protein above 140g daily, my total carbohydrates below 160g, and my fiber above 23g (except yesterday, which only made it to 18g). My sugar intake has been pretty decent, too, staying in the 20g-30g range. Now, most hard-core low-carbers would scoff at these numbers, since Atkins Induction limits you to 20g of carbohydrate per day total, and NO sugar, period. All my sugars have been… let’s see… OK, one day I had some low-cal ice cream that had 16g of sugar, but the rest is mostly my organic breakfast cereal, South Beach Diet snack bars, Splenda Brown Sugar Blend, stuff like that. I feel pretty positive about my food intake, considering this week’s results.

Remember how I said I’d try this for a couple weeks, and see if I lost three pounds in two weeks?

I just lost four and a half pounds in one week.

I weigh 197.5 lbs this morning, in contrast to the 202 I weighed this past Sunday.

Tomorrow’s Easter in Westlake, with Aaron’s family, so I expect I won’t be monitoring my carbs quite as well as I have been. I’ll still make a concerted effort to be good, stock up on the meat, go easy on the starchy goodness, and only eat one small dessert. (Believe me, at Uncle Pete’s, dessert is a course unto itself. We’re responsible for bringing a cake, and I know Pete’s wife Dee will likely be making something scrumptious, too.) I may gain back a little weight, stabilize at a slightly higher number — and I’m OK with that.

I have no intention of getting back up to 200, though.

Looks like James owes me ten bucks.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much success following the SparkDiet this month. Well, I had success in *following* it, but not in losing weight because of it. My weight on March 1st was 202.5 lbs; my weight today, on April 1st, is 202 lbs. After the losses and the gains over the past month, I’m only half a pound below where I started.

Time for a new strategy.

Starting this week, I’m going to be monitoring my carbohydrate intake more closely, and to hell with calories. Well, calories are a good judge of portion size in general, so not entirely to hell with them. They just won’t be my be-all end-all, man-I-fucked-up gauge.

If this doesn’t do something for me, maybe I ought to go back on a “real” diet. One that’s published in a book, and that I follow properly, instead of this grow-your-own bullshit I’ve been trying to do lately. It’s obviously not as successful, and I’m obviously not a medical professional or nutritionist or personal trainer. I don’t know.

I’m not going to beat myself up over it, though. I’m going to give my grow-your-own SparkDiet another, oh, two weeks or so. If I haven’t lost at least three pounds by the end of two weeks — I think that’s a reasonable expectation — I’m going to go back on a structured low-carb diet. Probably not Atkins, but maybe Sugar Busters or another related diet. I certainly have enough books that I’ve never read and reviewed for my now abandoned podcast. We’ll see.

In less than seven days, either myself or my co-worker James will be the winner of a $10 wager.

About three weeks ago, we agreed that we would compete for SparkPoints at SparkPeople.com, and whoever had the most points accumulated in the month of March would win $10. Right now, it’s still anybody’s game. I’m sure we’re both going to pull out all the stops this week, though.

The one major point-gaining strategy I’ve been slacking on is cardio. I can claim 1 SparkPoint for every five minutes of cardio, up to a max of 24 points (that’s two hours) per day. Usually, I only end up doing my 30-minute walk over lunch, and maybe some yoga in the evenings. (I’m not sure yoga should count as cardio, but that’s how they have it categorized, so OK…) This week, head cold permitting, I’m going to ramp up my cardio. I’ll do 45 minutes to an hour walk at lunch (which means I’ll have to get there and clock in on time in the morning), and I’ll do yoga and rebounding (trampolining) nightly. Hell, if I feel up to it, I’ll probably go jogging at Wildwood tomorrow or Tuesday, since the weather’s supposed to be so warm. That much activity in one week should not only kick up my SparkPoints, but also break me out of this goddamned plateau.

I thought before that maybe if I increased my fiber and protein, that would help. It doesn’t seem to be. So, this week, I’m also — no, wait. This week I’m already increasing my activity. I shouldn’t decrease my carb intake at the same time. I’ll hold off on that, and see if doing more cardio does the trick. If it doesn’t, *then* I’ll look at my carbs.

All righty. Wish me luck, both in my competition against James and in my battle against the neverending scale reading of 201.5 pounds.

I never thought I was much of a numbers person — not after snoring through a stats class my Freshman year of college, then struggling through other collegiate-level maths. I’ve discovered, though, that I enjoy finding and tracking trends, be they at work or in my weight loss.

I’ve been seriously bummed this week, and losing faith in the SparkDiet, because I’ve remained at 201.5 pounds for the past nine days straight (not counting one day when I lost half a pound, then gained it back the next). The only thing that kept me from totally giving it the big heave-ho was my $10 wager with James. For total SparkPoints earned, not for total weight lost, thank goodness.

At any rate, I have my own Excel spreadsheet and graph that I’ve been updating over the past, oh, more than four years, and I’ve incorporated weekly averages into it. I average my weight for the week, Sunday through Saturday, and subtract that average from the previous week’s average to help gauge my weight loss. I’d forgotten that last week’s average was 202.2, and it turns out that this week’s average is 201.4 (thanks to that one lower day), so I actually lost 0.8 pounds since last week. That makes me feel better.

SparkPeople, though not exactly the diet I would have chosen for myself without the online tracking, at least has some nifty graphs relating to food and exercise and goal-setting. It tells me that my recommended daily fiber intake is 25-35g, and informs me that I’m consistently below that level. I can also see that my protein isn’t as high as a former low-carber’s should be. So, my goal for this week is to meet my recommended fiber and exceed my recommended protein levels. Those things alone should push a lot of the evilness out of my diet.

Today will be fun. Today, Aaron and I are meeting Jason at the Happy Rose Buffet, where I will be selecting only the healthiest items possible, having only one plate of food, and sticking mainly to sushi. I will set a good example, and I will be proud of myself.