Staying Positive

Well, tonight when I get into work is when I have my weekly weigh in to see how I'm doing. Last week, I weighed in around 223.5 lbs and I set a goal to lose two more pounds by today. I'm a little bit nervous about it because I cheated yesterday a little bit an weighed myself on the bathroom scale at home and it didn't seem to show that I'd lost. If anything the bathroom scale shows I may have gained! I will just have to wait and see what the digital scale out at work says and go from there.

On top of all that though, I've been thinking about this past week. I set that goal and I have to admit that it did wonders for motivating and driving me to eat right and get my training in every day. Tonight, perhaps the scale will not reflect the past week's efforts as I fear, and that's the danger of using the scale only to measure my success. So, I'm going to do my best to not allow the scale to determine how I feel about this past week.

In Tom Venuto's, The Body Fat Solution, he talks about how from day to day our body weight can fluctuate as much as five pounds, factoring in just water retention and things like that. To feel successful, all I really need to do is look back on this past week. I feel really good about how I ate, and trained all week. I stayed motivated, and had a strong will power. The other thing going for me, is I can feel for a fact that I've lost some fat as my clothes are fitting looser than before. I got to work last night and strapped on my firearm and duty belt, and it all felt a little looser than a week ago. And that's the true measure of success In this whole get into shape business. It's quite possible that I've been adding muscle and losing fat simultaneously and they've been canceling each other out.

The scale is good tool for measuring some success, but it shouldn't be my primary motivation from week to week. Of course, it eventually has to reflect my efforts. If I can get down to less than 10% body fat, I sure as heck will weigh less. Man look at my rambling rant today! You'd think I'd already weighed and found that I'd gained ten pounds by the way I've gone off today.

Regardless of what the scale says tonight, I'm going to just continue to charge forward with the same plan. I'll have to reset my goal and try again for next week. It's probably time to take some measurements as well. I'll update when I get the scale results as soon as I can.

Over and out.