So today is important for 2 reasons:

• It’s been 90 days since I started this journey
• I ran a different set of numbers to see what additional benefits I was achieving with this fitness initiative

I stepped on the scale this morning, and it showed that I lost 18kg so far. That’s an average of 6kg a month over the last 3 months! It feels really good to have achieved that. Sometimes I look at the scale and my two tracking apps (Fitbit and MyFitnessPal), and I feel like they are lying to me. In truth, not many people notice that I have lost 18kg. I guess by many measurements, I am still far away from a healthy weight. But I notice the change in small, but nice ways.

Like for example, this morning I had to wash my favourite pair of black jeans (and in fact all but one pair of jeans). So in a bit of a desperation, I took the last pair of jeans that I saw in the closet and just put them on and went downstairs to the laundry. As I was doing that, I realised that the jeans I was wearing were the black pair of jeans I had put away in the closet back in July 2015 once I had outgrown them. So it was a really nice treat this morning. Once I reach my Phase 1 goal, I think that there are some of the things which I have put away in the back of the closet that I will be able to wear again 🙂

The other things I decided to do this morning was to go to my credit card’s website and download some data. I was interested to test a theory of mine that not only had I been eating better, but I had been doing it for less money than I would have before this fitness journey. So I decided to take two typical travel months, November 2015 and February 2016, and do a comparison on my spending on food at home in Stockholm (I excluded food purchased during business travel and vacation trips).

What I found out is that when I compare November 2015 to February 2016, I spent about twice the amount of money ($700) in November compared to February ($350). So at least the initial analysis confirms that I am literally paying myself to lose weight! It comes about because as a single guy, I make meals typically with 3-4 servings. So there is always something for lunch or dinner the next day. And I tend to prepare food 3 or 4 nights a week and then just rotate those amongst the days. So essentially the cost of one night out is being spread out over 2-3 days.

Anyway, I thought that I’d create a sidebar conversation about some of the other aspects of my fitness journey, since it is more than about weight loss. Until next time!

So what a difference 11 days can make!

When I last wrote, I was in the midst of a plateau. It was angering, depressing, and motivating all at the same time!

It was depressing because even though I was doing the same things, I wasn’t seeing any weekly improvement. It was depressing because mathematically it meant that was goal seemed to be out of reach and I was resigning myself to the fact that I would miss my goal by 3-4 kilos. It was motivating because I thought it didn’t have to be that way if I didn’t want to it be. So 11 days later, the good news is that the scale has started to move definitively down again. I am 1kg lighter than when I last wrote. It sounds like it is a small thing, but it is a big achievement to me. And I owe it to a couple of things:

• Increasing the intensity of my exercise
• I started adding morning and evening routines to my exercise schedule
• I re-grounded myself in the “Psycho” mentality (it’s really CICO, but it feels more fun to say psycho)

CICO basically means that when it comes to weight loss, it’s no more complicated than Calories In / Calories Out. At the end of every day, I need to be at a caloric deficit in order to lose weight. And on the days when I know that I will take in more calories than I use, I simply need to plan to create larger deficits on the other days. I of course will not starve myself, but I can make better, more thoughtful choices with the other meals that I have available.

Note here that I am not talking about nutrition, although that is important too. For weight loss purposes, a calorie is a calorie, whether it is a bowl of ice cream or a bowl of salad. For nutritional purposes (the vitamins and nutrients your body gets out of eating both), you of course go for the salad more than you do for the ice cream.

So now I have the 11 weeks to lose 12kg, to meet the original goal of losing this weight by my birthday. I think that it is amazingly tough to lose 1kg a week. I am basically telling myself to go one step further and lose 1.1kg a week. I have to think about how to do this. It might be that I can’t do this myself and that it is time to bring in a personal trainer.

Throughout this journey so far, I have told myself that I wanted to lose weight and do it in a natural way as possible. That means that I didn’t want to start using supplements (like whey powders for example), nor did I want to want to swap out ‘regular’ foods for ‘diet versions’ of food (e.g. low-fat, fat-free, etc). I wanted to eat naturally, and just make better food choices and natural substitutions. I also didn’t want to fully embrace Intermittent Fasting just yet, and I haven’t fully embraced Stronglifts 5×5 yet (I did it a few times, but I feel like that is for Phase 2 of my journey). My actions so far have carried me to 58% of my goal. I am hoping that this approach can carry me the last 42%.

