Diminished
4 January 2011I've lost about 20 lb (which corresponds to about 9 kg) recently, moving to the center from the high end of the normal
range for my height. (I'm about 5ft 10in, which is just less than 178 cm.)
I'd not been weighing myself, but my clothes were tighter than I wanted, and I was unhappy with my appearance. I guessed that I needed to lose about 10 lb. I got out a scale and weighed myself, it told me that I weighed about 168 lb (which corresponds to 76.2 kg). Based on a table that I consulted, I decided to get down to 156 lb, so I lost 12 lb.
But, looking at more tables, I was seeing that, pretty consistently, a weight of 151 lb would be dead-center in the normal
range. I decided to retarget to that. That would be another 5 lb.
Then, because my old, mechanical bathroom scale was acting-up, I got a new, electronic scale. It consistently gave a reading of about 3 or 4 lb more than did the old scale. *sigh*.
Anyway, according to the new scale, I dipped below 151 lb to-day. (That weight corresponds to about 68½ kg.) My programme was basically just one of reducing my intake of food-stuffs. I hadn't been eating a lot, but apparently my metabolism is pretty slow.
Tags: weight, weight-loss
Congrats on the weight loss! Losing weight is something many of us want or need to do, myself included. I'm about your height, and I would be ecstatic if I weighed 168 lbs! For most of my adult life I weighed about 140, and at a certain age the metabolism sloooowwwss doowwwnnn...
It seems that I could eat one peanut per day and still gain weight now. I think elves are visiting me in the middle of the night and filling me up with air, or rainbows, or something. *sigh* indeed.
It's all about burning off more than you take in, and the older we get, the more effort needed to burn less. I think I will follow your example and see how much I can drop (I'm crackin' 200 #s...er, all muscle[?!]). I've done it before, but it took extra exercise. Did you find it easy, was it a continued concentrated effort, or was it easy once you made up your mind? Most people want to see results daily for encouragement, and since it is a slow process (just as adding the extra weight was) it can be difficult to stay commited amid all the temptations and opportunities for "cheating eating".
Rice cakes and water! Yum!
I can be pretty stoic about many things, and I've always been more of the eat-to-live than live-to-eat type. I would have liked to have seen results every day, but that isn't likely when one aims to trim the weight gradually (as is usually the healthiest approach) and I hit a few plateaus and experienced a few upward blips. I did, however, weigh myself every day, and continue to do so.
Rice cakes (literal or metaphorical) are fine if one likes rice cakes, but if one doesn't see oneself eating them for the rest of one's life, then they probably aren't a good way to lose weight. A temporary change in eating and exercising habits can effect weight loss, but the loss itself is going to be temporary as well if the only behavioral changes are temporary. If one could figure out what one would be doing to maintain one's target weight, and just did that, then over time one would get to that target weight. Some moderate temporary changes to speed-up the process are fine, of course.