Countdown to Vegas - Week 5

December 19, 2010 · 5 comments

Diet starting weight: 304

Week starting weight: 295

Today’s weight: 294

Week weight loss: 1 lb

Total weight lost: 10 lbs

This is my fifth weekly loss in a row in my Countdown to Vegas challenge. I didn’t feel good about this week at all - stress at work led me to not follow the diet plan I wanted to this week. Multiple binges, a couple of trips to fast food including one morning when I inexplicably found myself at Burger King have a Sausage and Egg Croisant and hash browns, and then still having a banana-nut muffin at work. One day at lunch I had a dessert bar that must have been 500 calories. I did no exercise whatsoever.

Yesterday I weighed in at 296 and I knew I needed to have a very good day to just get back to break-even at 295. So what did I do? I made a nice omelet for breakfast but then followed it up with a bagel with cream cheese. I was out Christmas shopping with my daughter (holy smokes the Mall of America was PACKED) and had a Chicken Divan crepe at Magic Pan and then we split a nutella dessert crepe. Dinner was a salad, but it was a premade salad from the grocery store and I used all of the dressing.

So I really had no business ending up the week losing a pound. I wrote once about how I compared losing weight to playing poker, in that you really need to focus on the decisions you make rather than the results you achieve. With good decisions eventually will come good results even if in the interim you have some swings in your results. It’s a useful thing to keep in mind for those weeks where you really feel that you did everything you could do but still gained weight.

It’s a sobering thought when it comes to weeks like this one.

Things I did well this week:

Pretty much nothing

Things I did not so well this week:

Pretty much everything

Last week I wrote that my goal for this week was to lose 2 pounds and that because I wasn’t traveling I had “no excuses for not kicking butt on my eating.” Well that didn’t work out so well and this week I am both traveling and have multiple Christmas parties to deal with. It could be a pretty bad week if I let it. I’m going to try to not let it be.

Five weeks, five losses - a promising start to my goal of losing 40 pounds by June 30th, 2011.

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{ 5 comments }

Cynthia December 19, 2010 at 12:39 pm: The body does what it does. Congrats on the loss though! You are so right, it’s best to follow the good behaviors and keep that up, because eventually, that’s what gets us there.
John December 19, 2010 at 1:05 pm: At least you lost! Just make sure one bad week does not lead to two bad weeks.
Ron December 20, 2010 at 7:21 am: Congrats on the loss John!
John's Weight Loss Blog December 20, 2010 at 7:40 am: Thanks everyone. I’m taking a different approach this week and actually wrote out how I expected my week to go in terms of eating, we’ll see how it goes!

I Need a Good Week
John Hammell December 20, 2010 at 10:02 pm: Hi John- In all probability you are insulin resistant, have you ever used a glucose meter to monitor your blood sugar? The feedback you would get from that would be invaluable in helping you attain your goals just as its been helping me. I didn’t start losing weight til I began learning about insulin resistance, and have a lot of information about this problem on my blog. Diabetes and obesity is becoming an epidemic in our country and the world. People need to learn about insulin resistance or they’ll just keep nuking their pancreas til it stops working and they’re forced to start injecting insulin. When you eat foods that are too high in carbs, you get a huge insulin dump, and your cells start blocking the insulin from carrying the glucose into them where it is needed to be burned as fuel. When you become insulin resistant, you suffer from chronic fatigue and become addicted to carbs. What happens is carbs break down into the amino acid tryptophan which is the precursor for the feel good neurotransmitter serotonin. When you’re stressed you reach for carbs to produce serotonin which temporarily makes you feel good, but the problem is that when your cells block the insulin, instead of being carried into the brain and burned as fuel, the glucose is deposited around your mid section as FAT. So you need to monitor your carbs, stop eating rice, potatoes, bread, sugar, cut way back on fruit intake, and you will start finally CONSISTANTLY losing weight. Get a glucose meter and start using it. It will provide you with feedback on what you’re eating and on how much exercise you’re getting because when you are getting enough, it lowers your blood sugar. Taking certain supplements such as chronium can also help a lot. I’ve been eating soft boiled eggs, natto, drinking tea such as bitter melon which helps lower blood sugar. I’ve been eating meat, fish, salads- while staying away from bread, croutons, ketchup- anything with sugar, anything that is high glycemic. Some fruits are more dangerous than others from a standpoint of glucose. Steer clear of tomatoes, they’re very high glycemic. Learn about good fats. You don’t gain weight by eating fat, you gain weight by eating CARBS. Theres lots of info about all of this on my blog at. I’ve gone from 246 to 195 and am heading down to 180-185 and I intend to stay there. What I’m doing works and it will work for anyone.