Weighing At Home

We don’t normally weigh in at home, but I knew I couldn’t face the number on the official Weight Watchers scale. So, while we’re working on getting solidly back on plan, we’ve decided to weigh at home on Thursday mornings. I’m not sure how long this will continue. We may decide that it works well for us and switch to Online Only memberships instead of attending meetings. We’ll see. Anyway, right now, we’re weighing first thing in the morning, right before showers. When you weigh doesn’t matter so much as being consistent about it. When/if we go back to weighing at the meeting, the loss/gain won’t be accurate for that week.  Just something to remember if you’re weighing at different times or places.

Anyway, down to business.:

• Jenny -1.4
• Jason -5.2

The good news is that we both lost, which we needed. The bad news is that my body is conspiring against me and as you can tell from those numbers, I’m having to fight for every pound I lose while Jason had a pretty significant loss. Now, I know that men usually lose faster than women do, but in our first year of Weight Watchers, I easily stayed ahead of Jason in total weightloss. Several factors have contributed to the gap, firstly being my hormonal imbalance that is not being medicated (not my choice). Secondly, Jason has been quite a bit more active than I have. He’d only had a few days under his belt at the gym (approximately 45 minutes per day I think) by the time of this weigh in, which was Thursday morning, but it definitely helped him have a great loss. I haven’t been as dedicated to exercise and it shows.

But I have a new tool in my arsenal. After being recommended by a couple of people, including last week’s commenter, indigodragyn,  I found myself a used Ultra FitBit to try out. I did some testing and while it had a few extra erroneous steps, it wasn’t even close to how bad the Weight Watchers one was. No more than you’d get from any other pedometer anyway. While there isn’t a way to adjust sensitivity, it felt like it wasn’t needed on this unit. This really is the kind that you clip on and forget about while it tracks your day. Here’s a screenshot of the dashboard:

I really like that it doesn’t just tell me totals, but lets me look at where the activity is during the day. Above is the summary of where I was activity-wise at the time I came back from lunch today.  But I don’t just wear it during the day (clipped inside my bra – guys can clip on belt or belt loop) but I also wear it tucked into a wristband at night and it tracks how well I sleep:

Last night, even though I was in bed for just about eight hours, I lost one and a half hours to sleeplessness, waking up 19 times during the night. So far, it’s a pretty handy little tool. Now, I just need to make sure I’m getting up each morning to exercise like Jason does so I can have a fighting chance.