M.lb. - Week 7, etc.
Day 43
May 12, 2008
Weight: x - 10
We're at something of an impasse here. After several weeks of doing this experiment at Penn State, where I had the benefit of a supposedly "very accurate" electronic scale, I have now returned to Wayne and have to use my home scale, which is spring-loaded and reads somewhat lower than the electronic scale did.
I had been hoping that, at this point in the game, I'd have been able to get a decent estimate of the difference between the two and take it from there, but that hasn't quite panned out. Here's the not-so-scientific study I recently did:
At the start of Week 4, the day before my fourth weigh-in, I weighed myself on the home scale to see what it said. Relative to the electronic scale (and the reading of x that I've been using as my starting weight), the home scale said I was at x - 10.5. That next day, as you can see in the post above, the electronic scale read x - 8. So, assuming I didn't somehow lose a whole bunch of weight over one day, the two scales should have been about 2.5 lbs. apart.
A few weeks later, and things have gotten more complicated. I broke my cardinal rule of one weigh-in per week on Friday, because I knew I was leaving to come home. The scale, as it had this past Monday, read x - 10, unsurprising since I'd been sick. I ate breakfast during the drive home, but got back and hopped on the home scale anyway -- which read, shockingly, x - 17.5! Something clearly was amiss.
This morning's weigh-in came back down to x - 15.5 on the home scale. Not knowing what that is relative to the electronic scale has been frustrating, but I think I've hit upon a solution.
As many of you know, the past two weeks have been very trying for me, dealing not only with the stress of finals and final projects, but also with some unexplainable mystery illness that sidelined me from most anything fun. In fact, after a week and a half of dealing (poorly) with it, it was an unexplainable sleepless Thursday night that led me, after an hour-and-a-half of tossing and turning, to wake up at 6:00am on Friday morning -- running on a whole three hours of sleep -- and pack all my shit up and get the fuck out of State College so I could get home and see a doctor stat.
Today, I saw the doctor, who diagnosed me with an infection of the sinuses behind my eyes -- which explains the headache, the tingles, the pressure, the fucked-up equilibrium, and the lack of any constant nose-blowing. I'm currently on antibiotics to kill the bastard, and hopefully I should be back to fighting form really soon.
But while I was at the doctor, they had me hop on the scale. And their scale read, within a tiny little margin of error, almost precisely what the electronic scale had measured last week: x - 10! So I'm going to trust that the roughly five-pound discrepancy between the doctor's scale and my home scale is equal to the discrepancy between the electronic scale and the home scale.
So I'm going to stick with x - 10 as my official weight for the week, and the actual reading of my home scale for the week will be the baseline for further decreases from there.
(If this still feels arbitrary, take it on good faith that my home scale has never read me as weighing any more than ten pounds above what it is now, which still makes all the numbers make sense. Granted, if I were willing to divulge the actual numbers of the scale, this might be a whole lot easier to manage, but...nope, sorry. Still not willing.)
And so begins the home leg of this journey, which will be much more challenging since I'll not have the benefit of a gym to go to every day. So I'm really going to have to make sure I watch what I eat and limit my portions and caloric intake accordingly. Naturally, so long as the weather holds up, I'll try to get out on my bike or take a walk around Packanack Lake or do some other kind of exercise that suits me. But the way I see it, I'm now at the point where I'm trying to really follow Dr. Rosenthal's rules for weight control, which he gave me so many, many months ago, and which specifically say that long-term weight loss is a matter of maintaining control of your eating, not your exercising (although, as he admitted, exercise never hurts).
So I've given myself a jump-start already, and it's time to see what happens next. I've got wedding season starting in a few short weeks, and I need to get myself on a roll if I want to find long-term success over the next few months.
Let the Summer of Self-Loathing begin!
May 12, 2008
Weight: x - 10
We're at something of an impasse here. After several weeks of doing this experiment at Penn State, where I had the benefit of a supposedly "very accurate" electronic scale, I have now returned to Wayne and have to use my home scale, which is spring-loaded and reads somewhat lower than the electronic scale did.
