Well all, this is a tough time to be on a diet. Wishing you all a happy and safe holiday and hoping that those of us who are bad, are only a little bad.
(I’m gonna be at least a little bad. My birthday is next week and Mom will be cooking my favorite cookies.)
Happy Thanksgiving all.
My pre-Turkey Day weekend of overeating weight is 197.5 pounds. Near my lowest.
I have only lost two pounds in the last 2 months. 
I need to somehow keep below 200 through the Holidays.
Jim
I always think - it’s a holiDAY not a holiWEEK or a holiMONTH. I will enjoy the meal and have some pie and immediately get right on track.
I ran the YMCA 5K Turkey Trot this morning. Bring on the pie.
Hey, what a coinky-dink, I am also at 197.5. For me though, it represents some movement after about a month of being stuck at 203-ish from September through October.
I did some researching into “fat loss plateaus” (turning up a lot of advice similar to what’s found on this page), and the following suggestions seemed to work well for me:
[ul][li]If you’ve been significantly restricting your calories for a while… Try eating more for a few days at least. Your body may be in “conservation mode”.[/li][li]If you’ve been training pretty hard (5-6 days a week, or even every day of the week), take a few days or a whole week off to recharge.[/li][li]Kick your cardio up a notch. If you’ve been walking, start jogging. If you’ve been jogging, start running. If you’re not sweating or breathing hard (while still being able to carry on a conversation), you’re doing it too easy.[/li][li]Increase your cardio duration. If you’re running for 20 minutes, try 25 or 30 minutes. More than 40-45 minutes though and you’re probably better off doing harder cardio rather than longer.[/li][li]Use interval training. Instead of running at a moderate pace for 20 minutes, try running hard for 3-5 minutes, slowing to a walk to catch your breath, then run again.[/li][li]Try doing your cardio first thing in the morning before breakfast (“fasted cardio”).[/li][li]Shake your cardio venue up. If you’ve been walking/running, maybe try a stationary bike. (But don’t use this change as an excuse to dial down the effort.)[/li][/ul]
After a month of no change, I took a week off, then started doing the harder cardio in intervals thing first thing in the morning. I used to run for 20-25 minutes at 6.7 mph, not including 5 minutes warm-up/down of walking; now I run for 5 minutes at a stretch at 8-8.5 mph for 3-4 segments, with 2 minute breaks of walking to catch my breath. I do this from about 7am to 7:30am, then shower and change and get to work, eating breakfast around 8:30am. (My gym is close to my office.)
Since doing this I’ve begun shedding the fat again, a bit under a pound a week.
Oh, and don’t forget the progressive weight training. It’s important even in a fat loss (negative calorie) program in order to keep your “weight loss” from being muscle rather than fat (remember, your “lean mass” is what’s actually burning calories, lose that and you’ll make losing fat that much harder).
Well, the holiday weekend is almost over. How did we do?
I was pretty bad. As I mentioned, it will be my birthday next week, so Mom made cookies for me. Despite my promise to myself that I would only have two per day, I have finished the lot of them.
The worst part of this though is: I had given up such things and lost the cravings for them. Now that I have over-indulged, I’m craving them like mad.
Today I will strive to get back on the wagon and give up cookies again. (Luckily I didn’t have any chocolate candy.)
I gained only monthly water weight which I’m sure will be gone by Tuesday (my weigh-in day).
On Thanksgiving, I completed the last of the Low Key Hillclimbs up Mt. Hamilton. I climbed the 19 miles / ~4400 feet in 2:09. I ate a few more bananas and cookies at the top than I should have, but I was tired and it was cold (it was about 38 degF with 20-30 mph winds). Besides, I figure I earned them. And Thanksgiving dinner. And a nice slice of pie for desert.
I still haven’t been able to crack my plateau. Right now I’m about a half a pound heavier than my weigh-in at the beginning of November. It’s terribly frustrating. I think I’ve seen some progress, as this photo from October 21st and this photo from Thanksgiving (hopefully) show.
On the positive side, I’ve got on my wife’s stationary bike for the first time in about three months (since I got the road bike), and I can really see the improvement. The “fitness test” wasn’t able to compute a score because it wasn’t able to ratchet up the difficulty enough to raise my heart rate, and I was able to pull 12-13 METS / 350 watts without superhuman effort.
Today I’m planning on taking my son out for a lazy ride on Sawyer Camp Trail, which will be 12 miles if he can make it the whole way up and back.
Keep up the good work everyone!
I ate a super-high protein breakfast on Thursday morning, and a protein bar on my way down to Baltimore. My plan was to do this so I could eat whatever I felt like eating at my sister’s house, and not have to worry about it. And that’s just what I did.
