Week 16 (36 to go)

So, my body is a strange thing. This week I lost a whopping 1.8kg. Because of this number, I have gone back and looked at what is different / what changed. This has led me down a path that i will try and articulate below:

First things first. This is the first week of COVID-19 'lock-down' (not official, just a social separation thing enforced by work). I have worked the entire week from home and I imagine i will be doing so for the next number of months. The positives of this include i am getting full nights of sleep, i have a routine developing and i am eating home made lunches instead of store bought. I have my gym equipment in the garage, so no problems with exercise and we have a good amount of fresh foods in the house so eating healthy is very easy. I think this has a large bearing on the numbers posted this week.

The work week has been unusual, I have been getting roughly 8 hours of sleep consistently, been making sure i do my exercise and sticking to home made food for lunches. When at work, i always opted for the healthy meals (Salads etc), however it is evidence to me that when you cannot track 100% of what you put in, the numbers estimated are just that - estimates. I think that once the COVID-19 clears, and normal workdays resume, I will need to make sure i pack lunches more and rely on 'healthy' take out options less.

I had the bucks on Saturday night, where many whiskeys / beers were consumed. To take it back a step, in the morning i woke up, did my normal workout at a higher intensity (cross trainer / Biceps & Chest weights). I then ate healthily through the day before heading out at 4pm. We went to a whiskey bar and comedy show, where my

dinner was a chicken schnitzel with veggies, not the best or the worst option. After the comedy show (11pm) the rest of the boys tried to brave the crowds and kick on, i pulled the pin and went back to my apartment. Because i had a relatively early night, i was up at 6am on the Sunday, got showered and dressed, checked out and drove the 50 minutes home before having a healthy breakfast and getting back on track.

This month I have had a number of activities that i have written about (Tool concerts, Wife's birthday, Work trip to Cairns, Bucks night) that traditionally would have derailed my diet. I have consciously gotten back onto my eating program as soon as possible and it appears, based on my daily weigh-ins, that my body stores about 1-1.5 kg of water for the day or so after the event, and then everything continues almost as normal. I have a couple of big losses the days afterward and my weekly weigh ins are mostly unaffected. I have included my analysis (apologies for my editing) below. The dots represent daily weigh ins tracked by my scales, where there are gaps is due to me being away from home at normal weigh in time (traveling etc). The weekly markers should align to previous blog posts.

The key thing to note is that on a daily level, it would be easy to throw in the towel seeing spikes like the below. The overall trend of my weigh ins, with weekly tracking has been positive, if erratic. I am gaining a better understanding of how my body reacts to situations and with my tracking data i can go back and have a look at numbers and understand why - not throw my hands in the air, say "i can't lose weight" and sit on the lounge eating chips.