Loosing Weight: Month 4
Saturday, May 19th, 2007Another full month has passed, so it’s time to summarize my progress. This is a graph for the month.
Overall, my weight loss has visibly slowed down. Maybe, it’s more “visibly” than actually — after all, the red averaged line went down 8 pounds in a month — but it did feel a little bit frustrating sometimes. Though now, looking at the number, I am quite satisfied. 2 pounds a week looks like a healthy rate.
Why did it slow down? Many people report that the closer is their weight to the “ideal” — whatever it is — the harder it is to loose it. I don’t quite understand why it could be the case, but I don’t have any reason not to trust them.
Actually, one explanation could be that as they progress with their diet, their metabolism slows down, so they spend less energy. And the metabolism slowdown may be explained both by the body adjusting to not having enough calories, and by the decreased weight (the less you weigh, the less energy you need to carry yourself around).
Another explanation to me personal slowdown is that I became less strict in counting calories. I still do it, and I still aim to 1600 calories per day, but I am generally less pedantic and pay less attention to it.
I did a couple of one-day fasts and a couple of juice fasts this month, and I find them quite helpful, both psychologically and physiologically. I think that that’s how I am going to use them going forward: to compensate for the bad eating behavior, or just when the body feels it needs some rest.
To put things into perspective, here is my weight for the entire time (four months since January 18):
Now, the question is, when do I stop? I honestly don’t know. I still feel fatter then I want to be, so I guess I am going to continue shrinking myself until I am satisfied with the results.
At work, many people finally started noticing that I am getting thinner — that’s after 50 pounds, heh — and many people tell me these days that I should stop loosing weight and work out more, to convert the existing fat to muscles. Of course, it is physically impossible. Fat and muscles are two different types of tissues, and they just don’t convert to each other. Sadly, it’s also physically impossible to grow muscles while loosing fat, and that’s why: to loose fat, one needs to eat less calories than he spends. To gain weight (the muscle mass, in this case), one needs to eat more calories than he spends. There is just no way to have it both ways at the same time.
So let me finish the loosing weight business, and then we’ll talk about the body building.
. It looks like cheap plastic calipers, and for a good reason. It is cheap plastic calipers. However, they say that it is a rather accurate way of measuring body fat — allegedly the best you can do at home. So far, according to it, I have 22% of body fat, which is “normal” but not great. It will be interesting to see how this number changes and how my fat weight loss will be correlated with my total weight loss.