Under 180 Pounds and Started Exercising Again

11:45 PM

I woke up to a surprising result today when I got on the scale. Yesterday I weighed 181.9 pounds, and I was still recovering from being sick, so apart from some walking, didn't exercise at all. I also tracked my calories and I ate 3200 calories yesterday. Yet somehow this morning when I weighed myself, I weighed 179.8 pounds. I lost two pounds? How?!

It was September 12th that I first discovered how overweight I had become. Prior to September 12th, I last weighed myself in around May, and I weighed 177 pounds. I was in the 170s range for months at this point, so I stupidly believed that I was invincible and couldn't gain weight anymore. This lead to me eating whatever (as long as it was vegan) any time I wanted and because I didn't weigh myself every day, I didn't see how much weight I was gaining per day.

I've learned from this experience that for losing weight, it is vital to track calories and to weigh yourself every day. That's basically the most important part about losing weight. I'm still on this weight loss journey myself, but I've lost around 8 pounds since September 12th, so I will continue following my own advice and we'll see where it leads.

Anyway, yeah. I did lose 8 pounds in under a month somehow. I weighed 179.8 pounds this morning when I weighed myself, losing 2 pounds in just 1 day because I weighed 182 or so pounds yesterday. The day before yesterday, I was around 183 pounds, so I lost 3-4 pounds in 2 days. I don't know how. Maybe being sick caused me to lose more weight somehow?

It's possible because my heart rate was faster while sick, and so was my respiratory rate, according to my Apple Watch. Every second we are alive we lose weight, we expel carbon from our lungs every time we exhale, and the carbon comes from lots of different places in the body such as our muscle and fat. This is the main way we lose weight, this is why exercising causing us to breathe faster which causes us to lose more weight.

So I was very ecstatic at seeing my weight finally go below 180 again. I started exercising again. I started using this app called Strides again which I used with my Apple Watch the first time I bought one back in 2022. That was my first ever Apple Watch, and I lost it this year at the beach. Strides allows you to track habits in a more quantitative way than other apps, so back then I set it to track the amount of push ups that I would do. I wanted to do 500 push ups a day, and using this app I was able to set it to remind me every 1 hour to do 50 push ups, and I would just check it off on my watch. Doing this for 10 hours, allowed me to do 500 push ups in a day, and I did this for two days.

There's nothing stopping me from doing the same thing now. I'm 20 pounds lighter today than in 2022, and I'm also stronger today than in 2022. So I should be able to do this same exact feat again, although that's not what I'm going for.

I started it slow today. I first set it to me doing 200 push ups, 200 squats, 200 leg raises, 40 pull ups, 40 chin ups per day. I would just do 10 push ups every 30 minutes, and in 10 hours that should be 200 push ups. That was the plan, but because I'm still recovering from being sick, I lowered all of this down to 30 push ups/squats/leg raises per day, and 6 chin ups / pull ups per day. Maybe some day I can set it to 200, but for now we can start it slow.

This took up all of my time today. I also organized other activities on the tracker as well, such as my brain training and social media vegan activism. I think it was a great start today. I completed everything in my to do list today.

Anyway, that was my day today.