Does monitoring your weight help you lose weight?

A leading blog title. So sue me.

To review, for those of you who are new:

• I’ve been clinically overweight for most of my life, at least since I was 14.
• My latest continuous effort to really curb my weight and improve my health started in August of 2010, when I weighed 195 pounds.
• My first goal was 164 pounds — a “normal” BMI for my height. I reached it in April of 2011, 7 months after I started.
• I did it mostly through exercise, though I did do Weight Watchers in the winter of 2011 until I met my goal.
• After I met my goal, I stuck to WW principals but didn’t count points. I kept losing weight until I ran a marathon in October 2011, when I weighed 148 pounds.
• Since the marathon, I’ve put back on about 7-10 pounds in the past 4 months. I kept running and cross-training, but not at the same volume. During the holidays I gave myself plenty of cheat days.

I’m OK with this — gaining back the weight — because I am still in a healthy BMI and I knew that a lot of the weight I lost marathon training was only because of the volume of exercise I was putting in. I know myself, and I know that I can’t live happily on a restrictive diet. Maybe that sounds defeatist but  … it’s not like I am saying I need to binge eat. No. When you run 5 or 8 miles on an average day and burn 600-1000 calories, that’s a lot of extra food. That’s like an extra footlong Subway sandwich. I try to work on mindful eating — stopping when I feel satiated — but its harder when you’re trying to undershoot a couple hundred calories than a couple dozen calories.

So.

I know I’ve said before I’m happy to just be under 164. But that’s not true. I’m happy to continue to fit into all the new clothes I’ve bought. I don’t want to buy bigger clothes. And I want to keep improving my running performance.

So, 157 is my upper echelon. I don’t want to go over that in this stage of my life. So, to get to the point of this post, I started doing something about it — a small step — just charting my weight every day. Not going back to points, not restricting any more than mindful eating — just being mindful of where I am.

If you look at the chart, OK, charting my weight hasn’t made a difference. And I haven’t been doing it that long. It’s only been about 3 weeks. But I notice patterns. I seem to gain some weight up to and after a long run, and lose it all two days afterwards.

My goal with charting my weight, running, writing this blog, and everything, is to incorporate healthy habits in my life that make managing my weight … routine. Not effortless, because not everything worth doing is easy, but … a system that is so effortless to follow, it doesn’t take all of my consideration and effort and desire to execute. Managing my weight can’t control my thoughts and emotions because there are too many other important things in life.

So, tl;dr: I don’t want to count calories again, but I really don’t want to keep gaining weight, so I’m charting my weight every day to observe trends and hoping that is enough to keep me honest. We’ll see.

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