64/100 - step back

Hmm. I'm not quite 3 weeks into the year, but the scales are suggesting my weightloss slowed dramatically this week. There are many, many reasons that could apply here, but the major benefit from the fact I'm keeping a food diary and tracking my exercise and pedometer steps is that I can look at the data and objectively identify if the reasons are obvious ones. If they are, I can fix it. If it's not as obvious from the data, I think at the moment I would put it down to hormonal fluctuations, lol, but in this case, the reasons are actually very obvious. I'll have to wait til Thursday (3 weeks) to do the actual stats, but as it stands the simplified answer is I am eating a little bit more in week 3 than I did in week 1 and 2 (still well under my needs, but until I do my weekly stats check I'd guess about 100 kcals more per day) and I'm moving less. My daily average step count is lower, which I think is due to the weather being so awful recently (not today - it's gorgeous today, albeit cold) and my overall exercise/workouts have dropped this week. I've only actually exercised on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday in the last 7 days.

There's very little excuse for that, when you step back and look at my goals. I'm blaming weather, but of course I need to really blame my own decision making. Other people get some exercise when the weather is bad - and I'm a member of 5 gyms within a 5 mile radius of my house. If the weather really is undesirable, I can always go and do an incline walk on a treadmill for half an hour, even if it's just wearing my jeans and a jumper, and that's going to significantly improve my activity levels. but where I need to improve is my own cardio work - I need to start significantly burning some kcals. I only ran once last week, and it was less than 2 miles. And in the gym workout that I didn't do with my trainer, I worked on resistance and strength stuff, and kind of ignored a lot of the more heart-rate-rising parts "because I'd had a long day at work". Saturday, when weather stopped me from driving to parkrun and the swimming pool afterwards as I had planned, I did manage to walk over 25,000 steps across the day, but I didn't do anything to really get my heart-rate up. So, because I can step back and see all this information in the data I'm recording, I can quickly make some adjustments to my lifestyle before I slide back fully into old habits, and pick things up again.

It's interesting; in my wee rant the other day about the TV programme, I did acknowledge they raised some interesting and useful snippets of info. One of these was the concept of "compensation" when it comes to activity. They got a group of overweight non-exercisers, and gave them a pedometer, telling them to just go about their daily business with no changes. The group, after a week or something like that, averaged about 7500 steps a day, if I remember right. The following week, they asked them to exercise on 3 of the days of the week. The pedometer showed that on those days, the daily average was over 11000. So far so good, they've increased their activity levels and are well on their way to losing some weight... right? Well, wrong, because the researcher showed that in the second week, on the non-exercisey days, their step count actually plummeted, to less than 6000 steps. They compensated for the exercise days by being a bit more restful the following day. Overall, the weekly step count is around the same, maybe even less on the week they exercised. Really interesting experiment, and one I can actually see happening in my own records!! So, awareness is the key factor here: I can purposely start trying to get that 10,000 steps a day again (I've only managed to do so twice this past week, and one of those was the big walk on Saturday) - and hopefully, with a bit more knowledge, and a bit more objectivity, next week will be a lot more successful. x