I suspected that today would be a little tricky, if only from the standpoint of getting all the food in. It’s my first shift back on nights, which means switching from day mode. Usually I stay up until around 3AM, with maybe a snack before going to bed, sleep til around midday, have breakfast when I get up, and something to eat before I leave for work. Now I have a set amount of food to eat in each 24-hour period, I think my usual pattern will change to dinner before I go to bed, breakfast on rising, something to eat mid-afternoon, and the snacks when I get to work. This will be followed by the lunch portion overnight (around 3AM), and then dinner when I get home, which is a little more than I’m used to but will work out fine.
This afternoon, however, I had a seminar to go to, which meant dinner before going to bed, breakfast on rising (around 1PM), part one of my lunch/snacks when I got to uni and the rest when I got to work. Yes, I know – fascinating. Well, the seminar (or, strictly speaking, PhD oration) certainly was, but that’s somewhat beside the point.
Day 1 of week D is certainly delicious, and very filling - I had the snack of cheesy chicken spaghetti when I got to uni, some when I got to work (a piece of delicately seasoned roast chicken sliced over a salad and wrapped in a mayonnaise-spread wrap; and a baked vegetable patty with sweet chilli sauce) when I got to work, and dessert (stewed peaches; and a reprise of week B's apple and sultana pancake!) just before midnight.
But before all of that I weighed in - though a little disappointing after my illicit post-diarrhoea weigh in the day before (dehydration may not result in an accurate picture of progress, but it does make for a gratifying one), I've lost a further 2.1K, bringing my loss thus far to 4.4k in two weeks.
I suspect that I'm not going to manage any significant exercise over the weekend, particularly as I didn't fit it in on this least rushed on days, but beginning Monday it's back on, so I can both maintain the loss and so I can build up my fitness as I de-escalate the weight. I can't see myself ever being close to the 60k or so that is recommended by BMI calculators for my height (BMI = 22), but 75k or so (BMI = 28) sounds reasonable and achievable. And my current BMI? Is north of 40, just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from.
For the record, I think BMI is a simplistic and flawed measure of health, that doesn't take frame, ethnicity or gender into account. more importantly, the divisions between categories are purely arbitrary - there are no differences between the health outcomes of a person who's BMI is 24.9 and one whose BMI is 25.1, but one is 'healthy' and the other is 'overweight.' In many cases outcomes are better for people wtih a BMI between 30 and 34 or so. for more criticism of BMI see this article, this response to another article, this article about what's wrong with the western campaign to lose weight instead of to gain fitness, and go here to read about how changing the definitions of BMI categories massively increased the number of 'overweight' Americans overnight; for a more visual representation of the arbitrary nature of BMI check out Kate Harding's BMI Project. Despite all that, my BMI isn't an inaccurate reflection of my size. - Alex
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