It’s hard to believe that it has been 75 days since I started on this journey. 75 days! Holy shit that is a long time. But it hasn’t felt like a long. In fact, it’s felt like quite a short time. In terms of weeks, it’s only been a little over 10 weeks since I have started to focus on my eating and exercise habits.

So where has it left me?

I weighed myself today and realised that I lost 15kg since I stepped on the scale on New Year’s Day. I think that this is something to be proud of, even if I don’t feel very happy about it.

That probably sounds strange, eh? But let me explain…

As I wrote previously, I have a goal weight that I am trying to get to. My originally goal to reach that number by my birthday, but at current rate and pace, losing 1kg a week, I would miss my goal by 2 weeks. So now I have to decide how much is my goal worth to me? I probably need a couple of weeks of making myself miserable in order to get there, but I could do it. This goal is important to me. I made a promise to myself to get there by a certain date. As good as it would feel to still make the goal with only a two week delay, it still means that I will have failed.

But I will do my very best to succeed in a healthy and safe way.

No matter what, I won’t blame anyone other than myself for the end result. One of the great things about using the MyFitnessPal (MFP) app is that it adds another dimension to my eating. I like to think of it as “matrix-fying the way I consume food”.  The best way I can describe it is kinda like being Neo in the matrix. I visualise numerical values (calories, micro-, macro-nutrients) on the plate or in the glass. And most times I make smarter choices because of it.

The weight achievement I have today is tenuous. I need it to hold for the rest of the week before I declare success. And I am still of the mind to get to buy some PT time with my gym, as I do feel like what got me to this amount of weight loss so far might not be enough to get me through the next round.

In terms of exercise, it’s still pretty much the same:

• 3x a week of body pump (I consider it working with weights, even though the internet is evenly divided on whether it has any value at all as a type of strength training )
• 2x week of spinning
• 1x week of something I call “cardio blast” (60-120 minutes of a sustained activity)

Sooner or later I will incorporate Stronglifts 5×5 into my life, but I am not there yet. Most of it is psychological. As I might have written earlier, my experiences in that part of the gym the few times I have been there haven’t been positive. The people there weren’t very friendly and unless you were “one of the boys”, it actually felt hostile (made to feel like I was in their way).

Anyway, to leave things on a positive note, I am happy for the gains that I have made thus far. In the grand scheme of things, I am making good progress, but not great progress. This journey stopped being easy a couple of weeks ago, but now is the time where I need to buckle down and keep at it.

Onwards and upwards!

It’s hard to believe that it has already been two months since I started My Fitness Journey! I challenged myself over a period of 6 months (okay 5 months and 2 weeks) to not only focus on my weight, but also on my nutrition.

It’s been a really interesting experience. Since New Year’s Day I have lost almost 14kg. In January I lost 10kg and in February I lost 2kg. I actually thought that I would have lost more in February, so in some ways this is disappointing. But on the other hand, one of the reasons I like to write about this is because it forces me to do the math and to be honest with myself. I have set my goal to lose a kilogram a week, and it seems like I am only doing half as much.

The really frustrating part is that in February, I kicked up the intensity of working out. A couple of days a week I added morning and evening training, and I have been making sure that 3 workouts a week are strength training (Body Pump). But I also know where I could do better:

• I have been travelling a lot, and I have been a bit too generous with the plate portions on more than one occasion
• When I travel, it disrupts my workout routine. I have to stop ‘trying’ to get to the hotel gym, and just go and do it. I think buying a slightly larger carry-on case will help me out here.
• I have to make sure I don’t get discouraged and keep the longer-term view. I am not prepared to give up on reaching my goal in June!

In the larger context, I have remember that after 8 weeks, I am down 12kg, which means that overall I am slightly ahead of my target. And so far in March I am down another 2kg, which puts my even more slightly ahead. According to my Fitbit Dashboard, I am at 48% of my goal. If you had told me that I would be this far along after only 9 weeks, I would have been a bit skeptical. So the lesson I am taking from this is that:

• I need to do  better job of logging how I feel when I go off plan (sometimes I purposely eat/drink more for special occasions). What things are stressing me out and what foods am I using to react to that?
• I have to stop stressing out when I do go off plan. I keep on forgetting that it is marathon and not a race.
• I should seriously consider a personal trainer for intermittent check-ins after March (we’ll see how I do). What is powering me through this first 48% may not be what is needed to power me through the remaining 52%. And some independent advice on my workout would be welcome.

But seriously, I feel good overall about where I started from and good about where I am going! I just have to keep pushing forward 🙂