Yesterday taught me this training and lifestyle change is gonna be a LOT harder than I first thought (and I already knew it would be tough). I’m still going on because I need it. Not just because of the need to lose the weight and get healthier, but because this is one aspect of my life I feel I have some control over, even if it’s just baby steps.

And the baby steps can add up to miles and miles.

Too many things interfered with my workout plans last week… and it makes me wonder how much of an improvement I would’ve made had I been consistent. Then again, it also makes me wonder how much damage I would’ve done to myself had I impulsively pushed forward when my body wasn’t feeling it.

But there are several key things I learned and kept with me over the years when that dreaded number on the scale would show up:

1. The scale is only one measure of your body’s state; your body mass at the moment, not how you feel or how great your accomplishments have been over the week. And that number will change multiple times a day, especially menstruating or ill, so log it as just a piece of the puzzle that is you and move on.
2. Muscle weighs more than fat, and exercise builds muscle. The scale can’t tell the difference.
3. Sometimes the scale goes up or won’t budge at all, but if your shirt feels looser and you have to pull your pants up more often because they keep sliding down… it’s probably a sign that fat loss is occurring.

The scale went up about 2 pounds to 205.4 a few days ago (I hadn’t weighed myself in a week because of illness and I needed to change out the batteries… and kept forgetting). Now I’m at 203.4, so not much movement since two weeks ago… but my pants would suggest otherwise.

I have to find my old belt for work, because at the restaurant, as I walk miles around the place, feel the sweat going down my back & need to drink tons of water, I swear I have to pull up my pants more as the night goes on. I have one of those odd frames where my waist and hips are pretty much a square. I have a slight indent where the waist is, but that’s it. My jeans are pretty cheap, too, and not meant to accentuate anything (don’t like highlighting that tire around my middle, anyway), so I don’t have the ones that narrow in a bit to hug the waist. That’s what the belt has to be for now.

That’s a good feeling because I always had the theory that the scale not budging indicates your body is shifting those fat stores around a bit as the muscle takes its place. If the scale doesn’t budge, but your clothes fit looser or better and you have a better attitude or feel you have more energy, then something’s working if weight loss (or “mass reduction”) is your goal.

And it’s my theory as to why “spot reducing” doesn’t work, because your body is has to redistribute its mass to prevent you from injury or losing your center of gravity, and likely why the belly fat seems to be the hardest to lose unless you’re consistent or have lost quite a bit of weight already.

What hit me is I HAVE to get my endurance up pretty quickly. I’m actually on a half-marathon training program on the iFit app and I am NOT keeping up well. My run this morning was supposed to be a make-up run that I could only do a bit of yesterday, but my foot is telling me to put it off and focus on cleaning and meal prep before work. It’s an hour run, and I don’t think I have the stamina for that right now (other runs the past few days have been shorter, so this one’s an outlier… part of that short runs and one big run on the schedule thing). And I’m barely a runner at that.

Tomorrow I’ll do it and go at my own pace. I do not have the stamina or the endurance to do an hour at the speeds initially indicated. The average speed I would’ve been doing on the elliptical was 60 RPM. I can’t go that fast for that long, maybe a few minutes at the most right now. But at around 50 RPM, I could maintain that for much longer, if not the whole hour (though I’d try for 55 at least here and there).

That’s the thing I forgot about these programs: it’s all data that I can use, whether I succeed with the “planned program” of the day or not. And if I can’t reach the recommended speeds and distances, then I need to record it, see where I can improve, and take that in. As long as I make the attempt and do my best, I WILL see improvement. It will just take a lot longer to hit the target than I initially thought it would.

Now my plan is to read more on anatomy and physiology, running, mental health, etc. while watching YouTube vids and looking through the sources they bring up to keep updated on developments in exercise and changes due to studies over time. Some videos might have interesting info about the latest science on helping with metabolism or sleep, but if the video is 7 years old… that means there’s something to take into account. Finding more recent videos about the same topic gives some comparison.

My research-hound mind is going to enjoy the next few weeks. And my feet are reminding me they need some major strength training, as my right foot is feeling that twinge after a long go yesterday.

Also, I’ll be working on two major dietary changes: cutting out added sugars and eating vegetarian outside the home. I still have some meat in the home that I need to get rid of (thankfully very little), and some dairy, but it’s going to go in the next week or two and hopefully I’ll be on the way to being fully vegetarian by August.

The sugar thing I find is necessary because those random sugar cravings totally derail my efforts and my sleep cycle, and I don’t need to add more to my diet. Plenty of things out there already have natural sugars, or sugar in their ingredients. I hope to even have it out of my coffee in the next few weeks.

I have a theoretically easier shift at work today, one that will give me plenty of time to read and write notes in between guests, so today I’ll be drafting a game plan to ensure success in the next month with these goals. I’ll have more on those in the course of a week.

I feel the next two weeks will be a bit tough, but great in the long run, with more successes.