This morning I was at 215, down 4 pounds from my last weigh in. It was a pretty good weekend (50 mile ride on Sat, short ride on Sun, ate well) but the drop surprised me since I hadn’t eaten all that well last week. I’m officially more than half way to my goal, and about a month ahead of my schedule.
Go me.
WTG, Telemark!
I am wearing a dress today that I haven’t worn in more than five years.
This hereby constitutes meeting a major goal of mine – to start getting back into some of my old clothes.
dance of joy
This month has been somewhat frustrating compared with the previous two. I’ve had two ~week long plateaus, each followed by a small gain, and then followed by a loss to the next plateau level. Intellectually, I understand that this may be because of gains in muscle mass (especially considering that I’ve added some extra aerobics and strength training into the mix), but emotionally it’s hard to come to grips with the fact that the extra effort isn’t enough to keep the overall trend downwards.
The good news is that since my report the first of the month is that I’ve lost 11 pounds, crossing (the psycologically important barrier of) 250 to 249. If the trend continues, it looks like I’ll end off the month at 245-246, which would total about 50 pounds since I started 3 months ago. When I started, I had a goal of 220 by July 2007. I think it’s time to think of a more realistic goal.
Hi all, currently I am on the low GI diet which is working really well for me, working out 5 days a week and walking the other days. I didn’t weigh myself when I started in January of this year so I don’t know how much weight I lost up to March. Since March, I’ve lost 24.75 inches and 31 lbs and am due for a weigh in/measuring next Saturday.
I’m just reading through these posts and wondering if people are all weighing themselves daily? I used to diet excessively at one point and began weighing myself daily and it really became an obsession about the numbers for me. I lost track of the health benefits I was gaining, of how better my heart and lungs were etc - it was all about the numbers and if the numbers didn’t read right, then I was devastated. I now believe that weighing myself daily was a real problem for me - I have heard recommendations that a person should only weigh themselves weekly or even monthly, in order to take account of natural fluctuations in the body (especially for women but probably also for men).
These days, my diet is less restrictive than it used to be, my exercise is of the same intensity but not for 2.5 hours plus a day, I’m not exhausted and cold the whole time and I get weighed and measured at my gym once a month - when I started there, I told them I didn’t want to know the numbers, just tell me when I’ve lost. I feel it’s more healthy for me not to focus on the numbers all the time but to focus on the health benefits. The benefit of measuring is that I can be losing inches but not so much weight (as muscle weighs more than fat, therefore I am developing my muscles which burn more calories at rest than fat ever will).
I guess I am taking a more holistic view of my weight loss/road to health and fitness than I ever did before and I think this new attitude will help me in the long term. And it’s the long term that’s important to me as I know that this is now a way of life, not just something I do for a few months and go back to what I was doing. It’s a re-education for me.
What do people think about daily weighing?
Well, it was hard, but I made a conscious decision not to weigh myself today. When I first came home from the hospital, it seemed like a good idea to weigh myself daily, just to track what’s going on with my body. But lately, it’s become a negative thing, and I’m not liking what daily weighing is doing to my brain. So I think I’m going to start weighing weekly, and that’s it!
I see my surgeon on Thursday, and the numbers on his scale are the only ones I count as “official”. But I’ll track myself weekly here at home, and stop this daily weighing nonsense!
I wore a dress yesterday that made my teenager ask “Mom, is that a new dress?” and I said no, it’s an old dress I haven’t been able to wear in a couple of years! So that was good!
Congratulations on the weight loss and improved health!!
Hi Norinew , I think that it’s all about our physical health **as well as ** our mental health and it really can’t be good for anyone’s mental health to be weighing themselves every day - we all fluctuate and I feel it can be ruinuous to a person’s self confidance if they go up by a couple of pounds in one day and down again another day. You never know where you’re at then.
I think taking your official readings from the Doctor’s scales is very wise too - it gives you a real basis to work from each time you visit.
Thanks for the congratulations on the weight loss and improved health - I really can say, hand on heart, that I feel better today than at any other time in my life. I wish I’d wised up sooner!
Good luck to you also! 
Wanna know what pisses me off? My husband who’s lost almost 10 lbs in the past 4 weeks without really trying. He just decided to start eating healthier after his recent colonoscopy so he cut out fast food and sweets and started making himself fruit smoothies for breakfast.
And here I am at about the same weight I’ve been for, well, quite a long time. Today I weigh 177.
It is important to look on the bright side. Yesterday I went shopping and bought myself some new clothes. Size 14. I had been wearing 16s but they were falling off me. Progress not perfection, right?
Still it just galls me how easy it is for him. :mad:
OK, sorry for the mini rant. Back to your regularly scheduled weight loss thread already in progress.
I weigh every day and put the information in LifeForm which gives me a nifty line graph. It’s easier that way to see the overall progress and not get caught in the day to day fluctuations. But I have to admit that I still get pissed when the number goes up and happy when it goes down. I threw my scale away once and that had the effect of making me give up dieting and I gained about 10 lbs so, for now, I’ll just continue to weigh every day.
