Past Efforts

If you’re curious as to what 21-day ’rounds’ have been completed to date, here’s the rundown:

  • Round 1 (November 16 – December 7, 2008) :  Alternate Day Fasting (ADF)
    This is a diet approach my mother has sworn by for years, and has recently been attracting attention from the health community.  Basically, it’s just what it sounds like: you eat normally one day and then ‘fast’ the next.  In true point of fact, my mother does not actually ‘fast’.  She simply restricts her intake dramatically on her ‘Non-eating days’, as she calls them.  I followed her example and limited myself to a banana and some juice, adding in carrots and fat-free microwave popcorn on days when the hunger pangs got to be too fierce.   I lost about 10 pounds (give or take) during Round 1.
  • Round 2 (December 8 – December 28, 2008): ADF + Weight Watchers
    ADF had proven to be a successful enough experience for me that I decided to continue it for another 21 days.  However, I was concerned about nutrition by this point and decided to add in some kind of formal diet tracking.  Weight Watchers’ point system was the diet approach with which I was most familiar (and I’d been paying for Weight Watchers Online for months anyway), so I made my goal for this 21-day round to continue on ADF, but to also write down everything I ate and track my Points totals.   My hope was that doing this would help me break my nervous eating habits, and also give me some incentive to make healthy choices.  I lost about 5 pounds this round.
  • Round 3 (December 29, 2008 – January 18, 2009):  Daily Walking
    Again, I continued my prior ‘habits’, but this round I added in a daily walk of at least 1 hour.  We have set up an old treadmill with a standing ‘desk’ that will hold my laptop so that I can work and socialize while I walk indoors.  I lost about 8.6 pounds during this round.
  • Round 4 (January 19 – February 8, 2009): Daily Exercise/Organization
    In this round, I nudged my daily exercise goal from 60 minutes to 120 minutes, and gave myself the option of either walking or doing Wii Fit exercises.  For most of this period I stuck to the treadmill and upped the incline I was walking from 2% to around 5.5%.   I also relaxed some on the Weight Watchers, because I hit my first real plateau here and there was some concern that I was actually starving myself by not eating enough.  I lost about 5.5 pounds during this period, most of it in the last week when I wasn’t restricting my eating on the Up Days.
  • Round 5 (February 9 – March 2, 2008): Sleep Schedule
    Continued with ADF, continued walking, and established a more relaxed Weight Watchers plan.  The primary goal for this round was to be in bed and ready to sleep by 11:30 p.m. in order to repair some pretty rotten sleeping habits.