One of my New Year’s resolutions was to cook more.  Part of my reasoning for this was that I wanted to eat healthier.  In the past, I’ve begun the year with a "Lost 20 pounds in 20 weeks challenge."  I could use one of those again this year as I’m almost 30 pounds above where I’d like to be.

That being said, however, I’m going to try a couple of weeks of an informal diet.  I’m going to cut down on the snacking, eat less and focus on eating healthier food.  I’ll dine on more salads and snack on less junk food.

In addition, I’m going to try to work out more.  I think I’ll break out the EA Sports Active and break a sweat.  There are going to be two challenges for this.  The first is the cold weather.  With such a chill in the air, I’d much rather bundle under my Slanket and let my laptop warm up my lap.

The second reason is that I recently hurt my neck/back.  I seem to be prone to muscle spasms and, after playing some Nintendo Wii with the boys last week, I got a bad one.  The odd thing was that it wasn’t even a high-motion game.  (Kirby’s Epic Yarn – you use the WiiMote like a normal video game controller.)

It’s been over a week now and I’m still sore and achy.  My neck still hurts when I move it and I get shooting pains down my right arm.  I’m not going to let that stop me, but I will take it easy at first.

My other change, rather than not going with a formal diet, is that I’m not going to update every week.  Honestly, for some of my "20 pounds in 20 days" posts, I began to reach for content.  I couldn’t think of anything to say other than "Hey, I lost another pound this week."  While it was nice to know just what I was posting about, I’d rather have more substantial posts.  So I’m just going to post an update every first Monday of the month instead of every Monday.  I may also put something on the sidebar to help keep track of my weight loss.

So that’s my plan.  Wish me luck.

Disclaimer: The body scale clipart above comes from OpenClipArt.org.

This is the final update in my 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks Challenge.  I hit my goal last week, so this week was mainly about making sure I didn’t slide back above it.

Not only didn’t I slide back above my goal weight, but I shed two and a half additional pounds.  I’m ending this challenge a full three pounds below my goal and twenty three pounds above where I was when I began.

During this challenge, I was using Google Documents to keep track of my points and weigh-ins.  I began using a regular spreadsheet, but quickly realized I’d need to be able to update it no matter which computer I was on.  I switched to Google Documents and it was great.  One of the nice fringe benefits was the ability to generate charts on my weigh-in data and easily export them as images.

Here’s a chart of my weigh-ins from beginning to end.  (Click to enlarge it.)

You can see spikes for Disney World, Passover and JSL’s birthday.  Otherwise, it was a pretty steady drop.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to keep eating healthy, but I’m not going to hold as rigidly to the points structure as I did during the Twenty Week Challenge.  Perhaps I’ll check back in in another 20 weeks (that’d be in late October) to see how I’m doing at keeping the weight off.

I’ve done it!  I hit 185.  And passed it.  Of course, I still have one more week in the challenge so I’m not going to call it quits just yet.  I’ll keep track of my points and weight for another week to keep at or under my goal.

Just a quick post to note that I’m closing in on my goal.  I’m a single, solitary pound away from calling this challenge a success.  I suppose I should be happier about this, but I’m not.  Ok, I am happy about it, but it’s not brightening my mood much.  The reason why will be clear in my next post.  Here’s hoping my mood lightens more so I can celebrate next week when (crossing fingers) I hit 185.

This weekend, JSL turned four.  This meant a birthday party which, of course, meant a trial of my willpower.  Now, my willpower can sometimes stay strong, but not during an event like this.  I’ll admit that I didn’t track my points over this past weekend.  And when I don’t track my points, I slip and eat more than I should.  Of course, this leads to weight gain.  I take a step back to 189.5 but I’m not giving up.  I’m still a stone’s throw from my goal weight and only three weeks to go.

There might not be any celebrations coming up to sabotage my weight loss, but something else is lurking: stress.  I’m not good about handling stress (as I’ve mentioned in the past).  I don’t have a big circle of offline friends to talk things over with and online friends can only help so much.  Talking with B helps, but if the topic is something we both are stressing over then the stress tends to fester.

When the stress festers, I think less of the pounds on the scale.  It’s not so much that I turn to food for comfort as I cease to care.  I’m worried about more important things so what does it matter if I stuff a handful of peanuts down my throat?  I’m fretting about big items so why should I care about how many points this snack has?

Right now, the stress is festering.  I want to scream about everything that’s going on, but the circumstances surrounding the stress don’t make that a possibility.  I can say that it involves NHL’s education, though.  Right now, the best I can do is try to keep the stress from overwhelming me.  Deep calming breaths and distracting work seem like the best prescription to avoid a binge.