Milestones - 2

So here I am again hitting another milestone. Last time I wrote a milestones entry I had just gone from the over 600 days away point and into the 500's. Today I left the 500's behind and I am at 499 days until my special wedding day. This may not seem like a lot but just five more sets of 100 days and it will be time for the wedding. So about 17% of the time has passed since I first started planning.

So lets start talking about where I am in my weight management plan. Previously I had planned on getting down to 190 from, my then current, 206. I ran into a few problems. First off my original scale was digital. I had to step on and step off about five times for it to actually give me a reading. This was my baseline scale for the 206 mark I started at.

Shortly after that mark was set it was my birthday and my girlfriend bought me a new scale. This one was analog so it had the spinning dial that landed on your weight. I was surprised to learn my baseline scale was off by about six pounds, the bad way. So now I had gone from needing to lose sixteen pounds to twenty-two pounds. Not a very good birthday, although it was a thoughtful gift.

Shortly after the new scale, in early April, I began running with the goal being a half marathon in December. I started out at two miles, three time a week. This was interrupted now and again by cold weather but by the end of May I could run regularly and had pushed the distance to three miles, three times a week,

Some time in late May I had another home scale incident. I had lost about three pounds when the scale started to give inaccurate readings. Knowing I couldn't lose five pounds by just sleeping one night, I reset the scale to my known weight from the day before. I had to do this several times and eventually the scale was wildly inaccurate. I think the humidity of the bathroom did it in because in the span of two days I could weigh anywhere between 180 and 215 pounds. So that scale was sent to live on a farm somewhere upstate.

My newest scale option is in the workout room where I work. They have one of the same kind of scales you would see at the doctors office. A few days ago I went in to set a new baseline for myself I was again surprised to find that I now weighed 215 pounds. This was after I had been running for a couple of months. I realized that I had been weighing myself unclothed at home and fully clothed at work. When I got home that night I weighed my shoes, pants, shirt, and jacket. It was a rare cold day in June so the jacket had some weight. Happily, the clothes alone came in at eight pounds on my kitchen scale. So my new baseline was set at 207.


So in the end, while it might look like I gained one pound, I don't think my original scale was very trustworthy. It is also possible that instead of losing weight, I was losing fat and gaining muscle. I had only one way of testing this theory. The wedding dress that I wore for Halloween a few years ago is a mermaid style dress so it is tailored for a fairly tight fit. In the few years since then I have tried to wear it now and again but have had some zipper blowout issues. I had the zipper replaced last December and still had some issues getting the dress on. When I tried it on again last week, I had absolutely no problems with the zipper at all. Yeah!!!!! At the very least I am losing some fat and girth.

I will continue my current schedule until the 4th of July. That's when I plan on changing to a half marathon training schedule. This will include stretching and strength on Sunday, three days in a row of of short runs with the last including another strength session. Thursday will be cross training on a ergometer, Friday I get a day off and Saturday is a long run. At first the long run will only be four miles but that will increase as the summer and fall pass, going up to ten miles in November.

Now that I have a good baseline we'll see how the new training plan goes and if I lose any more weight/fat. Shortly after the half marathon in December I will be going in for my first dress fitting. I will be following a similar plan in 2010 but instead of a half marathon, the end goal will be my wedding day.