Today's numbers:
- Today's weight: 203.0 lb
- Change since last week: -1.0 lb
- Cumulative weight loss: -131.0 lb
- Average weekly weight change: -1.72 lb
My life continues to be hectic, and it won't let up until I get to the other side of the San Diego LGBT Pride Festival next weekend. So I'm extremely glad that my weight loss program is faring pretty well while on automatic pilot.
But in the meantime, I couldn'r resist taking a little time out for some weight loss data geekery. Yes, if it wasn't enough that I'm geeking out with this blog plus tracking my progress in an Excel spreadsheet and graph, I found myself getting interested in how my rate of weight loss was slowly decelerating. So I plotted a graph of the changes in my rate of weight loss over time.
And, yes, that rate is slowly but surely decelerating--which I knew already without making a chart. But now I can see that deceleration. And as that deceleration continues, I expect to see the graph of that function asymtotically approach zero. Geeky enough for you? My high school calculus teacher would be so proud.
But this isn't totally an exercise in pointless number-crunching. This is a fine demonstration of the fact that, for any given weight, there is a daily caloric intake that will maintain that weight at equilibrium, and as you get closer to the equilibrium weight corresponding to your caloric intake, your rate of weight loss will slow asymtotically until you reach equilibrium at that weight.
However, I've noticed that many dieters (and I use that word purposely to connote folks who are operating under society's dieter mentality) tend to freak out when their rate of weight loss inevitably slows down this way. Never mind that it's totally natural--if they're not losing that two (or more) pounds a week, they're convinced something is screwed up.
So they get way depressed, decide their diet is a failure, and go off on a binge, blowing their diet right out of the water. Or they start cutting their caloric intake drastically, excercising frantically, and other strategies to keep their rate of weight loss constant, which extreme behavior over-stresses their bodies, at the very least leaving them feeling like crap--and at worst, provokes the Lizard Brain into emergency famine mode, sending them off on a binge that, again, blows their diet right out of the water.
See, this is one of the dangers of dieter's mentality: you get so focused on those numbers as the sole measure of your success that you'll torture your body in any way necessary to achieve the magic number, and torture your psyche when you body rebels against being forced towards the magic number. Whereas if you listened to your body first and looked at the numbers only later, and only as a quantification of your body's state, you'd be a lot better off both physically and mentally--and a lot more capable of sustaining and maintaining a healthy weight loss.
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