We Like Sheep - Wandering Astray

So today is a pretty cool day for me, a few months ago I read a little book called: The Hacker Diet. It was really useful for me. What I appreciated the most were the realistic sensibility of the author - very little BS or moralism, the mathematics based ideas, and the simple online tools for tracking progress.

Three months ago today, I broke down and purchased a scale. For the first time in 3+ years I decided to weigh myself. It was not a happy number. I also started logging my weight each day with the nice little web-version of the hacker's diet's online tools. My goal was to establish a baseline of what I was doing without any diet changes and then drawing from that start making some changes for the better.

One of the commitments for the Symposium I am part of is that we develop and adopt daily spiritual practices. It was one of the ones I have failed at the most. I am just really bad at daily chores. I decided to understand my weigh in each morning as a spiritual practice. What I mean by that is that weighing in each morning is about confronting reality, and specifically one part of reality I don't really like to think about. Using some of the interplay training, I have paired this daily weigh in with a long hot shower afterwards. Back when I did the interplay seminar, we were asked to reflect on the physicality of grace, what feels relaxing, welcoming, peaceful, released, etc. For me one of those experiences is a long hot shower. So my long, hot, shower at the end of each day, is a nice way to celebrate successfully doing my daily solitary practice, and an easy way to feel present and happy in my body.

[Before anyone freaks out about daily weigh ins, the goal of the plan is to focus on a 20 day, rolling, weighted average. Meaning my focus is on keeping the trend moving in the right direction, not on what any specific day's weigh in comes out as.]

One of the tools the site uses to help you understand the information you are collecting is a 3 month chart. Today, for the first day my three month chart was full of data. Yay ... Now the diet / lifestyle changes did not kick in until May 1st (I chose a specific day so it would be easy to see if they were having an actual effect), so that three month milestone is still a little ways away. But hey, going to celebrate this one too.

My highest weight (per the average) was 287.4 - the average for today is 263.6. So with about two and half months of dieting, I am down 23.8 pounds. Including the time I spent building a base line, over the last three months I am averaging a 2.04 pound weight loss per week. Certainly not Biggest Loser style epic weight loss, but a nice steady pattern I am confident I can keep up for a while to come.

Here is that pretty graph:

I am sure that there will be ups and downs with this. My adherence to my own pretty loose diet plan is far from perfect, but perfection is not the goal, an average of 1.5-2 pounds every single week for a year is the goal, and I am still on track for that.

So to all the people that have had to deal with me bitching and moaning about the diet, thanks for not slapping me. It used to drive me nuts when people complained about dieting, but now I realized that sometimes the food I chose not to eat, is exactly what I crave.