'Cause you gotta have goals

My April 18 post covered my main goal for right now. Losing weight.

I feel that my overall weight is too high. I am too fat, or rather, I have too much fat on me. So, I want to get it off.

I know that it's better to trade out fat for muscle, and that's very much a long term goal for me, but in the short term, I'd like to simply be lighter.

Specifically, I'd like to get down to somewhere around 175#. That represents a loss of 25# from my starting weight of 200 (well, slightly higher).

I know that I can expect a reasonable rate of loss to be no more than about 2# per week. There's 15 weeks from now until July 31. Thus, I should be able to lose as much as 30# in total.

Tracking weight loss alone can be a depressing affair. Especially if, like me, you track it by day, rather than weekly. But, there is a method to my madness. By tracking daily, I reinforce the habit of being conscious of what I am eating, and how much I am eating per day. I can see that eating a bit more on the day before really does show up on the next day's scale.

However, to keep from going crazy with daily tracking and the normal fluctuations in weight, I stick to a couple of simple principals. First, I weight at about the same time in the morning. This makes the comparisons for measurements a lot more consistent. Second, I try not to pay attention to a single day's weight. Rather, I compare it to several previous days, and to the history of weights as a whole. As long as there is a downward trend in the data, then it doesn't matter if today's weight happens to be higher than yesterday's.

By trending the data, I can see whether or not I am making any progress, and I can gauge how well I am progressing.

For now, I am keeping my goals simple. Just the weight loss. As time progresses, I may choose to add in an additional goal or two, but I really do want to try to just focus on one thing at a time.