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Things are looking better this week. Yay for boomeranging weight loss!

Weight: I was at 177 pounds this morning, which is down a full 5.5 pounds from last week. Of course, I was over-inflated due to an unusually large excess of carbs and so forth, so that weight came off fast. And I’m betting I was dehydrated this morning, as I lost two pounds in the night and I don’t really feel like I earned them mowing the lawn.

Exercise: Pitiful! I averaged under 300 calories/day burned. Two days last week, I did nothing more strenuous than shower. I didn’t jog once last week, either, primarily due to really crappy weather (either raining, or 95 degrees, or raining AND 95 degrees). Come to think of it, some of my weight loss might actually be muscle loss. If so, I’ll end up with an annoyingly small weight loss (or even a small weight gain) this coming week, because I’m hoping to get back into a regular workout schedule again, starting with lap swimming in a few minutes.

Intake: I’ve managed to behave generally well, here. I had a burrito from El Aguila one night to celebrate the last day of my Spanish class, but I saved half of it for lunch the next day. I went to the State Fair, too, but limited myself to a pork chop and water for the evening (and that, my friends, is willpower). My low-ish intake this week is probably the only thing that saved my diet. Well, that and my atrophying muscles. Go them.

Weight-wise, all this means I’m only two pounds from my goal, with two weeks left to go (my original, arbitrarily determined goal was 30 pounds in 12 weeks). Even with a bit of muscle gain and a weight-gain rebound to compensate for my weight-loss rebound, I just might be able to make it. Yay a second time!

When I first decided to start losing weight again a couple of months ago, I knew I was going to need a little bit of external motivation. No man is an island, et cetera and so forth, particularly when stranded on a dessert island in a sea of nougat. I also knew that I wanted to pay careful attention to my progress: if I progressed too slowly there was little point in eating rice cakes in lieu of chocolate cakes, and if I made too much progress at once I would worry as to health risks (such as hyperskinnia). I also decided, early on, that this diet should have graphs.

From this understanding was borne the Weight Loss Dashboard. At first, the Dashboard was just a few Excel worksheets thrown together in a few hours of geeky excitement at work. It worked well, however, and I started to spend free time here and there improving it: I wrote functions that self-corrected if I forgot to add data for a day, or didn’t calculate certain figures if I hadn’t given enough information to make those data accurate. I also worked to make it more attractive and consistent as a total package.

And then a friend saw me using it one day and asked to have a copy, and I gave it to him. And then another friend asked. And another. And I started to think to myself, “self… maybe I’m on to something here.” And so I spent a few more hours tweaking things, wrote a quick-start guide, and packaged the whole bugger up.

This is how we come to the commercialization of the Weight Loss Dashboard. For just $5.99 (as a testing starting price… it may rise or fall in the future), you can get yourself a copy of the Dashboard to use or abuse as you see fit. I think it’s a fair price: you’d spend about the same amount cheating on your diet at McDonald’s.

I have a fair bit of faith in the Dashboard — It’s helped me lose over twenty pounds in the last nine weeks. I believe it could help other people reach their goals, as well. If you’re interested, I have a purchase page set up.

So close, yet so far…

Weight: I’m a pound lighter today than I was last Monday. I managed to lose a ~lot~ of weight at the beginning of the week (5.5 pounds by Saturday morning!), and managed to gain most of it (4.5 pounds) back by this morning. So I was, briefly, below 180 pounds. I even managed to lose weight between Friday and Saturday, despite eating nachos and pie for dinner. I’m attributing my success to the fact that neither stayed in my stomach for long, due to the inclusion of seven various shots of liquor and eight or more glasses of beer while eating said nummies. It’s a good thing my birthday only comes around once a year.

Exercise: I was good at the beginning of the week, worse later on. I managed 90 minutes swimming, 70 minutes jogging, and around 200 minutes walking for exercise last week, or around 50 minutes of exercise in some form per day. I jogged a 5k in just over 30 minutes, which had me feeling pretty good. My plan is to start adding longer distances back in to my routine: I hadn’t noticed, but I’d fallen into a pattern of shorter distances at higher speeds, and really, that’s not as good for me in terms of weight loss as is slower and longer.

Intake: Hoo boy. It really depends on my estimates, which weren’t great. The lowest number is 920 calories on Friday, but that’s assuming I correctly calculated how many calories I consumed, and then correctly calculated how many of those calories came back up later on. I’ve averaged around 1800 calories/day for the last three days, assuming my fast food guestimations are accurate. I’m not sure they are.

My spreadsheet estimates that I have around three weeks of dieting left until I hit 175 pounds. I’d say it’s probably pretty close. And even if I hit it before then, it’ll take a few days/weeks of playing around with food before I figure out how much I can eat in a day without gaining or losing weight.

