Saturday, October 1, 2011

When is a plateau not a plateau?

About 8 pounds ago I convinced myself that I was on a stubborn plateau. How wrong was that?

One nice thing about this being a lifestyle choice (and not a diet) is that I didn't veer. It doesn't matter so much if I am losing weight, as long as I am healthy and eating the right foods. I want my body to find its new equilibrium - whatever that is (if it is in a bad place, of course I will have to reevaluate - but so far so good). If I was just doing the weight loss thing (again), I'm almost positive that is where I would have started adding in more foods (again), leading to the next upswing in the ongoing diet yo-yo (again).

It is great to think that I might be off the rollercoaster this time.

That spike there? That's where I fell off the slow carb diet. Then I found paleo/primal and never looked back. I wasn't even really trying to lose weight at that point. I needed a lifestyle that I could maintain in perpetuity that didn't make me fat and unhealthy. I found it. Finally.

This paleo thing? It's easy as pie.


2 comments:

  1. Where did you get the graph? Very handy, I think, to see how you have been doing long term

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  2. Hi Sarah,

    It is a Google Docs Spreadsheet plot (docs.google.com). Free, easy to use, and one click to download an image of the chart.

    Since you ask, though, a note about my weighing protocol is probably in order.

    I weigh myself frequently. I make a note only of new lows, unless I have an obvious uptick (at least 8-10 pounds for me since 5 pound intra-day fluctuations are normal) in which case I record that and new lows relative to that.

    I do that so that I don't have to use as many data points to see the trend. Each point represents a "local minimum". Another valid way of approaching that problem would be to record lots of detail and graph a moving average. But I'm lazy and it is just for me.

    David

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