Keeping Focused on the Diet

Still on the Diet

I am still on the diet. This is coming to the end of week 3 of calorie tracking and I am down 5.8 pounds. Surprisingly, these three weeks have been easier than I expected. I have had 5 days where I went over the calorie budget by over 100 calories, but on the weekly level, I have remained under the amount that would have me lose 1.5 pounds per week.

Diet challenges

One challenge I have had over these three weeks is the amount of hours I have been working for the day job (not the writing job). I’ve averaged over 12 hours per day (over 60 hours per week) since the start of April. And unfortunately, those are hours I have spent in the chair and not moving around. In fact, my Fitbit step counts for some days had been well under 5k and many hovered around 2.5k. Only 4 days had me over 10k steps. (I love having the tech toys to track these things. If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.)

Another challenge is that I am the only one in the house doing the diet. The positive side to that is outside two times that we grabbed some take-away, I have manged to refrain from eating in excess.

Things to compensate

To try to stay on the diet and compensate for the lack of movement, I put a couple of weights in the office. I’ve moved up to 15 pound weights and need to figure out where I put the 20 pounders. I’ve also been doing sit-ups, pushups, and other exercises and stretches. Though, I will be honest, I didn’t even do those on some days.

I have also been trying to eat at home more. I am eating more salads (which if I eat 4 cups of salad, it fills me up with few calories). The other benefit to eating at home is that my budget for food in April is running at around 40% of what I originally expected to spend.

The primary way I have stayed on track is by eating smaller portions. I still get to eat some goodies, but instead of eating 3 servings of ice cream, I weigh out 1 serving and just eat that … slowly. It might not work for everyone, but it is working for me.

Sanity

How is my sanity while we are all at home? Pretty good actually. Since I am still working, I don’t have those concerns and I feel fortunate for that. The huge number of hours has been good and bad. On the plus side, I don’t have time to think about other things, but it keeps me from being able to have the time to exercise as I would like and it keeps me from writing or doing creating things. The lack of writing and creativity is probably the biggest detractor from my mental health. I get quite grumpy if I don’t do creative things.

The fortunate thing is that I hope the time will normalize back toward the 40 hours a week mark soon.

The other very fortunate fact, both for the diet, and my mind, is that I live close to several trail systems. They aren’t the mountains, but many of them have some tree cover. So this morning, we got up and put in 6 miles on one of the trails we had not explored much before. There were quite a few people on the trails getting in some exercise, but not so many that we could not social distance.

The featured photo at the top of the post is from a tree on the trail, as is the small pond at the bottom of the post. There are lots of birds and other wildlife enjoying the weather, which is what we did.