Shrinking Dad Project, Week Five

This week my results are a bit hard to interpret, because my weight is actually up a bit from where it was mid-week, but the percentage of body fat calculated by my Withings WS30 smart scale is down significantly. I weighed in at 257.8 last week and this morning I weigh in at 256.6, so that’s about right, a bit more than a pound. Progress.

I’m doing something that I know is a bad habit: I’m weighing myself every day or two, rather than just once weekly, as the team at Nutrisystem recommends. There’s more fluctuation in my weight than I would have expected, and I have to admit I was highly motivated mid-week when I weighed 254.3, an entire 3.5lbs less than my end-of-week weigh-in. But it didn’t “stick”…

Truth be told, there are a lot of external stresses in my life right now, primarily parental challenges related to where my children are in their own life journeys, and while I don’t feel like it’s adversely affecting my eating habits, it’s clearly taking a toll on my sleep and overall health. Life, however, isn’t what happens when “it stops raining and the sun comes out”, life is about what happens during the rain. So as with many people, I can’t just run away to a tropical island and focus completely on losing the weight sans reality.

What I have been doing in recognition of the higher stress level is going to the gym more often. In fact, I worked out at my local gym six of the last seven days, which is a good rhythm. Ellipticals, exercise bikes, stairmaster, treadmill, whatever, I focus on exceeding what Nutrisystem calls “your daily 3 tens” (three ten-minute exercise stints) as one straight, direct workout.

Here’s how my weight has looked in the last three weeks or so:

You can see how that 254.3 weigh-in mid-week was highly motivating, but in fact I’ve ended the week down about 1.2 pounds from last week, not almost 4. Perhaps that morning was following a day where I just ate less. Not sure. So it goes.

Where this gets more interesting is to look at the percentage of body fat, something that the Withings scale automatically measures (by sending a very low electrical current through your body when you’re standing on the scale. In fact, if you have a pacemaker, you’re not supposed to use the WS30. You can’t feel anything tho, so don’t look too worried, dear reader)

As you can see, my body fat percentage has been pretty stable at 31% or so, but apparently my more aggressive workout schedule is paying off, as I’m able to finally drop that down to under 30%. I’m not sure what the goal is here with body fat percentage and I don’t ever expect to have the leanness of an ultramarathon runner, someone who probably is at about 1% body fat (just kidding, I’m sure it’s higher than that) but still, a reduction has to be good!

There’s another factor that’s been at play this week too: I misjudged the reorder schedule for Nutrisystem food and ran out of just about all their foodstuffs for almost the entire week. So I’ve been improvising, which has worked okay except it’s awful easy to work with their prepared portions, no thought involved. When I’m done with the program, of course, I’ll go back to my own foods so this has been a good trial run, with my typical restaurant meals (eat slowly, box half up immediately to manage portion size) and such.

Anyway, that’s the week five update on the Shrinking Dad Project. It’s still going well, I’m still losing weight and now that I’m hovering around 255, I’m enthused to get below that mark and stay there. Then 250. Then… ?

Oh, and I’m now on the innermost hole on my belt as the exercise has helped me shrink down too. I’m not taking measurements of my waist but, using that as a measure, I’m going to have to switch into smaller jeans and a newer, smaller belt in the next week or two. And that’s a great place to be heading!

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