Ten Tenths.

A short post about my interim measurement of weight loss.

Week Ten finished on a high note as I did something that I haven’t done in a long time. This morning, instead of having an early plod round the lanes before the taxis turn up we had an early breakfast in town after which I walked to the start of the canal path and the mile and a half walk through to the main road and a convenient layby where my partner Jackie could pick me up. I haven’t done that walk in a couple of years and it’s only used by a few dog walkers and joggers that early in the day : also, because we’ve had slightly better weather – less rain and warmer, the path was in reasonably dry conditions – it was also totally free of cars which makes it a calm and meditative walk rather than a fraught competition with drivers in a narrow lane. The end of ten weeks is also a bit of a high point in that iv’e completed all of my planned exercise and aside from one shortbread related fail at the local cafe iv’e stuck to my dietary changes as well.

At home my new work table has arrived, iv’e sanded it down and modified it to fit the space and we heaved it up the stairs with a fair amount of cursing. After my walk I even managed to give it the first coat of matt varnish – so all good although my hips are stiff after the longer walk.

Ten weeks seemed to be the ideal time to weigh myself and thus get a late interim measurement even though my training cycle finishes at the end of week twelve and my idea is to have a rethink about how to proceed and what I need to change about what i’m attempting. It’s also useful and mathematically easy to get a weekly estimate of average weight loss as all I have to do is work out the total change at week ten and divide that by ten : the important note is that i’m not using my baseline weight as I expect that in the first couple of weeks of exercise plus dietary change i’m likely to have dumped a load of water and that skews the numbers.

The numbers are in so there’s not much point in waffling on. According to the bathroom scales iv’e lost 2.5 Kg in the last ten weeks : as I expected that’s a little bit lower that I hoped for and I thought that weight loss would be higher at first and decline as I get a little fitter. In a way it’s great because it’s not skewed artificially high by early water loss and what iv’e measured should be mostly fat as my choice of slow aerobic exercise should mostly metabolize fat and not muscle. That’s now my baseline and predictive number – 250 Gm’s per week which sounds about right if I can keep that up long term.

I think also that it will be more useful in the future to work in Ten week cycles, then at the end of each cycle I have a known previous number to compare progress against. The other thing it means is a slight change in that I start my next cycle tomorrow morning, as I write, and I think I should set preserving muscle mass as much as I can this cycle knowing that I seem to be able to cope with what Andrew Huberman calls the Macro Suck – I do need to add a few Micro Sucks as well as to add protein and resistance exercises.

YouTube presenter Chris Williamson talks to Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and brings us the good news about Sucks