Friday, March 28, 2014

More Fitbit: Another Pesky Plateau

So true, so true.

The annoying thing is when you are working and not seeing the expected results.  That's what's been happening with me this week on the weight loss journey.  Granted, I've been sick, but I'm still doing what I can.


Above is yesterday's end-of-day Dashboard.  Everything looks really good, and yet I was up .4lb this morning.  Grr.  Even after eating an early dinner and only having a bottle of water when Hubby and I went to the movies last night.  It is the first time since using the Fitbit and calculating so carefully that I've gone up.

After recovering from my frustration I then asked...why?  These are my theories:
Theory 1:  I haven't sweated with Jillian Michaels since last weekend because of being sick.
Theory 2:  Maybe I miscalculated some calories somewhere.
Theory 3:  When I look at the red parts of the day when I was inactive, I was really inactive.
Theory 4  My body, now sick for 5 days, is trying to rediscover its equilibrium somewhere and my weight has suffered because of it.

So today I am being extra careful, and feeling better.  I did the Jane Fonda Walkout--50 minutes, this morning.  Breakfast was a smoothie with 2 bananas, 2 oz of blueberries, and 16 oz of homemade almond milk.  Lunch was 4 ounces of smoked turkey lunch meat, an apple, and a Cafe Vienna warm drink.  I've already had 52 ounces of water too.

I have had some wonderful responses from people on Facebook and in person about my new regimen and blog posts.  To those people, I encourage you to eat real food.  Yes, my cooking has become less creative and my Crock Pot is gathering cobwebs, but I am not eating "diet" food.  (Except Vitamin Water Zero.)  No diet bars, diet soda, low-cal ice cream, diet this and diet that.  And definitely no diet pre-made microwave meals.  Just real fruits, real veggies fresh off the organic counter, and a lot of chicken and fish.  (A bummer because our store isn't going to carry fresh, wild Sockeye Salmon for several weeks--Hubby's and my favorite.)

So I am not going to let this week bring me down as far as progress.  It's a healing week.  And I'm only logging my weight on the Fitbit site when I'm losing.  Some may disagree with that, but I only want to see progress.  I'll know what those horizontal lines mean with no dates entered in.  No need to document further than that.

Plateaus happen.  They are common.  My hope is that this one doesn't last 2 weeks like 8lbs ago (a pre-Fitbit plateau.) 

I would love to hear your theories and suggestions for overcoming plateaus.  Here's to health.  :-)

2 comments:

Christopher Bradford (Grasshopper) said...

I've found that while monitoring my weight daily helps keep me focused, there are usually fluctuations from one day to the next that have little or nothing to do with what I ate or drank or how much I exercised. If the plateau continues for 3-4 days, that's when I start wondering if I'm doing something wrong. But one or two days? I don't worry about it and often see a slightly larger drop after the apparent plateau.

MO said...

Probably you are correct, in that the illness and all has sort of thrown your body off. I agree with Chris that there are also fluctuations that we don't understand. Good luck. I know you'll be back to progress when things settle down.