Creating new habits is freakin’ hard! But I need to get rid of the pounds I’ve added to my padding during the pandemic, plus the pounds I needed to lose before the coronavirus pushed us all into self-isolation and made us hang out with our pantries and refrigerators all day.
My weight has crept into digits that are affecting my health. My blood pressure is too high and needs to be medicated. I am fatigued in the afternoon and can’t concentrate on my writing. I run out of breath while walking up long flights of stairs. It’s not pretty. And I’m tired of it, literally.
I’m like a lot of people who struggle with their weight. I know all the nutritional facts, the caloric content of random foods, the best ways to burn those calories, and could probably have earned a few Ph.D degrees if I’d better spent the time I used to study diets. I also know what doesn’t work for me: diets that work short term but has no maintenance plan, group meetings with other dieters, super hard workouts that discourage me after one session.
I’m also a compulsive planner. I love my project paper planners and it is a little scary how much money I can justify spending on stickers, washi tape, and really good pens. So, I decided that maybe I could combine my love of planners with my dislike of dieting and exercise. Plus, it was a good excuse to buy another planner!
During the Happy Planner Memorial Sale, I purchased their Sweat, Smile, Repeat fitness planner in the mini size. I had no other motivation other than that it was on sale and I like Happy Planner notebooks and planners. I gave myself some time to kind of get ready to start this fitness project and set a hard starting date of Day 1 of Q3. I plan my writing projects by quarters, so it made sense that I would incorporate this new planner into one of my quarterly goals.
At first, I had wildly ambitious goals about how much I would exercise each day. These were quickly scaled back once I actually did one of those exercises. In the end I settled on using my Fitbit tracker and the Fitbit app to track steps and calories consumed. However, I know from one of those earlier attempts that just tracking things in the app is not enough of a motivation for me. I was also going to write down my meals in the fitness planner, together with my exercise.
In the Fitbit app, you can set up different plans based on how much weight you’d like to lose per week. I went hardcore and chose the highest possible, which is 2 lbs per week. One thing I really like about Fitbit is that the app warns you if you’re eating too little compared to how much you’re exercising.
The math part of my brain likes that Fitbit keeps track of the calorie deficit for me. It’s not a complicated formula. Basically, fitness scientists estimate that to lose one pound of body weight, you have to burn 3500 food calories. So if you want to lose 2 lbs/week, you have to burn 7000 calories more than you eat. That means, create an average of a calorie deficit of 1000 calories per day. Once I’d lost the weight and went into maintenance mode, I’d have a calorie balance of incoming = outgoing. I also prepared for the inevitable adjustment that would have to happen as I lost the weight. The heavier you are, the more you lose per week. It’s not fair, but it’s a fact.
Simple enough, my brain told me. And it was. As long as I was at home in my own kitchen and had complete control of all my calories and could write them into my pretty planner with my pretty pen. In the first five days, I lost just over 5 lbs. Hurray!
But then very unexpectedly, an appointment two states away that been on hold since the pandemic hit, all of a sudden was available. Unless we wanted to wait several more months, we had to be on-site by the Monday that started my second fitness planner week. And since we couldn’t fly–the increased exposure on a plane wasn’t allowed if we wanted the appointment–we had to drive 1000 miles in two days, and then back again, all while socially distancing.
I did okay during the first half of the first day. I ate one of the low-calorie but fulfilling and yummy breakfast concoctions I’d invented and off we went. But then we stopped for lunch and of course, the choices were extra limited not just because you have to order from a menu, but the restaurants had extra limited menus because everything had to be take-out or delivery or drive-through.
I gritted my teeth and estimated my lunch calories. When it was time for dinner, several hours of driving later during–which I mostly obsessing about how the calories added to food cooked in restaurants because of lard, butter, and sugar–and one hotel checkin–which was surreal because everyone wore masks and stood very far away from each other and the room smelled of chemicals due to the extra cleaning–I had a major freak out.
My anxiety ran rampant as I worried that all the hard work of walking 10K steps or more every day and tracking every morsel that passed my lips was completely wasted because spending a week traveling would undo all of that plus probably pack on more weight. This moment always happens at some point during my fitness regimes and this is usually when I throw all the carefully laid plans out the window and eat all my feelings by stuffing my mouth with my favorite sugar-laden treats.
This time I didn’t do this though. I don’t know if it’s because I’d just finished Brené Brown’s Rising Strong, which encourages you to change the narrative of the story you’re telling yourself in hard situations and interactions, or if it was just because I couldn’t mess up my pretty planner by breaking my streak of tracking, but what I did do was a game-changer.
I had added extra blank pages for notes at the end of the planner. Using one of my pretty pens, I allowed my inner five-year-old to rage on the page about how unfair it is that my plans never work out because some external factor always messes everything up for me. Also, why can’t eat all the chocolate I want and still lose weight? So UNFAIR!
Once I’d spent all the angry energy, which was really anxiety–let’s be honest, I took several deep breaths and sat down to explain to the five-year-old that we were still on track. See, if my daily calorie deficit was supposed to be -1000. The fact that the Fitbit app said I was over by 300-500 calories, still meant a deficit of 500-700 calories. See?! Math! So beautiful!
Maybe my inner five-year-old is precocious, but she got that subtraction and realized that maybe we wouldn’t lose as much weight as the first five days of the plan. Maybe we’d lose very little or no weight, but the likelihood of us gaining weight back was mathematically unlikely.
We’re on our way home now, and will arrive back home on Thursday. I’ll see if the scale proves my mathematical formula on Friday morning. Stay tune of the Fitness Planner: Week 2 report. 🙂
TL;DR
-I’m a paper planner nerd.
-The pandemic has pushed my weight into health-threatening territory.
-I started a new food and exercise regime using a fitness planner.
-Things went well as long as I had full control.
-Then I didn’t
-I freaked out.
-I calmed down, kind of.
-Future reports will show whether the plan is still in play.
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[…] Stay tuned to see how I do my second month. And if you want to read how it all started, here’s the first post in the Fitness Planner series: Fitness Planner: Week 1. […]
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