Your weight changes like Oprah!

I have joked a lot with friends and family that my weight fluctuates like Oprah. It's funny to me at least, and is definitely a way to make me feel better when I gain a few pounds. In the picture I captured the graph of my Gyminee weight tracking. I joined Gyminee in October of last year when I heard of a challenge posted by Brad Feld which he called his weight jihad. I joined the Boulder Boys weight loss challenge, and it worked pretty well. I lost about 12 pounds in the three months we had the competition. You can see from the graph that I lost a lot of weight right away in a very short period of time. That's what I call my obsessive period. Then, you can see that it starts to fall apart, going up and down and for the most part staying flat (or maybe even creeping up at a small incline). That's what I call my post-obsessive period.

Typically, after the post-obsessive period, I have a gluttony period. For whatever reason, I work out hard and starve myself for a few weeks, or even a month. Then I just can't take it anymore, and I start eating the things I have been depriving myself of. For me, that's essentially chips (potato chips, corn chips, etc). I can go on in that mode still working out hard, telling myself that I'm "maintaining" now. Then I'll say things like, "this must be my natural body weight, because I'm not losing any more." Being completely honest, that's all a load of BS. If I would just "maintain" a healthy eating and workout plan, then I likely wouldn't lose my mind from deprivation and binge on a family size bag of Doritos.

So, right now I'm back into an early stage, but I'm trying not to be too obsessive about it. I realized that I started getting into the gluttony period a few weeks ago, and I cut it off before it could do serious damage. I'm trying a new plan I'm calling obsessive maintenance. With this plan I still hit the treadmill, and I still eat healthy and small portions for the most part. However, I'll let myself have a snack size bag of chips every few days, and a couple of cheese and crackers, etc. I'm hoping that by using portion control and not complete deprivation I will stem the post-obsessive phase and stick to my guns this time. If I can maintain this for a few months, the hope is that it will become natural habit, and much easier to continue.

The big gap in the data points on the graph was me entering the gluttony period and then back into obsessive. I don't know what my weight climbed back up to as I decided I didn't want to know until I had tried lowering it again for a while. I'm psyched that I'm back on track and the lowest I've been since I started tracking it. Wish me luck and strength of will, and soon enough I'll reach my goal.