Home Eating and Away Eating

First the numbers of an obsessive maintainer...

Weight that I decided to maintain at: 85.0kg (13st 5)

Average weight since getting to my target: 83.3kg (13st 2)

Average weight in the last month: 84.0kg (13st 3)

Average daily steps in the last month 10,865

This probably looks quite good. The snag is that we came back from our recent cruise and I was at 85kg, I quickly got down to 82.4kg, but then it climbed up again to over 85kg! Then the dark thoughts start along the lines of I am losing control over my weight. Fortunately I have my geeky statistics to help, as well as my live-in priestess of common sense - Ann. Both of these showed that of the last 30 days I spent 19 of them eating away from home. This is why I have now started talking about Home Eating and Away Eating, and these help to explain what is going on...

Home Eating is similar to how I ate when I was losing weight, but it is a slightly eased-off version, having more porridge and fruit, as well as some seeds and smoked salmon. Eating like that all the time gives me a slow weight loss.

Away Eating is eating breakfast and dinner in restaurants, and buying sandwiches for lunch. That is slightly like the way I used to eat in the old pre-Nutracheck days, but I am making some different choices. Choices such as buying the lowest-calorie sandwiches I can find, sometimes having no dessert, and often avoiding particularly calorific meals. Eating in that way for just two or three days gives me quite a weight gain, although some of it drops off quickly, I think because it is unfamiliar (maybe fatty) food that hangs around in my gut.

Ordinarily, when Away Eating is four or five days in a month, this all works out fine, and my weight is stable. In fact if I am at home all the time for a couple of weeks, my weight drops by a kilo or two. But in the last month there was not only the cruise, but more or less as soon as I got back I had to go away three times, with all of that Away Eating. Hence my weight stuck stubbornly high.

In fact the good effect of Home Eating has just been proved, because the last five days have all been Home Eating, and I have lost 2kg. But I am not complacent about this - I need to make sure that I don't relax on Home Eating so much that it is no longer strict enough to undo a run of Away Eating. And exactly what I would do if it turned out that I regularly needed to go away twice as often as I do now, I don't know. I suppose the answer would be to cut down on my Away Eating, although I have had no success doing that so far.

But, let me finish on an upbeat note - this morning, after maintaining for 14 months, I weighed 82.8kg, which is absolutely fine!