Krista's Graph

This is roughly the graph Krista was talking about towards the end of her post.


The effort to enter calories tapers off as all your common food is entered, and in time you'll hit a constant low rate of foods you haven't entered into the system coming up in your day to day eating.

Also, on a separate note, Krista just jumped up saying "I can just figure this out empirically!" as she ran off to get the kitchen scale. She's telling me the alternate ways to figure out how much a muffin weighs. You know what's tricky? Telling how much a muffin weighs when you have a whole bunch of muffins and a scale.

Also, says Krista: "The math was true!".

Scott's Week 2 Weigh-in

Starting Weight: 159
Last Week's Weight: 158
Current Weight: 156 (down 2!)
Goal Weight: 150

Exercise:

• 29km running

Eating:

• Still around 1500-2000 calories/day.
• Dieting trick: If you're eating Krista's delicious "Novel Nuts" (as they're called - they're spiced, sweetened pecans), you should do it with these steps, in order:

1. Decide how many to eat. Hint: if you decide on more nuts that you have fingers, that's too many.
   
2. Get the container out and remove that many.
3. Close the container and put it away.
4. Eat the nuts.
   

Extra bonus:

• Freezing your own smoothie food is waaaaaay cheaper (about 50% the cost). Still expensive for food, but about $2/lb rather than $4-$5.

Super-duper graph:

At Moose's suggestion, I've added the dashed line. It's roughly an extension of my actual progress, so if it's below the red line, I'm good, if I'm between the blue and red lines, it's iffy and if I'm above the blue line, I'm in trouble. For now it's below the red line!

The dashed line doesn't necessarily go though the most recent data point - it's the line of best fit through the whole data set, but it should be close enough for this purpose.

Yoda and Goal-Setting

I remember a lecture from Psych 101, in which the prof was talking about a study in which they discussed effective goal-setting.

The main idea was this: when working to achieving something, focus on things that you do or don't do, not things that you try to do and might fail. The test is that the sentence "I tried to do X and failed" shouldn't make sense.

For example, if my overall goal is to lose 2 pounds per week, I might say "I want to lose two pounds per week". And at the end of week 1, I might be 2 pounds down or I might not.

What this prof was saying was to this instead:

Ask yourself: "What do I have to do to lose 2 pounds per week?"

The answer might be something like: "Well, I need a calorie deficit of about 1,000 calories per day to achieve that, so I'm going to eat no more than 1,500 calories per day and exercise for 1 hour per day".

Then, at the end of week 1, your success is based on: "Did I eat 1,500 calories per day and exercise for 1 hour per day?". You can see that "I tried and failed" doesn't make sense for this goal. You might say "I did it" or "I didn't do it", but the "I tried but that piece of cake fell into my mouth" will not fly very well.

The trouble is that real-world goals are often the "try and succeed/fail" type and not the "do/don't do" type, so it can be helpful to develop the habit of converting between the two.

As our good friend Yoda says:

Do or do not, there is no try

Scott's Weigh-in

Starting Weight (last week): 159
Current Weight: 158
Goal Weight: 150

Exercise (was kinda lame):

• 2x Jillian, level 3. Don't be fooled, I'm just tagging along with Krista who can actually do level 3. I spend some of the time panting on the ground.
  
• 11km running
  

Eating:

• I've more or less behaved myself. I'm not a big calorie counter, but I'm hitting about 1500-2000 per day.
• Favourite dieting trick: working with food seems to give some of the satisfaction of eating it. I like to eat peanuts because it's a lot of work to get them out.

Extra bonus:

• Dieting makes you a much cheaper drunk!

Super-duper graph:

• I'll try to stay below the red line to give some buffer at the end.
  

Joining the Challenge

This morning, as I was sitting next to Krista at breakfast, looking like a hobo:


when Krista reached out her finger, and poked this:


... and then she wiggled her finger around to make it dance.

(no, not that! Seriously people!)

So, here we are - I'm joining the challenge!

My goal is just weight loss:

Current weight: 159
Goal weight: 150
Goal weight loss: 9 pounds.