Week 26?! Yes, week 26! Broke through my plateau.

Ok, summer has been horrible for my blogging. It's also not done a great thing for my diet plan, I was in a plateau for quite some time, but this week I have pushed myself to make the right choices and get back on plan.

This summer has been great. I feel better than I've felt in ages, and we're doing a lot of stuff outside. We're also going out to eat a little more, and even treating ourselves. Since the summer started I've been on a cruise (made reasonable food choices, but did not 'diet'). Spent a week with my family (more reasonable food choices but still no dieting). Since we got back we've gone out to dinner a few times (reasonable choices, staying as close to lean and green as possible). We even had a small celebratory night out at a hotel, with dinner (reasonable), dessert (fresh cannoli), breakfast in bed, then crepes for brunch.

Finally tonight, we've got one more kid-free evening before our daughter comes back from camp, and we're going out one more time on a date night.

The key to all of this is that despite all of this 'not on plan' eating and activity, I've managed to maintain, and not gain. And then once I buckled down, this week I had over a 4 pound loss! I expect this is because I've spent most of the summer eating enough carbs to have glycogen stored up again, and this week I've burned through some of it.

As of this morning, I was at 254 pounds. Seven months ago, I was at 332 and had put a goal of 250 pounds as a far future goal, nearly impossible to attain. Now I'm a stone's throw away. I reset my goal to 240, so that I would go off plan and regain glycogen and still stay under 250 and have that be my maintenance weight, but now that I'm nearly there, I think I can do a little better.

So, while I'm not to goal yet, it is time to take a pretty hard look at things. In a couple of weeks (whenever I hit 250, I think) I'm going to start transitioning off Medifast and start eating more real food. I want to do the transition properly and then shift into a standard 'IIFYM' (if it fits your macros) style of eating to focus on building muscle and losing fat slowly. So over the next few weeks I'll be looking into that and see where I think I need to set my intake on carbs, fats, and proteins. I expect I'll still be low-carb for a long time, but not quite so low carb as I am now.

I'd like to be in transition before the end of this month, and off Medifast sometime in August or September.

Medifast has been amazing, even with the last few weeks (they were frustrating at the time, but honestly, I wasn't on plan consistently for any of my plateau, so it's hard to complain with 'maintaining/slight loss' when you aren't actually following the diet!).

The biggest lessons I've learned are: consistent meal planning, cooking every day, bringing lunch to work every day. Those are huge, because of course you're going to gain weight when you grab a biscuit at Mc Donald's for breakfast, eat chinese buffet for lunch, and then order pizza for dinner because you don't want to cook. One of those as a special occasion? Sure. All three in one day, and multiple days a week that look like that? Bad idea.

Ok! Enough talking. Time to break out some graphs. I've been a slacker this summer, but it's time to end this thing with a bang, so it's back to daily blogging and weekly graphs and charts!

Click to embiggen!

Here you can see the tail end of my plateau. It started at the middle of may when I hit 260 and then started hovering, dancing between 258 and 262 for a few weeks. I started this week in a good place, 258.0, my previous low. Even with dinner at Blueberry Hill, cannoli, and crepes, I only went up to 259.9 and decided to knock it out of the park the rest of the week. I hydrated, followed Medifast, limited snacks, and broke through.

The 6-week plateau is obvious here.

Taking a look at the weekly, you can see the stall, hovering at 259-261. Despite that though, I ended week 26 at an even 3.0 pound loss week, and that's good enough. I still think I can manage to hit my goal by mid-August.

And here's my weekly graph. Still pretty impressive, even with that flat bit. Not much longer now!

Back from vacation!

I was on vacation for about two weeks and managed a cruise and beach trip off Medifast and maintained!

I'll be posting a more detailed post this week once I'm hydrated, caught up from being gone for a while, and have some more data, but for now I'm pretty happy. Now it's time to get back on Medifast for the last bit of my loss and then transition and get my long-term plan in effect to build muscle.

But before I go:

Marshall and Christy, last week:

And us prior to starting Medifast:

Scale frustrations, slacking on the blog, and NSV.

So I haven't been blogging. I also haven't been losing weight.

For the past few weeks I've been hovering. Why am I hovering? A few reasons, most likely.

I've been eating out slightly more often, and that's increasing carb intake. I'm snacking on a few things I shouldn't... a chicken finger, some real peanut butter, more sauces than I should be eating with my chicken and mushrooms, etc. going heavy on sodium and not keeping my carbs under 100g is not helping.

I'm just not drinking my water. I know I need to and I'm working on that today.

I'd stopped exercising as much.

So, I need to actually pay better attention to water and sodium and carbs for a few days, and then I'm going on vacation where the goal will be to 'eat like a healthy person' and not 'eat a medifast diet' or 'nom nom nom buffet food and dessert bars'.

I want to get home from vacation within 2 lbs of where I started (ideally 2 lbs lower, but 2 lbs heavier is ok).

I'm currently at 260. My low is 258.2, but that was an outlier when it happened. I've been bouncing between 259-261 for a couple weeks now and it is definitely time to buckle down and do something to kickstart my metabolism. I'm hoping that more/different types of exercise and different foods will help.

However, let's go over a few NSV that have happened:

I can mow the entire lawn, with edging, and cleanup and not get winded.
I was up on the roof cleaning gutters and it was perfectly fine.
I'm wearing size XL shorts and shirts and they fit.
I put on a pair of size 38 pants and they fit!

I was straining my size 44 pants when I started this. I'm not totally comfortable in a size 38 yet but it is close. All my 44s are gone to Goodwill, and the 42s are on their way. 40 is comfortably loose (requires a belt) and 38 is a little tight.

I still have 20 lbs to lose, but I feel great and am getting slimmer and stronger. So I can't complain too much when I'm having a scale plateau at this point.