On Saturday July 28th, I started my “98% Diet” plan.  My starting weight was 193lbs with a body fat % between 24-26% depending which of the two scales I use.  The outcome I’m targetting to achieve is to hit a body fat % of 12% or less by August 2008, which would put me at around 165lbs if I was to gain no muscle between now and then.  Since I will be implementing a strength training program at the same time, I expect that I will gain muscle mass so 165lbs is not really my target weight.  I don’t really care if I end up weighing 200lbs in one year, as long as I hit 12% body fat because it will just mean I’ve gained a lot of muscle. :) 

In the short term, however, I wanted to see how well my diet would do without implementing any form of exercise and my current “Trend Weight” is a loss of 4.3lbs of fat in 14 days (188.7lbs).  What is a Trend Weight?  Well, I like to weigh myself every day but the problem with weighing yourself every day is that your weight will fluctuate from day to day simply due to the amount of water you retain, so it is not really a good indicator of how well you’re doing.  For example, if you eat really well on a given day and then next morning you weigh yourself and you are actually a pound heavier than you were the day before, that becomes discouraging!  Or if you slip off your diet plan and eat a giant pizza but the next day you wake up and you’ve actually lost half a pound because your body purged some water, it kind of screws with your mind a bit psychologically and you start having these crazy thoughts linking “Eating Pizza = losing weight?  Hmm….I wonder…” and “Eating Healthy = gaining weight?”  Of course, this is not true, it’s just that we have no real way to measure exactly how much fat we’ve lost just by weighing yourself on a scale on any given day.

So why not weigh myself once a week for example?  Well, there’s a flaw in that as well.  For example, here is my actual weight on three days:

Aug 5 - 188.6
Aug 6 - 185.5
Aug 7 - 188.8

August 5th was a Sunday, so if I weighted myself every Sunday once a week I would think my weight for that week is 188.6.  If I weighed myself every Monday, I would think my weight for that week is 185.5.  That’s a 3.1lbs difference!  So instead of relying on a weekly weight, what I actually do is I use a formula to create a trend weight.  Here’s how the formula works:

Today’s Trend = TT, Yesterday’s Trend = YT, Today’s Weight = TW, Yesterday’s Weight = YW

Formula is: TT = YT + (TW - YW)/7

So, for example if my weight during a 7 day period follows this pattern: 200, 198, 196, 198, 195, 196, 197, what would my trend weight be at the end of each day?  Well , here it is:

Day 1 - Actual Weight: 200 - Trend Weight: 200
Day 2 - Actual Weight: 198 - Trend Weight: 199.7 (Calculated as TT = 200 + (198 - 200)/7)
Day 3 - Actual Weigth: 196 - Trend Weight: 199.2 (Calculated as TT = 199.7 + (196-198)/7)
Day 4 - Actual Weight: 198 - Trend Weight: 199.0
Day 5 - Actual Weight: 195 - Trend Weight: 198.4
Day 6 - Actual Weight: 196 - Trend Weight: 198.1
Day 7 - Actual Weight: 197 - Trend Weight: 197.9

So, here’s what the typical person would do if they weighted themselves and only looked at their actual weight:

Day 1 - 200lbs - Great start, I feel great.  Let’s do this.
Day 2 - 198lbs - Woo hoo! Lost 2 pounds, this kicks butt!
Day 3 - 196lbs - Woo hoo! Lost another 2 pound, this is easy!
Day 4 - 198lbs - What happened!? I just gained 2 pounds back!  What’s going on, am I doing something wrong? I ate well yesterday!
Day 5 - 195lbs - Woo hoo!  Back at it.  Lets rock!
Day 6 - 196lbs - Ok this sucks.  Now I’m gaining weight back.  This rollercoaster ride is driving me nuts!
Day 7 - 197lbs - Gained another pound again!  This sucks big time!

See how depressing it can be to weigh yourself every day?  You start linking pain to weighing yourself, you feel out of control because even when you eat healthy you might gain a pound on the scale the next morning etc.  If however you just focus on your trend weight, your week would look more like this:

Day 1 - 200lbs - Great start, I feel great.  Let’s do this.
Day 2 - 199.7lbs - Cool, things are slowly starting to take off.
Day 3 - 199.2lbs - Nice!  Every day I get closer to my goal.
Day 4 - 199.0lbs - Not as big of a drop as yesterday, but I’m still doing well.
Day 5 - 198.4lbs - Very nice!  This is really starting to get exciting.
Day 6 - 198.1lbs - I can do this.  It’s just a matter of time and I’ll reach my goal.
Day 7 - 197.9lbs - Nothing but good news.  Sweeet!

See how it works?  It basically smooths out the bumpy ride.  Anyway, I just wanted to explain briefly what I mean by “Trend Weight” and why I prefer to watch that on a daily basis versus freaking out when the scale shows I’ve gained a pound or two.  Keep in mind that the trend can also go up if you consistently are gaining pounds every day, so it doesn’t mean you can ignore your diet and still expect your trend to go down.  It just helps to smooth out the bumps a bit so that we can see progress on a daily basis.

In case you’re wondering, I use an Excel spreadsheet to do this calculation so that on a daily basis I just plug in my actual weight that morning and the spreadsheet automatically calculates the trend weight for that day.

The specifics of what I’m actually following for my daily diet will be detailed in future articles.  In the meantime I just wanted to report my progress so far and the process I use to measure it.

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