Day 39 – Every Day Is A Battle

It never gets easy. As you can see on the graph to the right I was doing well early in my journey but have struggled for the last two weeks. I haven’t figured it out yet but I suspect that I am eating too much. As I have described earlier, I don’t eat badly, so it must be the volume of food. Also I probably eat too much meat and not enough protein from other sources. Plus, I hardly eat out any more.

Maybe my dad is right, I’m building muscle while I am losing fat. Since muscle weighs four times more than fat it won’t show on the scale yet. But there has to be a point where the work begins to show as weight loss. I am getting pretty anxious to see that particular turn of events. For the last two weeks I have had no net weight loss. The only positive I can see is that I am not gaining weight. There have to be other positives that I can’t put my finger on yet. After all, when I started my journey I couldn’t run for 10 minutes and now I am running at a much faster speed for 35 minutes. Plus, I have continuously increased the weight on the weight machines and increased the number of repetitions.

Yesterday I gained one pound and this morning another which brings me right up to the exact weight I was one week ago and two weeks ago! Two weeks straight at 209 pounds. That’s getting a bit distressing. Analyzing everything I have been doing, (eating right, and exercising); I would have to be honest and say I could do better. To quote the Apostle Paul, “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” It’s all Greek to me. How bad can I be if a Saint can’t even control himself?

Have I always eaten right? I don’t think I could honestly say yes. Just like Paul, I want to, but sometimes I can’t resist. Maybe my portions are just a bit too big. Have I taken advantage of every workout opportunity? Well, I guess not. But I want to. Isn’t that enough? Apparently the answer to that question would have to be, “No, that’s not enough”. So I find my self re-dedicating myself to watching what and how much I eat, and making new pledges to get to the gym and finish every exercise with an honest effort.

Here I go into another week determined with a new dedication. With that said, here is my status for the day. Weighing in at 209 on the 39th day of the journey brings me to an average weight loss of .15 pounds a day. I am not gaining weight but my average weight loss drops with each passing day that I don’t lose weight. I will be at the gym today.

One last note before I post this. I am thinking of upgrading my treadmill routing again. I am contemplating starting at speed 6.0. I will stay at that speed as long as I can. If I can’t make it through to the last three minutes where I bump it to 7.0, I will back the speed down to 5.5. This is basically what I did to get to 5.0 in the first place. In the beginning I couldn’t run at speed 5.0 for more than 15 minutes, and then I backed it down to a fast walk (3.0). Then, each day I tried to run at 5.0 for more and more time until I could run all the way through. We will see how it goes.