Tough Week

It really was a hair puller this week. I suppose there's a reason that common wisdom is don't weigh yourself every day. It can get really exasperating. For quite a while early in the week I thought I was headed for another low loss week like last week. The meager .8 pound loss that I had then was still bothering me. It shouldn't. Any loss is a good loss, and sure beats going in the other direction, but where I am right now, it's just too little. So I ended up obsessing over the scale all this week, and it nearly killed me. I'm going to have to really force myself to stay away from it until the official weigh in day each week and just take it like a big girl, whatever the number is.

This week actually turned out good though. I had a 2.8 pound total loss, which is great. Sure, who wouldn't love the numbers that people on those big weight loss shows on television have, right? That's not realistic though. I exercise a lot--for a normal person. I get in at least an hour a day 2 to 3 days a week, and an hour and a half 3 to 4 days a week, with one rest day in there to let myself recover. On those shows the players are expected to exercise 5 or more hours a day. Who in real life has that kind of time, not to mention how dangerous that is for the body, the chances for injury, etc, and most of us don't have a doctor on call in the next room. There have also been a lot of rumors, even former contestants who have said they were made to do things diet-wise or take supplements that weren't condoned on air. Regardless of the whys though, any reasonable person would have to acknowledge that anything over 5 pounds a week, even for the heaviest person is probably way too fast, especially without surgery.

What really makes me laugh, thinking about those shows (and for the record, I watch just about all of them, I can't help it. I'm a glutton for punishment.) is the juxtaposition in viewpoints from one of my favorites. I love Chris Powell's Extreme Weight Loss, but on the show he pushes contestants to lose extreme amounts of weight, upwards of 5 pounds a week in some cases. However, in most of his pre-show books and writings, and even some written during the show's span, he says that safe weight loss should not be more than 2% of your total body weight per week, making my maximum safe loss 3.5 pounds. So, 2.8 is pretty close to that. Not max, but up there.

Oh, and by the way---this week's loss puts me over the 60 pound total loss mark at 61.8 pounds lost.