Weigh-In Tuesday: 7/29

I've mentioned on here before that I'm changing my lifestyle and trying to lose weight with Weight Watchers. I realize I don't really need to defend exactly why I want to lose weight, but I want to share. The automatic assumption is that I'm trying to lose weight because I'm getting married. Well I'm not getting married for over two years- and no, I don't just have that little faith in my ability to lose weight. Honestly, if I were losing weight for a wedding, I would start fairly close to wedding time because as hard as it is to lose weight, it's even harder to keep it off. Which is why, when deciding what I was going to do, I decided I want to change my lifestyle. I didn't want to diet.

I'm pretty sure diet is from Latin meaning an impermanent change in food that causes weight loss but ultimately leads to gaining more weight in the future. Okay, so maybe I'm not really up to date with my Latin (or etymology, or whatever the heck it's called). But the thing about diets is: they end. And from my experience, dieting usually results in me gaining all the weight back the second I stop. and then some. and then a little more.

So really what I want to do is change my relationship with food- how I think about it, what I put into my body, and how much crosses the threshold of my lips. I'm a scientist, and as a scientist, I like to use scientific speak. Those calories your talking about being in your food, well they are actually Calories with a capital "C". The word calorie with a little "c" refers to the amount of energy you have to add to a system to to raise the temperature of 1 g of water 1 degree Celsius, which is defined as 4.1868 Joules (J). You learned about joules when you learned about energy.  It takes 1,000 little "c" calories to make up 1 big "C" Calorie. But really calories are just energy-- the energy that fuels our hearts to pump, our minds to think, and a proclaimer to walk 500 miles (and maybe 500 more). In science/engineering, efficiency is a big thing. We want what we get out of a system to be close to what we put into a system. I was being very inefficient. I was putting in way more energy than I needed and outputting very little work.

So I changed. And by tracking my food and making mindful choices, I have turned my body into a more efficient machine. And on Weight Watchers, I can eat that chocolate sundae if I want to. I just need to make other choices during the day/week/month to allow for that. It's balancing a budget. I have a limited income. I cannot buy the Prada purse and the designer shoes in the same pay period. But if I buy the Prada purse, I have to make sacrifices. No designer shoes, no coffee from Starbucks or Biggby this month. So it's the same with my lifestyle. I'm balancing a budget-- of food/calories/nutrition instead of dolla dolla bills. However, I'm hoping my handle over food with transfer to my budgeting skills with money. That budget is tighter than I'd like.

And, because I like accountability, I'd like to let you know that in the past week, I had a loss of 3.6 lbs. So allow me to celebrate for a moment, before I get back to the reality that I still have 66.7 lbs to go. And then we're really gunna celebrate!