One woman's path from fat to fit. Or something.

As of Monday, May 30th:

Bust: 44″ (no change)
Waist: 35.5″ (-1)
Hips: 45″ (no change)
Right thigh: 24″ (no change)
Left arm: 13″ (no change)

Weight: 198.6 lbs

This week: -1 in/ -5.2 lbs
Since 5/9/11: -8 in/ -6.2 lbs

It’s been quite a while since I’ve weighed less than 200 pounds.

All in all, a pretty good week. I modified my goal in Libra from 165 pounds to 185 pounds. I chose 185 because it’s the lightest I can remember being in recent memory, when I was restricting calories and working out like crazy. I got there and my weight didn’t budge, and I got discouraged and stopped caring (yet again). 185 is just a way post – once I hit it I’ll just readjust my goal and keep trucking. Libra tells me that at the rate I’m going, I’ll hit my goal by 7/28/11. And every pound I lose, that date moves up a little more.

Plus it makes the weight graph look much more manageable.

Last Week’s Goal: Water Consumption

I set a daily goal of 100 ounces of water a day (approximately half my body weight), and for the most part I’ve met it. I’ve found that if I drink 20 ounces of water at home, it sets me up for the whole day. I try to have hit my goal before I leave work, since I find drinking water in the evenings much harder than during the day at my desk. Weekends were also a challenge, but buying 50 oz bottles of water from 7-11 and sipping them all day definitely helped. The Hydrate app was a big help too, and it allowed me to accurately track my consumption and poked me when it had been too long between entries.

This Week’s Goal: Thermodynamics and Triathlon Training

There’s a chapter in Four Hour Body that talks about the effects of temperature on the body’s ability to burn fat. Without getting too deep into the science of it, he and his test subjects found that cold exposure is an effective way to increase fat loss. Now, I’ll try just about anything once, and if exposure to cold can help lose weight then I’m all for it. I’ve started taking cold showers in the morning (actually, 1-2 minutes warm and then the remaining 5-10 cold, according to the instructions) which are an experience, to say the least, and tonight I’ll be putting a homemade ice pack across my shoulders and upper back for 20-30 minutes just before bed. I’m considering adding ‘drink at least 500 mL of ice water immediately upon waking’, but I flat out refuse to take ice cold baths – that’s just crazy. I shiver enough in the shower!

As for my triathlon, it is now 13 weeks away. I though it was 12, which was why I started back at the gym on Monday. But after actually writing the whole thing out, I’m a week early. It’s ok though – I figure this is just a breaking in period, and I’ll repeat the week #1 workouts twice. Plus it gives me a chance to really gauge how my ankle feels, and whether I’m going to be able to start jogging in order to get ready for my race. I’m using the training plan from Your First Triathlon, which is tailored for beginners and to last the 12 weeks right up until my race.