Weigh-in Wednesday: 11/12/14

I took another step backwards.  I weighed in at 121 pounds this morning.  That’s up almost a pound from last week.  For the first time in two months, my five week average also bumped up a little.  I’ve definitely hit a plateau.

It’s not really a surprise.  I’ve been much more complacent about my eating habits, so I could see the handwriting on the wall.  To make progress, I need to lose weight while I’m home and limit the damage while I’m on the road.  This past week, I didn’t really do either one.

Last week, I had a few days where I was restrained for most of the day, but ate too many snacks in the evening.  I usually run in the late afternoon.  Sometimes, I’ll eat a light dinner, but an hour or two later, I’m hungry again.  Because I’ve been gradually ramping up my training, I’m trying to strike a balance between losing weight and eating enough to fuel my training.  Lately, I’ve been a little too willing to keep fueling.  Sometimes my evening snacks add up to as many calories as my dinner.  It’s like eating two dinners.

Over the weekend, I ran both a marathon and a 50K.  I was probably doing OK until after the second race.  I had a huge dinner that night.  I went to an Italian restaurant where I order a pizza and a cup of soup.  The cup of soup turned out to be more like a bowl.  The dinner also came with a small loaf of bread.  The bread came first, and it was served with “Italian butter.”  (That’s a saucer of olive oil with herbs.)  While I was waiting for the pizza, I polished off a small loaf of bread.

The next day was where the real damage was done.  I was originally scheduled to get home in the late afternoon, but I switched to an earlier flight.  Minneapolis was having its first winter storm of the season, and I had a better chance of getting home if I left early.  A consequence of getting home earlier is that I kept thinking it was later than it really was.  (The difference in time zones didn’t help.)  I ate lunch before my flight and got home feeling like it was dinner time, even though it was still only 1:30.  For the rest of the day, I was snacking.  I didn’t keep track of what I ate that day, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was twice as much as I usually eat.  It was also a rest day, so I wasn’t burning many calories.

I have to get better about my snacking.  I also have to take a long-term view.  We’re going on a vacation this weekend, so I probably won’t lose any weight until the following week.  Then I have to get serious again.