Blessed by the Potato

I had a fairly arbitrary goal for losing weight in 2018: about 2 pounds per month, or 24 for the year. It sounded do-able without being drastic. The first half of the year didn’t go so well, and I ended up cutting the price of the course in response. Then I got serious, and lost a lot of weight in the third quarter, mostly by doing what I should have been doing all along: tracking what I ate.

This quarter featured many food-centric holidays: Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Potatomas, as well as my birthday. So I eased up on the diet and the pressure to lose weight. However, it also marked the beginning of the curling season, so overall things weren’t too bad. In the end I lost 8 lbs this quarter, which is a marked decrease in the rate from last quarter, but still better than the 2-lbs-per-month pace I was targeting for the year. It means that even though all the progress was crammed into the last half, I did manage to meet (exceed!) my 2018 goal, losing just over 30 lbs in total.

It’s cliché to say, but this has been a good thing. I have more physical energy, and I’m more flexible for curling. My heartrate hasn’t improved meaningfully since the update last quarter (~2 bpm, which is less than the week-to-week variance in FitBit’s graph), but that improvement was still a big one and puts me in a much healthier range. My snoring is mostly gone, though I’m still not getting enough sleep (but that’s not a function of poor sleep — I think the sleep I am getting is good, I just need to get better about turning off the world and just going to bed in the first place).

One downside is why I emphasized physical energy above: a big mindset change was not letting myself eat because I wanted to use food as substitutes for emotions or because I was bored, etc. But that means that sometimes when I’m stressed, I’m adding to my mental burden as I fight the old habit of eating through the stress. I’ve noticed it’s made hitting peak productivity a little harder when writing.

I’m not sure yet what the ultimate goal for 2019 should be. In my last update I said the next goal would be to get to the “overweight” BMI range (from “obese”) by June, but even at my slower “I can have a few Halloween-sized chocolate bars” pace of Q4, I’m already halfway there and on track to hit that point by April.

Getting to a weight that starts with a 1 would have been unfathomable a few years ago, but I know I probably shouldn’t stop there. I just don’t know what to target for the year: 2 lbs/mo again? Maybe take it a month at a time and not set a goal for the year?

I know one thing to make explicit is to not backslide: many people who lose weight do go back and put it on again, so I’m going to be conscious of that even as I don’t feel as much pressure to lose so much so quickly anymore.

2019 Goals:

• Lose just over 7 lbs in the first quarter (same pace as Q4-18).
• No backsliding through the year!
• Keep ~2 lbs/mo pace through to end of Q2 and re-evaluate?