On Losing Weight

I have decided (with some prodding from various directions) that I really need to lose weight. Well, really, it would be more like giving it away since I won’t miss it when it’s gone. But I digress. I have an extraordinarily complicated plan for succeeding this time.  I am going to inflict my progress (or lack thereof) on all two of you who read this thing. More specifically, I am going to report my daily weigh-ins here. The theory behind this is that it will keep me honest, or at least more honest than doing it privately, which clearly hasn’t worked.

So, to get things rolling, here are the numbers from the past week.

2013-07-23 307.4
2013-07-24 307.0
2013-07-25 306.8
2013-07-26 305.4
2013-07-27 305.0
2013-07-28 304.8
2012-07-29 305.4

All weights are reported in pounds for a couple of reasons. The first is that my scale reports in pounds. The second is that the numbers move faster in either direction (there are 2.2 pounds in a kilogram) so there is a greater psychological impact to changes in the reading.

The readings are taken in the morning before breakfast and after certain bodily functions are taken care of. They are also taken undressed (except for my glasses which I need to be able to read the scale and my underwear which contributes a negligible amount to the total). This should eliminate most of the variability from other factors.

It seems pretty obvious from the above table that I was doing okay until this morning. In actual fact, even the number for this morning isn’t terrible. However, the fact that it is higher than the previous couple of entries does mean that I need to consider what I did yesterday to make sure it doesn’t continue.

My ultimate goal is “get down to a healthy weight”, whatever that means. I expect that is somewhere in the range of 200 pounds but that will become clearer as I get closer. But as a goal, “lose 100 pounds” sucks. Instead, I have broken it into sub-goals. First, for each sub-goal, I’m targetting “under 305 pounds”. Then, “under 300 pounds”, and so on. There is a psychological weight to each of those nice round numbers. Those sub-goals don’t have a particular time attached to them. Instead, the specific daily, visible goal is “less than the day before” which should be fairly easy to meet.

As far as reporting here, my goal is to report the numbers no less than once a week but preferably daily. Regardless of the interval between posting, absent special circumstances (broken scale, no scale available, etc.), there will be a number for every single day.

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