My point here is that most people have a hard time losing weight at all, an even harder time losing as much as they want, and yet even more difficulty in staying at that lower weight.
Despite the difficulty, I intend to be one of them.
Like most successful projects, it's about having a decent plan followed by solid execution (and perhaps a few adjustments along the way). For me, accountability is also a big factor. I need to have someone who I tell about my successes and failures. Having to tell someone that I knew what I needed to do but didn't do it goes a long way.
This blog has helped at that. My friends on Traineo.com have been a huge help too. Now, I've come up with a way to track everything I'm doing and be able to report on it.
As I've written before, my major goal for next year is to get my 40K (24.8 mile) time trial time under an hour (59:59 is just fine). I also want to get my weight down about 15 pounds over the next 6 months (which is well under a pound a week).
In order to meet these goals, I came up with a list of daily and weekly tasks that I need to do. I broke those tasks into weight-loss related and fitness-related. Let's face it: it's totally possible that I could increase my threshold power by 10% but not lose a pound. Or I could lose all the weight but gain no power at all.
I then weighted them so that ones that are more important get a little more emphasis. While I want to spend at least 1 of my trainer days each week on the time trial bike, it's more important that I at least got on the trainer to begin with. I also added bonus and penalty items that might help (or hurt) on a given target. Taken together, they will give me a score for the week.
I'm not off to a great start this week, partially since I did not plan to start this seriously for another couple weeks. Still, my weight loss has been on target. I'm down to 185.0 now (from 187.0 two weeks ago).
This is the chart that I came up with and the first week's results (click on it to enlarge it enough to read):
It's not perfect, but I'm sure I'll improve it with time!
