I had noticed for the past week or two my weight loss had stalled a bit. Nothing horrible to be worried about, but just different. I spent a little time today looking through my weight reports to see if I could figure anything out.
They say that it is demotivating to weight yourself every day or at least pay attention to the daily weight as normal fluctuation and water weight can play havoc with you. I have a withings scale however that I use every morning and it automatically uploads its data which is then automatically pulled out by several different programs (Runkeeper, Lose It!, etc) to give me updated data on my weight.
So I learned somewhere over the past few months that my weight loss progression actually had a pretty interesting pattern to it. Each week I would have a spike downwards and then a few days of small decreases of weight, then suddenly would have a spike upwards for a day or two. Then the following week it would start over again, with each week being just a little lower in weight than the previous one.
I wasn't really looking for quick weight loss any longer, and had been focusing more on trying to improve my running and fitness. Since I was losing about .5 to .7 pounds a week, I figured that was a good and comfortable level to continue it at. So never really analyzed what exactly caused this pattern that I saw every week.
Suddenly the past two weeks, I kind of plateaued off a little bit. Now after working on losing weight for close to 5 years now, I've gotten used to plateaus many times in the past, but often times I ended up just giving up and settling with that weight as being where I stopped. I hit a plateau at 235-240 for over a year, I hit another one at 220-225 for almost 2 years... this time I wasn't really interested in just giving up and instead I was curious to try to look further and see if I could find some correlation with other data that I was collecting.
I mentioned in another thread.. maybe the weight loss thread, or possibly Sir Fozzie's thread that I used to count calories religiously. It helped me a great deal by helping me learn what different foods cost. It helped me learn what was good foods to eat and what was not. I also learned that a very simplistic approach to weight loss was calories in - daily calorie burn - calories burned from exercise would ideally be a little negative. (Not too much of a deficit as that is just as unhealthy as eating too many calories) What I ended up finding was a nice comfortable level where I tried to eat enough "good" calories to cover my daily calorie burn from just normal daily activity and then whatever I worked off was in essence the weight that I lost. I'm no nutritionist, so I am sure that wasn't the best or most ideal plan ever, but it seemed to work well for me.
I went with that plan for months and continued to improve my running fitness while also losing weight.. that is until this month. I haven't re-started any bad habits lately such as snacking or sodas or such.. so didn't think my diet fell off the tracks or anything.. To be honest I was still losing a little weight, just not that much so i wasn't too overly troubled by it but more curious than anything. I suddenly started thinking.. the other half of that equation is my exercise.. and in fact since the end of May, I cut back on my miles that I was running after my 10k race on June 1st. I've been running only enough miles to try to keep my fitness level until the start of my next training plan later this month. Considering I was running less (only 25 miles last week vs the 32+ from previous weeks in May), I began to wonder if that might be a change that caused the different weight loss pattern.
I went back to my trusty SportTracks program and put together a report where I compared weight by day with calories burned per day from exercise....
I noticed that there were big peaks or jumps in both lines, the black one indicating weight each day as well as the green which indicated my calories I burned from exercise. For the most part (with some exceptions), the weight would be highest right before my long run each week. Normally from an exercise standpoint, I usually rested or went easy the day before my long run. Then the day after a long run is almost always when my weight dropped the largest amount.
Looking at it further, the weekly pattern of weight loss pretty much mirrored my weekly workout routine.. Off Day - Long Run - Recovery - Mid run - Rest - Speed - Recovery. Since I did almost the same pattern every week with my training, I guess it makes sense that my weight loss pattern went with that as well.
I could also see that once I cut out the weekly long runs, it meant my weekly large drops in weight also disappeared. I got a good drop the day after my 10k race, but otherwise it has been pretty stagnant for this month. Thinking about it for a while, I guess it makes perfect sense. I was eating the same, just exercising less, so of course I wouldn't lose as much weight.
No reason to panic or anything, just was something I was curious about and took some time to look at. I start back with my long runs the last week of this month (2 1/2 weeks from now), so if my hypothesis is correct, I should start seeing a new pattern occur. I'm doing a different training schedule this time around though, so maybe the week won't have the exact same pattern for weight loss, but I expect I'll be looking for what pattern does emerge.
I am curious though how this weekend will work for me weight-loss wise. On Saturday morning I am planning on running a 10k fast for the Strava Any Way 10k challenge, and then following that I am doing relay for life where I expect I'll walk at least 15+ miles.. I have absolutely no idea how my body will respond to that, so will be interested to see.