A good week and a good weekend

Three interesting and encouraging things happened this week.
The focus on weight loss can be contagious...
Earlier week I had lunch with a friend of mine and mentioned that I had lost 10 lbs on the Atkins diet.  We had lunch at McCormick's, the pub/restaurant in our building, and I had the blackened salmon ceasar salad -- 0 carbs if you don't eat the croutons.  I told her I either get that or the salmon omelette.  Again, no carbies.  And they are both awesome.  So that afternoon I ran into her in the hall.  And she told me that she was inspired and had ordered the South Beach Diet book and Amazon was shipping it (Prime).  She had challenged herself to lose 10 lbs.  Her husband told her that her ideal weight was 4 lbs less than what she weighed (really, that doesn't sound like a good thing).  Anyway, she doesn't need to lose weight.  But she's gonna try the south beach diet, which seems to be what people do when they want to do low carb but have a bad "unhealthy" perception about Atkins.  They are both low carb, but my experience with reading about South Beach is that it is much more complicated.  You eat a 1/2 oz of low fat yogure here, and some skim milk at another time...whatever, atkins is simple.  Anything that doesn't have carbs -- meat, cheese, eggs, vegetables.  Anyway, it is nice that other people think it's cool.  I'm cheering for you, Michelle!

Then this weekend, my friends Chris and Mike got back from their Xmas vacation at their parents/in-laws houses and decided they're going to lose some weight too.  We often have playdates because we both have four year olds, so this weekend we loaded up the kids and took them over to Greenlake, a local lake with a 2.8mile path around it.  We walked the whole thing.  When I was actually running, the trainer told me to keep my heart rate below 156 for optimal training.  And when I was at the gym, the fat burner thing said to keep it at 118.  To do that, I had to go 1.6 mph on the treadmill.  So I compromised, and it turned out walking briskly, I could keep my heart rate at 140-150.  this was about 18 min/mile, or a little over 3mph.  We did that and then all had low carb brunch at a local pub.  I had veggie omelet, and they had salads.  Yum.

This morning, I weight in expecting to be at a new low (below 196.4).  Unfortunately, I was a little above that.  About 196.8.  This was a little disappointing after the exercise, but I've noticed this sometimes happens after the exercise.  I think it's because you actually build muscle which adds weight.  And I've been doing crunches too.  Anyway, the good thing was I was at 30.7% body fat, about 5% down from where I started.  That was lowest I've seen, which adds to my theory about the muscle.  That is encouraging, but it would be nice to make progress on the weight as well.

Finally, I got my first comment, from someone I don't even know that has been reading along.  This was the high point of the weekend, so thank you!  It has encouraged me to make this long post.

I did a little pre-bedtime weigh-in tonight and I was below 198.  That's encouraging as I often lose 2 lbs overnight.  So maybe will have a new local minimum tomorrow!