Well, I sabotaged myself this weekend: Friday night, I met up with some cool folks at Ella’s around 9pm for some pre-gaming. What were we pre gaming, you ask? The midnight showing of Clue at the E-Street Cinema.
Ella’s was where I sabotaged myself the first time: I splurged for a peperoni and sausage pizza. Blew my daily calorie budget by about a thousand.
Okay, so, sidebar: calorie budget? WTF?
Well, WTF is a cool little iPhone app a couple of people told me about called Lose It! Basically, it’s Weight Watchers for your phone. You set the weight you want to reach, and how many pounds you want to lose per week. I decided to be a bit aggressive: someone told me, or I found out, once upon a time, that my ideal weight (for my height) is 175 pounds, so I plugged that in for goal, and I selected the maximum weekly weight loss, which is two pounds. Assuming I can stick with everything, I’ll hit one-seven-five on December 16th, 2010.
Lose It! works by putting a person on a daily calorie budget — stick to it (or under it) and you’ll lose weight. Plug in your exercise, and it subtracts those calories against your budget. It’s not perfect: the food calorie counts are mostly estimates, and some of the exercises you can select from are laughable: Vacuuming? Broomball?
Anyway, whatever faults Lose It! has, the benefit of it as a phone app is that it keeps it front and center in one’s mind. I so much as snack on a pretzel, and I’m scanning through the app to plug it in. (Also, the app itself is free).
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled blog post: After Clue — which was, by the way, glorious* — I sabotaged myself a second time: I decided, “Hey, it’s 1:36am. I should walk home!”
And you might inquire, “Well, okay, I get how eating too much fucks your weight loss plan, Mr. Snay, but how does walking home at 1:36am fuck your plan?”
Well, it’s like this: I walked home. It was three and a half miles. Got the stink eye from a Secret Service agent on 13th & Pennsylvania, waved at a guy mopping the floor at Steam Cafe, saw an angry cop berate a kid who’d been driving like an idiot up on the Taft Bridge. Got home, checked my e-mail, went to sleep around 3:30. Woke up at 8:30, and was out the door about an hour later: trudged over to the Target in Columbia Heights and back, put an additional three miles on my feet.
About this point, my right foot started hurting. Not like unbearably so, but enough that it made walking a little difficult. And that’s when my phone rang: one of my unbelievable-how-she-hasn’t-been-fired-yet coworkers had (surprise!**) called out of work that night, was I available?
Well, of course I was. So I walked two miles down Connecticut, and by the time I walked into the shop, my foot was positively ouchie-ouch-ouch, to the point where I caught the Metro home.
I’m really getting into this walking thing: my foot was hurting, and I felt like a loser for taking the Metro. No worries about the foot though: I soaked both feet in a bucket of hot water with epsom salt, and it feels considerably better (even walked to work Sunday***).
In any case, the week still ended on a positive note: this morning, the scale read 250. That’s a loss of 2.5 pounds since last week, and a total of nine pounds since I started this endeavor.
*It sounds stupid, maybe? But it was great — I haven’t seen Clue on the big screen for a quarter century, and the audience participation and enjoyment is what makes spending $10 — to see a movie on the big screen that you could buy twice over on DVD for the same amount — so absolutely worth it.
** I’m not being sarcastic. It was a literal surprise — she usually gives no advance warning that she’s not coming in, she just doesn’t show.
*** … but then caught the bus home, because, y’know: ouchie-ouchie-ouch-ouch.