Two weeks ago, I was in bed for almost four days with a horrendous infection in my left kidney. The following Thursday was my monthly appt. at my surgeon’s office. I think that four days of barely eating contributed to my 14lb. weight loss for the month. I’ve lost another 3.5lbs since then, for a total so far of 95.5lbs. lost.
Good work, Norine. I wondered where you’ve been. We have a box o’ books for kidlet when you come, or if Mr. Eww wants to come by.
For some reason, I haven’t been getting email notifications about posts to this thread, so it kind of slipped my mind until I saw it on the front page again. Duh.
I’m sure the kids will appreciate the books. At this point, though, it’s probably better to just leave them with you until we see you guys on the 9th.
I really must learn to check who’s logged in before I post! :smack:
I don’t think I did too badly over the holiday. Granted, I did eat two Thanksgiving dinners, but that was pretty much all I ate those two days. I refuse to feel guilty about eating whatever I want to on Thanksgiving (pumpkin cheesecake!). The worst part of the holiday was that I didn’t have much time to exercise. I didn’t have time Wednesday evening because I worked late and then went along with my husband to his pool league game. Thursday morning I had cooking to do and then it was off to the in-laws’. Friday morning I worked and that afternoon we had a houseful of company before going to my mom’s for another TG dinner. I did get my workout in Saturday and yesterday though. I didn’t want to fall too far off the wagon where that’s concerned, since that’s where most of my weight loss has come from. I don’t do very well at dieting and frankly, don’t try all that hard. I’m up about a pound this week but I’m sure once I’m back on my regular exercise schedule it’ll be gone again.
Man, I’m struggling today. It is not quite 10 yet and I’m starving! The price we pay for our indulgances…
I am doing ok today, but I really over indulged over the weekend. This morning I weighed 201. That is a 3.5-pound gain over the weekend. I will now spend all week dropping it back off. At least I hope it is only this week. Maybe this will help my overall weight loss.
Jim
Haven’t even lurked in this thread before today. Norine, that’s quite impressive!
My weight gains and losses happen in a much smaller range, but it’s still gotta be dealt with before my gut takes on a life of its own. I got careless and put on 10 lbs. (and went up a waist size as a result) between last October and this October. I’m going against the grain, trying to lose it back over the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s season, but I’ve lost back three of those ten pounds, net, despite participating in a number of food-intensive events that pushed the numbers up temporarily over that time; I’ve done a lot of gaining and re-losing the same few pounds, but I’ve still managed to come out ahead.
My immediate goal is to lose another three pounds in the next three weeks, so that when I hit those last two office parties before heading down for Christmas with the in-laws, I’ll at least be starting off in better shape than I am now.
Wow. You’d really, really have to pig out to put on that much fat in a weekend. My guess would be that some of the junk you did eat caused you to retain some fluid, too. The good news is that the fluid is easy to get rid of.
Thanks! By the next time I see you, hugging me will feel quite different! 
I know you are right, which is why I am fairly confident I can get rid of it by the end of this week. However, I did pig out. I ate stuffing, pies, candy, more stuffing, whip cream, cookies, more stuffing, junk food, drank a lot of beer, did I mention the stuffing?, and I topped it all off with a heavy Portuguese Garlic Chicken with lots of rice and fries. In 4 days, I probably had more fat and empty calories than I did in the prior month.
Jim
Well, I had a double-whammy. Not only was Thursday Thanksgiving, but Saturday was my birthday. I spent all day preparing a fabulous T-day dinner but didn’t stuff myself, which felt good. I did feast --like yellowval I refuse to feel guilty over celebrating a cultural feast day. Years ago I read something by Dr. John McDougall where he said something to the effect that we as a culture and as people need celebration days, feast days. And that’s okay–we’re celebrating and giving thanks for the year, and one day of indulgence does not negate all the hard work we’ve been doing all year. We’ve just got to keep in mind that it’s a feast day and not week or month .
To that end, I allowed myself to feast… and learned that I could do it without stuffing myself. I enjoyed a lovely, calorie laden meal, but didn’t over-indulge, didn’t even want to over-indulge, and that always feels like an internal victory… and I worked out hard that morning and felt great when I went to bed, not bloated and slightly nauseated :D.
Also, my birthday was Saturday and we went out for dinner at a foo-foo restaurant, so I let myself have a nice dinner then. I’ve been working out hard all weekend and haven’t weighed myself since last week, so I’m hoping I at least came out even in the end.
I lost about a pound this week. I figure I would have lost 3, but Thanksgiving and a long weekend away intervened. I was surprised that I lost anything. My exercise routine has been shot, first because of physical therapy and now because of 2nd degree burns on 2 fingers on my right hand. I’m going to try to get back to the gym tomorrow.
I was starving today! I managed to get all the way to 10:30 before I ate my lunch. I went out at lunch and bought a salad and now at least I am stuffed on raw vegetables instead of junk I would have normally bought.