Thursday, March 01, 2007

March Challenge

I've decided it's time for a little weight loss challenge. And when I say little, I mean little. I'm coming up to celebrating the first year of hitting my 100lb lost goal later this month, and I've decided to try a bit harder to reach one of my remaining goals before that anniversary.

This gives me 3 weeks to lose the grand total of... 1 pound.

Writing it down like that it should surely be feasible. 1 pound. 454g. 3500 calories, more or less.

The reason I want to lose that one pound is to hit 110lb/50kg lost. That's not the goal I originally set myself, but I'm starting to feel like 150 would be a better weight for me than 160. There's nothing wrong with hovering at about 152-153 as I have been doing for months, but now I've finally hit 151, I want to push on and hit those nice round numbers.

I think that the main reason my weight has started moving a bit is that since lent started I've made more of an effort to kick some of my more dangerous eating habits. It's funny, I'm not religious, but somehow after the success of last year's decision to give up meat for lent, that keeps me on track more than trying to persuade myself that it's not good for me.

The big habit I've given up is a growing lunchtime flapjack habit. In the right circumstances, like before a run, flapjack can be a fantastic source of energy, and I always made myself walk across town to buy it, slice by slice. But from there, it developed into almost a daily "treat", and in fact stopped being a treat at all, and became something I started to expect to eat. Not that I adjusted the rest of my food for it either. Anyway, I decided to kick that habit for lent, and for good luck I decided that chocolate would have to go with it so that I didn't replace one lunchtime snack habit with another. Chocolate isn't entirely banned, but it has to be 70%/Green & Blacks etc, and it can't be a lunchtime snack. Or out of the vending machine mid afternoon. It's not the food that's the problem, more when and how I was eating it.

I'm also trying to kick the alcohol habit even more. Since November I've got myself down to very much weekends only, but I'm going to try to cut it down even further. Again, it's a bit flexible, I allowed myself a glass of champagne at a retirement party last week, but nothing apart from that. To be honest, I prefer not to drink during the week, or the day before a long run or race, so with marathon training building up opportunities to drink are cut down anyway.

More accidental is giving up caffeine. I've recently got into fruit teas, and the espresso machine at work (the only place I get coffee from) has run out of the little pod things you put in it. So it was a while before I realised that I haven't had any caffeine for over a week because it wasn't a deliberate decision as such. But still, it doesn't seem to have affected my energy levels and I might see whether I can keep it up.

Anyway, I'm hoping that between those changes to my diet, plus increased mileage, I might be able to shift that extra pound before the 21st.

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