Weight: 224.6 (-6.6)
Fat: 34.3% (-5.0%)
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Cardio (Treadmill 34:00 WL3 - 321 calories, 2.01 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back

Week 2
Avg Weight: 225.4 (-3.9)
Avg Fat: 34.9% (-1.6%)
Measurements

  • Waist: 46.4 (-0.3)
  • Hips: 42.9 (-0.3)
  • Forearm: 12.1 (+0.5)
  • Calf: 16.6 (-0.5)
  • Thigh: 23.6 (-0.5)
  • Wrist: 6.8 (+0.0)

Today is day 14 and that means the end of week 2. Since this is the second week that I have an average of my weight and fat percentages, it's also the first week that I have a solid comparison for how much I have lost after removing the weekly variation in weighings. But more about that below.

Last week I had developed a series of questions that I had intended to ask myself every week. But looking back I'm not sure that I want to keep that format. I still want to use the weekly blog post as an opportunity to review my progress, do perhaps not as structured as I originally thought.

Disappointment

I have to admit, that I'm fairly disappointed going into the end of this second week. I've added a bit of magic to the photo above so that you can hover over it to see my original photo for comparison. Now this was day 3 and therefore not completely a "Before" picture, but considering the way I've been easing into my new idea of fitness it's not unrepresentative of my original state. As you can see there's really not much of a difference from day 3 to day 14, even though I have worked out every single day and been more aware of what I'm eating.

As I mentioned in my Day 0 introduction post, I was really inspired by this video I had found of John Stone. He's posted his first 479 photos, both front and side so that you can see his daily progress. And looking at his day 1 profile and comparing that to his day 12 (comparable to my day 3 vs day 14) and you can see that he's made a serious improvement in his stomach.

By comparision, you can see my profile doesn't change at all. In fact, going through my photos makes me feel like it's just a photo gallery of the different shorts I own. When I was two weeks into my boot camp experience, I saw an enormous change in my body and so did everyone else. Right now the only people aware that I'm working as hard as I am is the person I live with who has seen the effort I've put into this.

Also, although I had even made an entire blog post about weighing daily and why you shouldn't sweat the daily changes, I did exactly that. In the first three days of the week, my numbers were almost identical: 225.6, 225.4, 225.4. And then I went up a pound: 226.4 before returning to 225.4 again for the following day. I knew better than to worry about this but after constantly dropping numbers the previous week, I confess that I fell into the same trap that I chide other folks for.

Perspective

I've harped on unrealistic expectations and the desire to push for immediate improvement so I have to say I was a bit caught off guard by the disappointment I've felt. Here I am preaching a slow and steady weight loss, an emphasis on realistic benchmarks and not "look how much I lost in just x weeks", and yet I load these photos up and wonder "Where are the results from all that hard work?!" I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, so I think it's time for me to reflect on this and gain a bit of perspective.

First off, I have committed to losing weight at a sustainable pace. My goal is not to lose weight and get skinny so much as it is to learn to live a healthier lifestyle in which I will lose weight, gain muscle and enjoy the benefits of fitness. Although I expect that my transformation will be dramatic it won't happen overnight, nor will it happen in a few weeks or even months. I expect to spend the next year or two losing this weight and then building some muscle before I even begin my maintenance. Two weeks is a drop in the bucket compared to two years.

Secondly, although I was comparing profile pictures with someone else and found myself expecting more, the same person taking photographs on the same days shows very little change in the frontal photos: day 1 vs day 12. And this is in someone who was losing weight at approximately twice the pace (at least intially) that I am aiming for. Visible change is different for every person and not always readily apparent.

Thirdly, my starting gut is far larger than his. His little pooch has nothing on the barrel I've got wrapped around my lower torso. When you've got so much to begin with, the same change in weight is going to be far noticable on someone that starts out with less. In other words, draining a gallon from a 2.5 gallon container is going to be a lot more noticable than drawing a gallon from a 55 gallon drum. I'm going to have to work a lot harder to destroy the bulk around my middle.

Evaluation

This is one reason why it's so important to have an objective way to evaluate your performance. Although my visual appearance hasn't changed, the numbers tell another story. My average weight for week 1 was 229.3 pounds, and my average weight for this week was 225.4 pounds, meaning that in my first week-to-week comparison I dropped 3.9 pounds. Since my target is to drop about 1-2 pounds per week, I'm actually ahead of schedule. Even better, today's measurement is 6.6 pounds less than my first day of weighing. I'm aware that there's a lot of water weight loss there so I won't get overly excited, but that's pretty substantial nonetheless.

Likewise, we can examine my fat percentage. If you look at the numbers every day you can see that they're very volatile. The fact is the measurements the scale makes are very error prone and not a good estimation of the amount of fat I have in my body. But they are good enough for relative measurements and to decide if I'm headed in the right direction. And in that instance, they are. My averaged fat is down 1.6% over week 1. If we accept that my fat percentage was around 35% to begin with and 15% is considered fit for males, this is extremely good progress.

To lose more I would risk lowering my metabolism by eating too little, or all the problems that come with overtraining. In fact if my weight loss or fat loss slows down next week, I shouldn't be disappointed as my focus is on the long-term not how I look today.

Conclusion

Remember, the reason you step on your scale in the morning, the reason you measure your fat percentage, and the reason you take photos is not to show off. They are a tool to measure your progress. To know if you are on the right track, if you need to make changes to your diet or exercise. We want to identify problems and plateaus, not to obsess about statistics or how we look. It's very easy to get caught up in these measurements, but it's important to reinforce the idea that these are a means to an end, not the absolute goal in our quest for fitness.