Shrinking Dad Project, Week Nine: Progress

Let’s start with some numbers: This week I weigh in at 250.4 pounds. I started out nine weeks ago at 267.5, which itself was a drop from almost tipping the scale at 270 at the beginning of the year. February 8 marked the first day I switched from my regular — and apparently not very healthy — diet to eating the prepared foods of Nutrisystem, along with eating more frequent, albeit considerably smaller meals, each day.

To keep my forward progress, I’ve also kicked up my exercise, going to my local gym almost every day and working out for typically 45-60min each day. I listen to audio books, so it’s pretty easy to zone out and “get it over with”, though rather to my surprise I am finding it’s a good way for me to gain energy and improve my mood if I’m feeling grumpy, frustrated or overwhelmed. I know I’m not the first to find that being in a bad mood and forcing myself to go to the gym is easily the best way to raise my mood and improve my day.

Over these nine weeks I’ve found that the prepared meal approach of Nutrisystem is a mixed bag: on the positive side it’s really terrifically easy to cook a prepared meal and be done with food, but on the negative side, as a single dad, I find that I’m often out and about for meals, especially dinners. In fact, I calculate that I’m about 2-3 weeks behind on my NS dinners, so I have rather a backlog of food. Perfect for the apocalypse, I imagine, but it’s interesting to see what it reveals about my eating patterns because I’m exactly on schedule with breakfast foods, have maybe 5-10 extra lunches after two months of being on Nutrisystem, but really have an astonishing number of extra dinners that I haven’t consumed because I’ve been out with friends or family for meals.

I’ll observe that by paying much closer attention to what I eat and how much I eat, I’m still losing weight at a good pace and haven’t had that stall out my progress or push me in the wrong direction, even as I eat out quite frequently. So it’s doable, thank goodness, because if this involved four months of every single meal eaten at home I wouldn’t have signed up in the first place. 🙂

So that’s my week nine status update. My 20 pound loss goal is in sight, and a bit closer yet, I’m looking forward to my first sub-250 weigh-in. It’s been a long, long time, so long that I can’t even remember being at this weight, let alone seeing 24- as a weight on the scale. Kinda makes me want to continue for at least another ten or twenty pounds and really see how I can change my physical dimensions. We’ll see how I feel in another 6-8 weeks, however…

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