Milestone and Vanity

I have finally reached my 134 lbs milestone! If I can keep this up for a week, I will gift myself an indoor rock climbing session with my husband. We’re always talking about doing it, but my husband can’t justify the cost of it. Now he can.

It’s strange, but I’m having a hard time justifying giving myself prizes for my milestones. I seem to be okay with paying myself for counting calories because in the past I have struggled with it. But when I reach a milestone, I swell up with so much pride that I don’t think I need a prize to keep me going.

Speaking of pride, I think mine may have gotten out of hand of late. I really have to watch myself, because when I lost the weight right before school, I think I was straight up vain! When I started my internship it was with 3 other interns, all of them seemed heavier than me. Although I didn’t say anything to them to make them think I was better than them, I was thinking it! I thought, “Why don’t they just lose weight? It’s so easy.” How could I have thought that? Just because I had lost weight by all means it was not easy! As punishment, I gained those 10 lbs back.

I also got advice-y when I leave comments on other blogs as if I was an expert because I lost 10 lbs! Well I’m no expert. In fact, recently things that I have thought were weight loss truths, I have found out to be…wrong. Yes, my dear readers, I was wrong. Although it shouldn’t come as a surprise to my long time readers, because when I was still learning about this weight loss stuff, I was making a lot of mistakes and they were kind enough to set me straight. And here I am thinking that the learning has ended. Nope.

For one, it finally dawned on me what BMR truly meant. I had assumed it meant the calories needed to maintain your current weight, but when my sister asked me I had realized that this definition was wrong. I had went educational on my sister, which meant I told her what the acronym stood for. I majored in biology for undergrad and somehow I had stored that BMR stood for basal metabolic rate. But as I said this, another undergrad knowledge jumped up. When I was learning it, it had meant the calories needed for normal functioning. I looked it up and my undergrad self was right. Therefore the soon-to-be-graduate self was wrong. Is it possible for me to be getting dumber?

I had posted using the wrong definition of BMR and I wondered why no one set me straight. I looked back on the post and realized that someone did. But I mustn’t have heard her. Well at the time I was thoroughly confused by all the numbers I had to deal with. I think I was much more focused on getting the numbers right. Sorry Kimberly.

Another thing that dawned on me was that fat burning zone is not the most ideal zone to be working out at. This is what Spark People had to say about that:

The "fat burning zone" business is very misleading. It’s true that low intensity exercise uses more fat as fuel and that moderate intensity exercise (that you can maintain for 20 minutes or more) burns both fat and glucose. But, you're better off exercising in the aerobic zone as much as you can, because exercising at this higher intensity burns more total calories. You will burn a larger percentage of fat in relation to glucose when you are working at a lower intensity, but you will also burn fewer total calories and less total fat. The relative percentage of fat burned has nothing to do with weight loss—it's the total amount calories burned that counts.

Charlene from my workout DVD had repeatedly told me this, but I wasn’t hearing her. I guess I needed to read it.

These are proofs that I am no weight loss guru. So I really need to keep my pride in check, so that I can be open to what people say. So that I don't mislead anyone. So that I don't make anyone think they are any less than me.