Dieting Progress Report

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker today and it made me think about my current approach to dieting and living a healthy lifestyle.
I have been able to lose 25lbs since the beginning of June. Since I have started this dieting and biking thing 2.5 years ago I have lost a total of 50 lbs. Please please hold the applause. I feel good about this progress. What I like even more than the actual number is that none of my clothes fit anymore. They just hang off of me. Even my shoes. Really my shoes are too big. The other part is that I now weigh less than my younger brother. I assure that hasn’t happened since we were children or maybe ever. I loved his competitive response to this news. He was all “let me starve myself for a few days and reweigh myself”. No sucker! I beat you!!!!

There are a couple things that have made this experience more successful than past attempts to lose weight. The biggest one is that I haven’t put any pressure on myself to succeed. I want to succeed but I don’t perform well under pressure. I have always lived this horrible cycle of failing and then being so terribly hard on myself. I then completely give up because the whole endeavor was just too hard. I never thought I could be successful in this area.

I am not keeping a food journal. You heard me right…I am not recording my food intake. I just can’t. This was one of the things that used to destroy my self-confidence. That doesn’t mean I don’t evaluate what I eat. I look at my daily intake before dinner and I determine how much I should eat. I want to keep my calories at 1800 or less per day. But this is a flowing number and I don’t beat myself up when I don’t achieve it. I just say to myself perhaps eating crap at the fair shouldn’t be repeated the next day. I try to make better choices when I eat out. I try to eat only two pieces of pizza and not four. I try to not stop for ice cream on a daily basis and I am strictly regulating the amount of dessert allowed into my house.

I have stopped pressuring myself to cook healthy and nutritious whole foods. That never really worked as I am usually too tired to cook when I get home from my fun evening activities. Instead I have filled my freezer with Lean Cuisines and Smart Ones and other such frozen delights. It isn’t always great but it fills me up and it prevents me from stopping at Taco Bell on my way home when I am most vulnerable to the hunger and exhaustion. I realize that this isn’t the best nutritional choice but it is calorie controlled and way better to the alternative (Taco Bell).

Last month a friend wrote a blog that talked about how bike riding is not the key to weight loss. I completely agree with her. It is more about the food than the exercise. But the combination of both has enabled me to be successful. The other part is I haven’t looked at the biking strictly as a weight loss tool. I look at is as fun first. My goals surrounding biking had zero to do with weight and more to overcoming mental blocks about what I can and cannot do. Yes, I can ride 1000 miles in a summer (I am way over that BTW), yes I conquered Riley Hill, and yes I can ride 50 miles in a day. I actually completed a metric century (62 miles) a few weekends ago. All of these things help tremendously with the weight loss but they are not the key factor to my current success.

I feel the key to my current success is to relax the pressure on myself. I think I will always struggle with the eating thing but if I can continue having a positive attitude and give myself a break every now and then, this could work for me.

The specific question that the co-worker asked me was did I have a weight loss goals. The answer is NO. I don’t want to lose XX by a certain date. I cannot look at it that way. I just want to continue to make positive progress. I feel if I decided that I wanted to lose 10lbs each month it would kill me if I didn’t achieve that goal and prevent future progress.

I prefer to look at it this way. The less I weigh the easier it will be for me to climb the hills on my bike and maybe one day actually pass one of my friends on the ascent. That will be worth celebrating.