An epiphany of sorts

...feeling a little grumpy because I clicked away from a blog that I'd been writing for 20 minutes and lost everything...grumble grumble. No autosave? what's with that?

Sigh.

Ok...the first version was probably pretty wordy anyway (I'm like that...I know) so here's the reader's digest version:

1. I love my bodybugg; it's not necessarily accurate when measuring my caloric burn, but it is consistent
2. I'm confident that despite my best intentions and efforts, I'm not very accurate when recording my caloric intake (the bodybugg site says that people are often off by 25-40%), but my hunch that like like the 'bugg, I'm consistent
3. While my recorded caloric deficits (intake - output) don't jive with my results, I know a "good week" when I see one

So...today I fired up my handy-dandy spreadsheet and started copying in my daily deficits for the last 7 weeks. I calculated weekly sums and compared that number with my recorded weight loss/gain for that week.

Ta-da! Behold, the numbers suddenly make sense. Over the last 7 weeks, every single time I showed a total deficit of 10,000 or more, I lost weight. And when I fell short, I gained weight or heald steady.

So there you have it - 10k. This week, I'm testing the theory. I got off to a slow start and need to burn up 3400 calories over wed/thurs (wed's only 29 minutes away from being over and i've tallied 2000) and I'll hit the magical 10k number. I'll hit it - no problem. Looking forward to Friday morning's weigh-in to validate my theory (also looking forward to filling in the rest of the weeks over lunchtime to see if my new theory holds true for every week...i'm betting it does).

This is really exciting for me - it puts a solid target in front of me & quantifies what a "good week" is. Now it's not a gut feeling...it's a number.

Suddenly I feel a lot more in control of my results - looking forward to a string of 10k's to finish off the Largest Loser program. I'm gonna kick thanksgiving's ass.