Well, there are a couple of factors here. One, men lose weight faster than women; it’s because they have more muscles mass than women. Two, chances are good that he hasn’t made as many attempts at weight loss as you have, therefore helping his metabolism to stay higher. It does suck, but it’s life.
Meantime, congrats on a smaller clothing size!
I couldn’t handle the daily/hourly fluctuations of the scale. I realize there are many reasons why weight can fluctuate, if you pick up glass of water, it’s heavy. If you drink a glass of water, you then weigh you + glass of water. Still, the scale became an emotional roller coaster for me. I couldn’t stay off of it, and weighed myself several times a day. When the weight was down, I felt ecstatic, motivated and that I could be successful at losing weight. When the scale was up, I felt like a failure, a loser - I was working so hard without results, I might as well go eat a cheesecake.
There are a lot of successful dieters who weigh every day and like getting used to the body’s fluctations. I know a few people that weigh daily, but take a weekly average. Or, they weigh daily, but pick one day a week to be their “offical” weekly weigh in. To save my sanity and motivation, I only weigh myself once a week, on Sunday, without clothes, first thing in the morning. Weighing myself like that gave me the consistency to stick with it.
So, if you don’t mind the daily fluctuations and you stay positive no matter WHAT the scale says, definitely weigh yourself everyday (several times a day!). Since weighing myself every day made me miserable, I had to weigh myself less and emphasize non scale related measurement (clothing sizes, measurements).
I weigh daily, but like Glory said, you have to really be used to your daily weight fluctuations. Water weight, food that was recently consumed, salt intake and water retention, etc… could really mess with your head if you let it.
So I weigh daily (first thing in the morning, without clothes), and enter the numbers in a spreadsheet in Excel. Then instead of worrying about daily numbers, I used a ten-day moving average to chart my progress. So even if my weight fluctuates day to day, or even seems to be going up for a few days even though I’m still on track on my diet, I know that as long as my average weight is trending downwards, I’m still on track.
I prefer to weigh daily and then track the average, because when I used to weigh in weekly it could sometimes still be discouraging - it might look like I didn’t lose any weight that week, but that was just a fluke fluctuation. But if I weigh every day, then I know that I’m making progress in general. It keeps me more motivated.
Of course, YMMV and all that.
I have a friend who had the same bypass surgery as me, and she weighs daily; then, she keeps herself upbeat by claiming as her own, whatever was her lowest number that week! 
It works for her.
What with the ridiculousness of my life in the past two months, I haven’t bothered to diet. I weighed myself today for the first time in those two months (which included a trip home with foods I get only once a year and NO EXERCISE). I am up eight pounds, and I’m sure a pound or two of that is monthly water weight gain.
I wish I could say I was upset about it, but it’s nothing compared to some of the other crap we’ve been dealing with (and are done with now, but thanks for your concern).
I’ll get back to it when I feel like it. I’m watching the food intake, but haven’t decided when to get back to the gym.
PS: Norine, are you skinny and beautiful yet?
Not quite yet. Ask me again next month. 
I thought it was gonna be next week?
Hey, can I join the club?
Just signed up on eDiets. I did really well a couple of years ago on Atkins, then slowly started to backslide, then last year about this time had an overuse injury that pretty much did in my exercise regime for a while, yada yada yada.
The good thing is that I have lost and regained weight so many times that I know portion sizes, etc. by heart and am really good at eyeballing a 3 oz. serving of meat. And the other thing I’ve learned is that ANY diet works if you stick with it. So I’m doing your basic 1200 calories, lots of fruits and veggies gig.
Looking forward to hanging out with you guys for moral support, etc.
Hey, freckafree, welcome!
Good Luck & Welcome freckafree.
What’s up Doc?
I just got the cravings for something sweet and I am munching on a bag of carrots.
Jim
I’m going on vacation next week for 3 weeks (can’t wait, counting the seconds) and I’m not terribly worried about what I eat (yay! that’s a first). Both my husband and I have been following a low GI diet since Christmas last and we find that we cannot go back to the kind of stuff we were eating before - too much fat makes us feel really bloated and horrible and we miss fruit and veg! I crave salad with cherry tomatoes and red peppers and I think we’d have withdrawal symptoms if we didn’t eat it about 5 times a week!
Whilst on holidays, we do intend to treat ourselves a little but keeping in mind what we know to be low GI and making good choices. We are self catering which will help a huge amount too - my husband is a really good cook and really enjoys it so there’s no complaints here!
What’s your favourite dinner at the moment? Hubby makes a very good chilli which has beans, lentils and some meat (nowhere near as much meat as in previous chilli incarnations) which all add protein. He only uses 2 teaspoons of olive oil for the whole receipe which gives us two dinners and two lunches for me to take to work. It’s my treat dinner and we have it every Friday night - totally yum.
Anyone got any other suggestions for delicious low fat/low cal/low GI meals?
My standard dinner these days is a salad: romaine lettuce, half a cuke, some grilled chicken breast (half a regular-sized one, a third of a large one), a sprinkle of gorgonzola cheese, and a little Italian dressing. I’ve been eating this day in and day out for months and still love it.