Back in October I talked about my fat loss plan, which boiled down to this: exercise 30 minutes a week and live a 1.5 lb-per-week feedback diet.
Here's a snapshot of the graph on the sidebar:
The red dots are my daily weigh-in, the blue dots are my water jug body fat measurement (aka the days I go swimming). The green and blue lines are trend lines. I've lost about 25 pounds. There are some notable features here.
First, notice how my body fat was plummeting compared to my weight when I was actively swimming and doing some minimal strength training. I got out of the habit, and haven't really reestablished it yet. Also, note that the body fat measurement is consistently lower than the BMI number.
Second, notice that my trend is most consistent when I was swimming regularly. Seems like that exercise thing is a good thing to do.
Third, and you'll have to take my word for it on this, when I was following my feedback diet it worked flawlessly. The humps are when I got rebellious and didn't follow the diet even though the feedback said I should.
Let's review the diet. It's really really easy. Get a piece of graph paper and mark today's weight. Draw a line that goes down 1 lb every 5 days (this is the rate I chose, you may want to choose 1 lb per 7 days or whatever). Now, if your weight is over the line, you eat smaller portions, drink more water, and skip dessert. If it's under the line, you don't fret it. Eat what you want (without gorging yourself).
Ok, this works really good, but there's bound to be hiccups. You're only human. So when you get a hiccup like I had in January/February, the feedback system breaks down. It only takes a week or so of disobedience for you to be completely unable to get back down to the line you charted without a sharp dive. But a sharp dive is exactly the thing you are not prepared to do. So you continue to float too high. Maybe you start a new chart (a wholly demoralizing thing to have to do), and then another hiccup begins and you lose heart even sooner. What I'm getting at is that line is just too rigid. The whole point is a sustainable rate of loss.
So I modified the mechanism slightly, and hence this blog post (no, it's not so I can brag about losing 25 pounds—that comes when I get to my target weight).
Take a piece of graph paper and draw a line with the slope you want as before, starting in the corner. Now, that line starts 5 lb or so above where you are now. This is to emphasize that the line is only a slope reference, not the actual line. Now mark your weight every day, and then decide if it's a diet day or not. Do this by estimating with your pencil, finger, or just your eyes, what the slope of the line that best fits the last 5 measurements is. If it's pointing down as much or more than your reference slope, it's not a diet day. If it's flatter (or pointing up), then it is a diet day.
I've been trying this new system for a few weeks and I have found it much more adaptive and encouraging. If you have a bad couple of days, you can be back on track within a few days, no problem. You don't need to make a new graph. You can see the progress of the past and recognize that while it's not a perfect line it's still very good progress. All the good kinds of feedback.
So go give it a try. It can fit in with whatever other exercise/diet plan you have. It can work if you are just maintaining your perfect weight, or even if you're trying to gain weight. It's easy (just a piece of graph paper on the fridge). You've got nothing to lose. At least, nothing you don't want to lose.
