Day 279: New Goal - Under 200 By Thanksgiving

Update: 50 lb Goal Reached Day 124. Current weight - 208.6 lbs - 8.6 lbs to under 200 goal.

No, I'm not on a blogging strike with the rest of the writing world. Life has just been crazy.

I'm on a new mission. Good news - I've continued to maintain the 50 lbs I've lost for over 150 days. Bad news - I haven't been working very hard at getting down any further, and I still have some work to do, so I'm setting a new goal. By Thanksgiving this year, I want to get that scale to show me a number under 200. So basically, I've got two weeks to lose 8+ lbs.

I realize this is an ambitious goal. In the past 4 months I haven't been able to do it...I'm not sure what makes me think I can do it in the next two weeks, but if you don't have a goal, you won't hit it. I actually think I have the tools to be able to do this, and here's are a few reasons why I believe I just might be able to pull it off.

#1 - I haven't been drinking water like I should.
I kind of knew this might happen - as the fall comes around, and colder days arrive, I tend to gravitate towards coffee more and more, and leave the water behind. Heck, it's possible, I've got a few pounds of pure water weight alone to get rid of, so I'm gonna try to hit the water again.

#2 - I'm not counting calories as strictly as I was before
One of the benefits of going through the process that I did with tracking every single calorie until I hit my goal is that I have a pretty good grasp of how many calories are in most things I'm eating. One of the downfalls though is that it's too easy to generalize, and give myself a little wiggle room. While I haven't had a hard time wiggling into my clothes or anything, I know that part of the reason I'm just maintaining and not losing, is that I'm taking in more calories than I was during my poundage dropping days. Getting back to cutting those down again will help.

#3 - I'm getting out on the bike a decent amount
After an initial scary experience on the rollers (see previous post) where I rode for 5 minutes without letting go of the wall next to me, I've actually made decent use of the rollers for exercise. Although it's still pretty tricky to even find 45 minutes to get out and ride, last week I was able to find 4 of 7 days where I could get out and ride in the garage, and on Saturday I even took advantage of the weather and got a 15 mile *real* ride in.

The rollers aren't exactly like real riding - no wind in the hair, no change of scenery, not the same kind of road friction - but they've been a decent way to get the heartbeat up, and do it on the bike I'm used to riding. It's definitely as close to real riding as I'm gonna get until we get back to the biking season again. Instead of the great outdoors, I'm now watching all kinds of streaming online tv episodes on an old laptop, and still getting used to being strapped on to a bike on 3 little spinning wheels. Two times now, I've just about gone down - not while riding, but when I forget to reach out for the chair to my left when stopping, and then have to desperately find the fridge behind me on the other side in time to stop from hitting the floor. I'm still an idiot on them.

Anyway, I think if I start putting down the water again, and watch the calories, along side of keeping up the exercise, I just might be able to get to under 200 lbs by Thanksgiving this year.

So once again, let the battle cry sound.....Release the Pounds!