I would like to take a moment and recognize the occurrence of something truly special: For the first time in a decade, since I first got my driver’s license, all of my demographic information is correct at the same time!

When I first got my license back in 1997, most of the information was accurate: my address was correct and my height was as close as it was going to get (I’m 5′ 10.5″, but do you figure they let you do half-inches? Nope!)… but I may have fibbed a little bit on my weight. I listed myself, that first time, as being 220 pounds. In reality, I was a lot closer to 250. Heh.

Fast-forward to 1999 when I turned 18 and needed to renew. I had just moved to Des Moines a couple of months prior and was living with my grandparents. My mom — who had just moved (along with the rest of the family) to another area of Des Moines herself — took me to the DMV to renew my license, and there I had a bit of a quagmire to work through: I was only going to be living with my grandparents for another month until I headed off to college. But I didn’t know my college address yet. My compromise was to list my parent’s address as my own, despite the fact I’d never lived there. I also bumped my weight up to 250, even though at the time I was already pushing 275.

Then came college and the Great Weight Loss of Whatever Year I Did That. By the time I was 22, it was time to renew again. I listed my new weight at 180, which was actually pretty close to accurate. However, we were only a few months away from graduation, and I had no clue as to what my address would be after that. So I left my parent’s address on my license. I’d still never stayed in the house for longer than 24 hours at a time, but I had no idea what else to list.

Skip ahead to October of 2006, and lo and behold, my parents decided to move and I bought their old house. For the first time since I was 18, my address on my license was finally correct! Unfortunately, two years of grad school and a few months of a new, sedentary job had pushed my weight back up to around 205. So close!

And then there was today. I was exactly 180 pounds when I weighed myself this morning. More importantly, I haven’t moved, shrank, or changed my eye color or gender in the last ten months. My license is accurate! This calls for a celebration, surely.

Language is a pretty awesome thing. Without it, this website would easily be twice as boring as it already is.

However, there are some forms of language of which I’m not a fan. I’m not talking about so-called “bad” words or anything like that. I’m more concerned with the imprecise use of language. And I’m not even talking about the nit-picky “imprecise language derives from imprecise thought” argument, or, God forbid, something the along the lines of the who/whom distinction. I’m talking about the sort of thing that any native speaker of the language should know by the time they hit age six.

Below, I’ve outlined three levels of imprecise language which annoy me to varying degrees (ordered least to greatest):

Level 1: Good Old-Fashioned Hyperbole

The following statement is not hyperbole: everyone hyperbolizes. Beyond that, if you’re using the words “always,” “never,” “everyone,” or “nobody” to describe something without first having conducted an exhaustive amount of research, you’re probably hyperbolizing to a greater or lesser extent. Hyperbole usually only gets on my nerves during an argument, and it follows a general pattern of:

Angry person: “Yeah, well, you always say that when we’re fighting!”

Rob’s annoyingly logical brain: “I’ve said that in two of the last five arguments. 2 != 5. This statement is untrue. This argument is suspect.”

But like I said, everyone hyperbolizes at one time or another. It’s to be expected. If I weren’t so maddeningly logical when I argued, it probably wouldn’t bother me much.

Level 2: New-Fangled Inanity

This one really gets on my nerves, and seems to come up all too often:

Clueless person: “It was the best day ever! I was literally walking on air!”

Rob’s snarky brain: “Hmm… well, I’m going to have to literally suggest we hide you away in a government-run scientific institution for a couple of decades and study your abilities. Or at least exorcise your levitating ass.”

People: Literally means something truly, honestly, and in all actuality did happen. Figuratively means you’re using a metaphor, a visually inclined bit of language to describe a thought or emotion that is otherwise too abstract to articulate concisely. You cannot use literally to mean figuratively, because they’re pretty much antonyms. And today is not opposite day. Tomorrow isn’t looking too hot, either.

Level 5: Inanity to the Nth Degree

While I was on my jog last night, I overheard a guy arguing on his cellphone (outside, very loudly, which is also very annoying, but that is for a different article). He wasn’t getting too many words in edgewise, but he did manage to utter this gem:

Improbably Dense Fellow: “That’s not even true to the 5th degree! To the 5th degree!”

Rob’s aching brain: …error…error…

Umm… pardon my French, but Mon Dieu… qu’est-ce que c’est?! Since when are there various and determinate degrees of truthfulness? Is this something new that I missed, or could I have been using this all along? “No mom, I wasn’t lying – I was just telling a 4th-degree truth.” Somehow, I doubt that would have gone over so well.