Back from Travels to the East

I have returned from a couple weeks on the road. The month of October is turning out to be quite a busy one for me. As a result, I’ve been much more focused on all things work related, and have let a lot of my side projects slide – including my CodePlex project, leveling up my WoW character, and posting up here. Beyond work, the only thing that I’ve really done as of late has been playing a bit of Halo 3, which has been a lot of fun.

As an update to the weight loss, I finally got around to updating the Excel spreadsheet and generating a graphic for the blog. The chart has evolved a lot since my first posting a month ago or so – I’ve marked off when I got different foods back and general progress. I think it’s fascinating to look at how things have progressed over time, in particular how adding the 200 calories around week 13 started to slow things down, but then it started creeping down again.

The last couple weeks I’ve been on the road, finally visiting family and then doing a user conference as a favor for one of my colleagues. I’ll be out again next week for a few days doing another user conference (but this time for one of my partners). I really have to say that being on the road runs havoc on routine. Although there was some lose over the last few weeks, I’m wondering if it was just from poor eating habits – and overestimating the numbers on what I was eating, which I tend to do. I am currently thinking about reversing that trend and potentially overeating, because at this point we’re concerned that I am getting too thin.

Another interesting thing that I see, with the chart, is that some of the weight loss corresponds mostly to when new foods are introduced, which makes sense. The reason it makes sense to me is that I become hyper-sensitive to what I’m eating when a new food is introduced. Partly, I think I do this to prevent the new food from being removed, but as well I do this as I’m looking for triggers that may cause additional issues (like increased hunger). And these past couple weeks have seen the introduction of dried fruits, which I’ve been using in trail mix…which I’ve been consuming in MASSIVE quantities due to being stuck in a plane, in a car, or in other situations. The side effect of the trail mix is that it is high in fat (due to the nuts), which then declined the amount of calories I was taking in.

Next week, when I’m on the road, I am thinking of trying to rely more on soy crisps, as opposed to trail mix…and hope that it helps reduce what happened this past month. I’m also going to try and let go a bit more. Odd to put it that way – not something you typically hear from someone trying to lose weight, I suppose. 😉