The Year in Weight Loss

As many if not all of you know, I've lost about 55 pounds over the past few years. I started off quite fat, so I'm still fat now, but I have a lot more energy and am a lot more athletic than I was at my previous high. So that's good.

But last year, 2005, was pretty bad. I started out by losing weight for a while, so that I was about 12 pounds lighter than I am now, but then I gained over 20 pounds. Eating lunch out almost every single day (Mexican food, no less) with a coworker didn't help, but in general I just couldn't string together even two weeks in a row of good diet behavior.

This year, I joined Weight Watchers with the coworker I was lunching with, partly because WW was what I had threatened myself with if I ever couldn't succeed on my own (now I don't know what to threaten myself with!) and partly because, by enlisting the aid of the coworker, I could resist going out to eat unhealthy lunches and stuff.

We started this on 1/10, and as of today's meeting, I've lost 9 pounds. (2.8 of those have happened since the start of the 15-week plan.) Losing 9 pounds in 5 months is not exactly the kind of result that anyone who goes on a diet is hoping for (no matter how many lies they tell, as I always do, about being happy with a slow and steady rate), and it's been 5 months of ups and downs, little losses and little gains, and it's been hard to see the pattern through the chaos.

But 9 pounds in 5 months is an average of 0.06 pounds per day, which corresponds to a calorie deficit of about 214 per day. That's not an insignificant calorie deficit, and it would mean losing 22 pounds this year if I kept up the rate. I don't know if that will happen or not, the 22 pounds, but if I look back next January and see 20 pounds or more lost in 2006, I'll be extremely pleased.