Well, my progress didn’t exactly go as planned this week. As I mentioned last week, I had planned this week to be down into the 260s. That would be a good range to be in and I would finally be getting into a non-embarrassing weight class. Well, that didn’t exactly materialize this week.

At one point this week, I was 5 pounds heavier than my best day last week. It ended up taking all week to get back down to the 270 mark that I had achieved last week. I am not completely sure what drove the increase in my weight. I did have a couple of moderately high calorie days, but they were still completely within my daily target. Friday was a little tough because I had a donut, pizza, steak, beer and wine all in the same day and was 600 calories over my net target. There were a couple of days of multiple drinks too. But, none of those were days before the big gain, they were after as my weight was coming back down. I know that fluctuations are going to happen daily, but it would be easier not to get discouraged if I was able to correlate them to some root cause.

Separate from what the numbers are telling me, I experienced some success this week in other ways. This was the first week when I saw a distinct uptick in the amount of random people giving me positive feedback. Multiple times at work and beyond, somebody would take me aside and tell me that I am looking good or that they really see the impact. This kind of culminated with the owner of a bar that we frequent at Indian Lake bragging about my progress to other bar customers. The other customers were people I didn’t even know. He was telling them how proud he was of me and my accomplishments.

Another interesting experience was that a coworker approached me and told me that my journey has inspired him and that he has started his own.  After putting on some weight over the past couple of years, he has committed to losing and has already made progress.  The big ah-ha here is that my story and my commitment can be inspiring to others and I can help just by sharing my story.  Guess Liz is right, I should really start a blog.  [Spoiler alert: you are reading that blog!]

I guess the biggest lesson I learned this week is that the numbers are just part of the story. My journey has lots of ways to evaluate success and the scale is just one indicator of progress.

Last week’s stats:
Distance walked/run: 34.3 miles
Total calories burnt: 28,533
Total calories consumed: 13,460
Weight change: 3.5 pounds lost