75.5 kg / 166.5 lb

Quick weight in results for today:

Don't mind the arrow up, my scale at first decided to show and record 64kg, which made the follow up re-weigh to look like an increase...

What to Eat for Lunch

My answer to "What to Eat for Lunch" question is: a handmade raw vegetable salad you put together yourself. And this is not only for when I am working on losing weight.

Benefits of it are quite easy to guess, but I will list them anyway:

• I always know what is in my salad and how much calories I just ate.
• Fresh vegetables are good source of all the nutricional goodness: vitamins, minerals, fiber, all the other things my body needs.
• I use mainly uncooked raw vegetables, so most of nutrients make it there unharmed.
• I can eat a big bowl of vegetable salad, get full and still be under the calorie limit I set for my meal.
• It takes 15-20 mins to throw a salad together, and yes, I can do it at work as well as at home.
• It doesn't cost a fortune even if I use organic ingredients, it is still cheaper that average lunch meal I purchased before.
• I always eat something different, changing ingredients slightly doesn't let me to get bored with what I eat.

A Start to Eating Better

Food: what I eat, when I eat it, what I don't eat and when I don't eat - one more challenge to overcome on a way to become healthier and more fit.

I had my ups and downs with this one and this is what I learned.

Dieting in its broad understanding of restricting yourself from eating certain food at certain times for limited amount of time starting from day X - doesn't work for me. I am constantly hungry, sleepy, powerless and counting seconds till the time it is over to stuff myself with foods the diet didn't let me eat.

Now slowly changing my diet from eating less of things which are not good for me to more of things are good for me, slowly reducing amount of calories to first match and then go below the amount of calories I use in a day that works.

The emphasis is on slowly, allowing body to adjust.

Weight Loss: Tracking Activity

In my today's world getting active doesn't mean starting running marathons from next Monday (yea, even if Mondays are these magical days which can give you these sort of powers). It is about doing enough activity to cover (or over do) the amount of energy I eat during the day.

Whatever it is running, or walking, or cleaning around the house, or moving... Anything will do.

How do I know if I have enough activity in my life? I track it. Steps is probably easiest thing to track, there are so many step tracking devices on the market at this moment. Some of them also measure distance, calculate calories, pock you when you are not active, store logs of activity, etc. For more advanced stats there are trackers which can link to you phone or have GPS for calculating speeds and location. These on top of the line also have HR monitors.

Most of them come with some kind of account there activity information can be stored, some will have website to see your account info or phone app to do so, or both. Some will also have a way to sync data from/to various tracking tools.

I did try few.

Weight Loss: How I Started

I knew I was (and still am) overweight for quite some time. But at some point amount of all these cool clothes which either didn't fit anymore, or were barely fitting (and looked funny) started growing exponentially. I was about US size 10 when we moved to USA 7 years ago. And last January had to get myself a pair of 16 US size jeans to not feel bad about not being able to get my 14th buttoned up. I boxed up all clothes I couldn't use anymore with a thought to donate them eventually.

But I had to see these 99.3kg (218.9lb) on my scale to realize that I am few steps away to be over 100 kg... Which for me is a lot and scary. This was good kind of "scary". It motivated me to do something about it.

I am closing to US size 8 now, 77.3kg (170.4lb), that is 22kg (or 48.5lb) less comparing to when I started back on January 2014. Feel free to follow my progress of weight-ins and exercise log in motivatemyself2014 Instagram account.