5 Months Gone, Lost 37.4kgs / 82.4lbs

This was a very challenging month. I was out of town for ten days on a business trip. That made a couple of things really difficult to accomplish. First of, the diet. Keeping up with a healthy diet during travel is always a challenge in itself. I had to do some grocery shopping in remote locations and plan my meals guesstimating calories eaten :) Worked pretty good tough. I lost a total of 4.8kgs / 10.5lbs during January. It is pretty slow compared to past months, but it is just going to get slower every month anyways. The pace of fat loss slows down while overall body fat percentage decreases.

I just want to point out the two weight loss plateaus in the above graph. During day to day weight tracking it is sometimes demoralizing to see no progress at all. Both for the first two weeks and the last two weeks of January it felt like whatever I was doing was not helping at all. I knew that was not the case. I knew what I was doing was right. Moreover, I knew I shouldn’t be fooled by short term results and keep it consistent. How do I know all that? If you monitor long term trends that’s what you will see. That is why it is critical to keep tracking the trend instead of daily changes. One would at least need a full month of data before can interpret anything :) If something is not working for a full month, change it, give it another month. I know that sounds painfully slow, but that’s the game.

Second difficulty was my cardio goal! My plan was to keep going with indoor cycling until I’m 110kgs / 240lbs. However, none of the hotels I stayed had a gym. That means no cycling. Budget hotels is what they are. Thankfully my trip was on the second half of the month and I had already been down to 114kgs / 250lbs. It was time for some running :)

I did 8K in my first run! :) It’s been three years I didn’t do any running, and my first run is an 8K! For those of you who never ran… this is just amazing… and I should say that this is thanks to my running background. At least that’s my guess. I don’t think anyone loosing 37kgs / 82lbs in five months can do 8K in their first run if that’s indeed their first run in their life :) However, my pace was pretty slow averaging around 7 minutes / km. My usual pace for 8k was around 5-6 minutes when I was around 90kgs / 200lbs. Considering I have 20+kgs / 44+lbs of additional fat on me I think it is a fair slow down I have in there :)

Being able to run is pretty big for me! It was my biggest motivation during my fat loss journey, and it is fun to see it happening. I kept running 4 times a week fulfilling my cardio requirements in my plan for the rest of month. Besides some weird knee pain I’m doing ok. That’s a topic for another day :) In other news! I have already signed up for a race this week-end :) I will be running 11K, or maybe crawling who knows :) It should be fun either way.

The plan for February isn’t different than January. I will keep doing four sessions of 40 minutes cardio every week. I’m sure most of it will end up being outdoor running :) unless my knee stops me. In that case I might need to fall back to indoor cycling. I will let myself ramp up the cardio time if there is a race, or for any particular social reasoning. However, I will try to plan for 40 minutes runs as much as I can. Besides enjoying running my secondary goal will be to stay close to my 160 minutes of cardio time per week goal without reducing time spent per session, or canceling a session.

That’s it for the monthly report. If you are on Runkeeper make sure you send me a friend request :) Here is my profile page. See you soon!