I had been hoping that, at this point in the game, I'd have been able to get a decent estimate of the difference between the two and take it from there, but that hasn't quite panned out. Here's the not-so-scientific study I recently did:
At the start of Week 4, the day before my fourth weigh-in, I weighed myself on the home scale to see what it said. Relative to the electronic scale (and the reading of x that I've been using as my starting weight), the home scale said I was at x - 10.5. That next day, as you can see in the post above, the electronic scale read x - 8. So, assuming I didn't somehow lose a whole bunch of weight over one day, the two scales should have been about 2.5 lbs. apart.
A few weeks later, and things have gotten more complicated. I broke my cardinal rule of one weigh-in per week on Friday, because I knew I was leaving to come home. The scale, as it had this past Monday, read x - 10, unsurprising since I'd been sick. I ate breakfast during the drive home, but got back and hopped on the home scale anyway -- which read, shockingly, x - 17.5! Something clearly was amiss.
This morning's weigh-in came back down to x - 15.5 on the home scale. Not knowing what that is relative to the electronic scale has been frustrating, but I think I've hit upon a solution.
As many of you know, the past two weeks have been very trying for me, dealing not only with the stress of finals and final projects, but also with some unexplainable mystery illness that sidelined me from most anything fun. In fact, after a week and a half of dealing (poorly) with it, it was an unexplainable sleepless Thursday night that led me, after an hour-and-a-half of tossing and turning, to wake up at 6:00am on Friday morning -- running on a whole three hours of sleep -- and pack all my shit up and get the fuck out of State College so I could get home and see a doctor stat.
Today, I saw the doctor, who diagnosed me with an infection of the sinuses behind my eyes -- which explains the headache, the tingles, the pressure, the fucked-up equilibrium, and the lack of any constant nose-blowing. I'm currently on antibiotics to kill the bastard, and hopefully I should be back to fighting form really soon.
But while I was at the doctor, they had me hop on the scale. And their scale read, within a tiny little margin of error, almost precisely what the electronic scale had measured last week: x - 10! So I'm going to trust that the roughly five-pound discrepancy between the doctor's scale and my home scale is equal to the discrepancy between the electronic scale and the home scale.
So I'm going to stick with x - 10 as my official weight for the week, and the actual reading of my home scale for the week will be the baseline for further decreases from there.
(If this still feels arbitrary, take it on good faith that my home scale has never read me as weighing any more than ten pounds above what it is now, which still makes all the numbers make sense. Granted, if I were willing to divulge the actual numbers of the scale, this might be a whole lot easier to manage, but...nope, sorry. Still not willing.)
And so begins the home leg of this journey, which will be much more challenging since I'll not have the benefit of a gym to go to every day. So I'm really going to have to make sure I watch what I eat and limit my portions and caloric intake accordingly. Naturally, so long as the weather holds up, I'll try to get out on my bike or take a walk around Packanack Lake or do some other kind of exercise that suits me. But the way I see it, I'm now at the point where I'm trying to really follow Dr. Rosenthal's rules for weight control, which he gave me so many, many months ago, and which specifically say that long-term weight loss is a matter of maintaining control of your eating, not your exercising (although, as he admitted, exercise never hurts).
So I've given myself a jump-start already, and it's time to see what happens next. I've got wedding season starting in a few short weeks, and I need to get myself on a roll if I want to find long-term success over the next few months.
Let the Summer of Self-Loathing begin!
posted by Dave at 5/12/2008 01:55:00 PM
2 Comments:
A. You might want to change that to "Exercise never hurts" which I'm pretty sure is what you mean.
B. Silly goose, you could have avoided this if you brought my scale home with you. (The box is even in the closet for easy transport.)
C. You can totally keep this up over the summer! I have faiths!
Per (A), amended. Good catch!
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