Week 10 - How do you measure progress?

If you measure your life in love, how do you measure your weight loss progress?
(sorry for those of you who don't get the musical reference)

I was planning on increasing my calorie intake from 1500 to 1800 this week. And for most days I did. It's a really tough concept for most people to understand that you have to eat to lose. Especially if you're doing an intense lifting program, you need to take in sufficient calories to feed your muscles otherwise your weight loss will stall. I just wanted to see if upping my calories would help my weight loss at all. It's a tough call, because the first time I did the X - I was eating higher calories and didn't see the weight loss I wanted, so I didn't want to replicate that situation. At the same time - I don't want to starve my body. So after about 4 days of making an actual effort to hit 1800 calories, I just ended up feeling uncomfortable and bloated on some of the days. Some of them, I felt fine. I've already conquered letting the scale rule my life and now I'm going to conquer counting calories.

Is it important? Yes - somewhat. Is it worth going nuts over? Absolutely not. I finally decided that my calorie intake will be between 1500 and 1800 based on how hungry I am. If I'm genuinely hungry, I'm eating. If I'm not, I won't force feed myself. As long as I'm taking in no less than 1500 and no more than 1800 on any given day - I'm good. I'll give it a shot and see how it goes.

I don't know what my weight loss results are this week cuz I don't weigh in til Saturday morning, so we'll see how the half week of incresased calories affected me. I will say that Hollister has been very good to me - I ordered another size XS sweatshirt online and aside from the arms maybe being a little tighter than they should be - it does fit. So if I lost no pounds and no inches this week, will I say that I haven't progressed? Absolutely friggin' not. I'm finally learning to look at fitness in a new way, as a process. There are certain things that apply to everyone trying to lose weight, but that doesn't mean we will all lose it the same way. Even if I didn't drop actualy pounds this week, guess what I did do?

3 unassisted pull ups. The first pull ups I've ever done in my life. I remember being in gym class in elementary school and doing the dreaded "bent arm hang" for girls or pull-ups for the boys. I could never hold my own body up and I was an embarassed little chubby girl. This week, I did 3 legit pull ups pulling my own body weight above the bar. Not only that - but I also ran consistently for 50 minutes. Another first for me. I ran on an incline, increasing the spead every 5 minutes for 50 minutes straight with no breaks and no slowing down. Not only that - but in my cardio kickboxing class that usually cardio kickboxes my ass, I only took one unmandated water break as opposed to my usual 5. And I didn't feel completely winded, I felt pretty good!

So do you measure in inches? In pant-size? In scale numbers? In the mirror? Regardless of what my scale says this weekend - I know I've made progress. I can't wait to see how many more pull-ups I can do and how much faster I can run.