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There seems to be a strong mental component to weight loss/gain. I don’t mean the obvious things like whatever causes eating disorders, or the focus on improving body image, or situations like that. Nor do I refer to non-scale victories like inches lost while the scale doesn’t budge because I’ve unknowingly built muscle.

No, I’m talking about the illogic that a certain loss–or gain–in numbers seems more substantial than another even when the change is numerically identical. Consider this: at my height, weight, and build, the goal is to lose weight, that not being a bodybuilder I should weigh so much less than what I do even if I did manage to build a decent amount of muscle, so a downward trend is a good thing regardless. (Of course there’s such a thing as unsafe weight loss, that’s not what I’m talking about. Rather I mean that dropping from, for example, 190 to 189 is naturally better than 191 to 190 even though they’re both a change of one pound.) There’s the rational awareness that going from 191 pounds to 190 or from 190 to 189–or the reverse–is still a change in one pound, but that mental component says that the 189/190 change is more substantial simply because the tens digit changed.

Well, with that illogic in mind, I’ve just made a substantial weight gain that, at my height and build, I’d hoped to never make… the hundreds digit has changed. Due to reward apps I weigh myself every day, and for three days running since Thursday, the scale has read at least 200 pounds.

Last week I’d finally gotten around to reading Son, the final book of the Giver quartet, and there’s a scene in there where the main character is being trained to climb a cliff. Part of her training is clearly meant to be sit-ups or crunches. This scene reminded me that I once again need to get back in the habit of exercising on a daily basis (since the 15K+ steps I do at work apparently don’t count) and I literally put the book down, did 10 sit-ups like the character was instructed to do, and got back to reading again. Forgot to run the Samsung Health app so I could get a badge for it though…. 😅

In other news? Got rid of my old desk and my nightstand and moved my bed to its new home. Next step in reorganizing my room to get back to the fitness games is relocating my dresser to the bed’s former location, and then I can move my current desk to the spot the dresser’s currently occupying. That’ll give me a decent-ish square in the middle until I can justify the cost of a Murphy (and replace my dresser with a smaller one to take advantage of the increased floorspace a Murphy would grant me) and have easy access to all of my outlets, whereas the previous layout had two set behind furniture at all times. And since I’ve had a new computer for getting close to a year now, hopefully much better recording options than before, even if it’s just a difference of things like fan speed/noise.

My long term goal is to get my weight down to the 130-something range. My short-term goal is to be able to wear the work pants I just bought. See, I finally managed to find some cargo jeans that look decent (so many of them look like the extra pockets were slapped on as an afterthought) and I wanted to see if the material would last longer than the cargo “slacks” I’ve been wearing… but I could only find these jeans in even sizes while I’m currently wearing an odd. And since the goal is to lose weight I didn’t want to buy a bigger size….

Products in use, Amazon Affiliate links included:

• The Giver quartet