Sunday, April 28, 2013
So a lot of weight loss programs try to make people understand or categorize their progress in terms of inches or sizes lost. That's pretty nebulous, if you ask me. It's like telling me the temperature in Celsius. Sure, I know 35C is hot, but I don't really know *exactly* how hot, and I'll nod at you with a polite smile if you try to tell me that's the temperature outside. But if you tell me it's 95F outside, that's like holy crap, it's fricking HOT out.
When it comes to planning a meal, calories and portion size are demonstrated in pictures of a gigantic-ass salad and some fruit on a plate next to a tiny blob of refined carbs on its own plate. I think that's very effective, and I say do this equivalency thing with weight loss.
I just lost five pounds. Doesn't sound like much, since I've got at least 100 to go. I haven't lost an inch off my waist. My fingers are still fat. I didn't go down a dress size. But five pounds is also a bag of flour:
Or five pints of Ben and Jerry's Mission to Marzipan (best flavor EVER):
It's also ten blocks of Kraft Cheddar Cheese:
Who knows how much spinach it would take.
Suddenly losing five pounds seems like a lot more than some vague, often meaningless, number on a scale. Also, can you imagine walking around with 20 bags of flour superglued to you? Or 100 pints of ice cream? Or 200 bricks of cheese? Sounds pretty ridiculous, but that's basically what I'm doing every day, now that I think about it.