Since April 2008 I’ve been dieting and exercising, mostly dieting. I weighed more then I ever had before at a whopping 265 lbs. Not an ideal situation.
I decided to attempt to lose weight, not really sure how I was going to do it. I started out with the South Beach Diet which got me down to 245 lbs before I plateaued. I was losing my motivation. Then my friend Jori who used to be a personal trainer got me doing what I’ve been doing since and it’s working pretty well. The key parts are to eat every two hours and I try to eat more protein. There were other similarities with the South Beach Diet like avoiding white carbohydrates.
Before I moved to San Mateo, I sold my car and have been relying on my two feet to get me around out here. This has also helped with my weight loss and allows me to cheat on my diet once in a while (how I do love Cinnabon.)
Well, I recently reached a milestone. I just dropped below the 220 lbs mark. Not too bad. I’m not sure how much weight I’m going to try to lose total. Right now I’m looking at 200 lbs as a goal. Mostly I just want to look better, get rid of the gut. Still a long way to go.
I had been tracking my weight in a notebook but I wanted to be able to do more things with that data so I recently got the app FatWatch for my iPhone. One of the neat features of this app is I can import and export my data. So I took an export today and wrote a little script to create a graph from it and posted it here on my site. You can view it here.
It is really easy for me to update it, I just upload a current export from FatWatch. So if you’re interested in my progress feel free to check out the chart. I’ll try to update it often.
There are two lines on the chart. One is what my weight is from day to day. This line can be misleading because my weight fluctuates from day to day. The way FatWatch takes this into account is by calculating a moving average. So every day the moving average is calculated by taking 90% of the previous days average and adding it to 10% of today’s weight. So even though you can see that I had a huge spike the day after Thanksgiving the moving average shows that I’ve been doing really well and that other then the 28th I’ve been making progress. Nothing to get bent out of shape about.
If I try to lose 1 lb a week, my next milestone (210 lbs) will be around February 22. Let’s see if I can do it.