Posts Tagged ‘weight’

Week 3 Progress

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

For the last week I’ve been tracking what I’ve been eating to a degree that I’ve never done before.  I usually hate calorie counting but for some reason this week has been fun.

The outcome…

The graph above is normalised so that what I’m aiming for is that 100% line for all the other lines.  Basically I’ve been tracking calorie, carbohydrate, protein and fat intake.  I’m aiming for 2800 calories per day which is 15% less than maintenance calorie level for someone my size.  Then I’m aiming to get 60% of my calories from carbohydrate, I’m aiming for 160g of protein intake a day and then the rest of the calorie, about 17% of my intake, should come from fat.

The increased protein is because I’m doing more weight-training and need the extra protein to help build and maintain muscle.

Over the last week I didn’t eat much differently than I normally would, I just kept track of it.  The numbers are as close as I could get based on the information on the packets of food I used and what’s online for all the things that weren’t in a packet.

You can see from the graph above there is a general trend.  Calories, carbohydrate and protein are all on the low side while fat is always on the high side.  So it looks like I’m going to be changing a bunch of stuff.  The fat has to come down and the protein and carb has to go up.

For the fat it means cutting out pretty much everything that is the least bit unhealthy.  Cakes, biscuits, any form of treat is out the window.  To give you an idea…a tuna and sweetcorn sandwich with a bit of mayo has about 50% of my daily fat allowance.  That isn’t a lot.

For carbs it basically means eating more cereals etc and for the protein I ordered some whey protein from www.myprotein.co.uk.  I didn’t particularly want to supplement my protein but there’s o other way I can figure out to get the extra 60g of prtein without stuffing my face with aduki beans, chicken or tuna.

Next week I’m going to have a week off tracking but I’ll track food intake again in a couple of weeks to see if I’ve made the necessary adjustment.

The good news is that I’ve lost weight since last week but the bad news is I’m not sure whether it’s fat or muscle.  I think the measurements I’m taking this time round are subject to a lot more variation.  You can check them out on my google spreadsheet page.

Wish me luck.

Sid.

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Week 2 Progress

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

Well it’s the end of week 2 and I’ve just updated my progress charts. The on I’m going to put up here is my weight loss one…

As you can see on the right my weight has gone up 0.5kg.  Very annoying.  At the moment I’m willing to let it slide a little bit but not for long.  I’ll be really disappointed if it goes up again over the next week.

As for the rest of my measurements I think they’re still bedding in and it’ll be interesting to see how they develop.  There’s obviously a lot more error that can occur in these types of measurement and I still need some practise at taking them.

What else has been going on this week?  Well the gym work has continued.  I managed 3 weights sessions and 1 step class this week.  I wanted to get out on my bike this weekend but my improving of the kitchen has got in the way and I’ve been fitting skirting boards and sealing worktops instead.  The main thing that happened this week though was my new scales arrived.


I picked them up from Amazon for about £12 and they are pretty neat.  What I’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks is just generally increasing the amount of food I’ve been having but I haven’t taken another measurement to see if I’m hitting the right amount of calories, protein, carb and fat.  These little bad boys are going to help me do that.

One of the things I was looking for in a set of scales was the abiity to easily tare them.  I wanted to be able to put a bowl on and zero the scales, then add cereal, take a note and zero the scales, then add milk, take a note and zero the scales.  It’ll make it so much easier to count calories compared to trying to weigh everything with the old school scales we had.

My goals for next week… Get in some good weights sessions.  It’s my final week of “beginners” weights so I want a good one before I move on to more advanced weight-lifting stuff.  I also want to get rid of that extra 0.5kg I put on.  Other than that it would be nice to see the general trends start to develop.

Wish me luck.

Sid.

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I Love My Scales – Part 1

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Right now I have two sets of scales in my life, my food scales and the scales I stand on.  I love them both.

If I had to rank them in order of the amount I love them then the food scales are just the tiniest little bit ahead of my other scales.  The food scales have never delivered bad news.

So why do I love them so?  I guess it’s not really love, they are inanimate objects after all, but at the minute I rely them.

The scales I stand on help me keep track of my progress.  That’s really important to me.  Without being able to track progress I have no idea whether what I’m doing is right or wrong.  It seems an obvious thing to track, weight, but after chatting to a few people I find it kind of weird how some people abuse their scales.  Some people weigh themselves everyday, I even know someone who weighs herself more than once a day.  Some people look down and then try and ignore what they see.  Some people take their shoes off, some people leave them on.  The list goes on. I myself am quite obsessive about how I weigh myself.  It’s the scientist in my…I like to be accurate.

I weigh myself at most twice a week.  If you weigh yourself more often then I think you can lose sight of any progress.  By weighing myself just the once or twice then I can see the difference.  At most it’s recommended you lose no more than 0.5lbs per day, about 250g.  No scales will be able to measure that and even if they could it means that a quick trip to the toilet could really sway your results.  That’s why I go for just the once or twice a week.

I also weigh myself at the same time of the same day every week.  First thing on a Monday.  I get up, head downstairs, pop to the loo and, to avoid the whole shoes on shoes off debate, weigh myself naked.  (Sorry for the imagery people.  Maybe I was a little too descriptive!)  I have often thought that I should not weigh myself on Monday.  The problem I have with Monday is that if I have a bad weekend it shows, much like in week 7.

My weight feeds into my tracker, my tracker helps me see when I can tick off my goals and my goals help keep me motivated.

My food scales help me in other ways but that’s another post.

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My clothes have started to drop off.

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Well it’s official, my clothes are too big for me.  Slowly my trousers are getting looser and looser.  It’s both a great feeling and a terrible one.  I’m not a big fan of clothes shopping so the thought of having to go out and get more doesn’t really appeal to me.

Anyway, I’ve now started to get to the point where people are noticing that I’m losing weight.  I’ve had a few comments and obviously I’m starting to feel it in the fit of my clothes.  So it got me thinking about putting this weight into context.  Now that I’m lighter by 6kg how different is it?

Well, one way of putting it is in water.  Go out and buy 3, 2 litre bottles of water and carry them home.  Those 3 bottles of water weigh the same amount as the amount of fat I’ve lost.  Also, if you get another litre to make it to 7 litres, that’s roughly how much volume my body has been reduced by.  (Human body fat has a density of about 900kg/cubic meter.)

I find it quite cool to think of it like that.  If I had to walk around with 3 bottles of water for the entirety of my life I wouldn’t be that happy.  But that’s what I’ve been doing.

By the time I finish my bout of weight-loss and get to 100kg I will have lost 15kg.  That’s the equivalent of 7 and a half 2 litre bottles of water or 3 of those big 5L bottles.  Not only that but my body volume would’ve gone down by 17 litres.

So tonight, when I get back from work and the gym I’m going to grab a tape measure and see how I’m progressing with my measurements.  It’ll be interesting to see how they’ve changed.

Sid.

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Weight Loss Tracker – Week 2

Monday, January 19th, 2009

I’ve got a ton of posts brewing but I don’t seem to get chance to post at the minute. To much improving to do. I must start improving my blogging!

Until I make time here’s how my tracker is looking after my 2nd week weigh in.

weight loss tracker week 2

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