Member-only story
Goal achieved! I lost 7kg this year
While selling a house, moving, working two jobs, and the world collapsed
A few months ago I wrote about the Captain Mal-from-Firefly diet, which is a mindset I adopted recently to change my habits. My goal was to lose the 5kg (11lbs) I gained doing an MBA, with a goal weight of 73kg (161lbs) by my birthday earlier this month.
I did it! I’m very proud of myself. All up I lost 7kg since New Years Day, which works out to be about 0.5kg per week. I didn’t give up nice meals out, and happily went out for burgers and spent a long weekend in Melbourne eating all the things.
Short answer: No snacking, smaller lunches.
I committed to a goal and tracked my progress using a spreadsheet. This was actually really important for motivation because I didn’t have any noticeable changes other than watching that number fall.
Except one little thing — my glasses. I stopped wearing contact lenses because eyes are healthier when they can breathe, and I wanted to give myself the best chance of not getting sick. So instead I’ve been wearing glasses full-time. Normally after about 2 days they start to hurt from the arms squeezing my head, and I have to either change to my old glasses or go back to contacts. I’ve been wearing my glasses for 4 weeks straight now; no pain. Conclusion: I just had a fat head!! 😆
Some refreshingly non-COVID graphs
My weight fluctuated by up to 1kg day-to-day, under the same conditions, which you can see in the trend line. I learned to care about the overall trend and not any individual measurement. Except the “new low” measurements, which I quietly celebrated.
Measuring my progress towards goal vs time elapsed was also good to track the velocity of my progress. I noticed in early March that I was slipping. That was a prompt to re-evaluate my choices.
And that’s all I have to say about that. It’s totally do-able, even though I didn’t believe it when I made the commitment in late January.
Now I need a new goal.
