Yet Another Weight Loss Update

I've now been working at losing weight for four weeks, and while I'm still making progress, it's not as fast as I had hoped. I'm down to 181 pounds, just one pound less than at my last update. That was 11 days ago, and at that point I had lost 5 pounds in about two and a half weeks.

Here's the updated graph of my energy balance for the entire period:

I've made one significan modification from last time: Instead of just averaging the plots for each measure, I've inserted trendlines. So you can see that while my consumption has stayed pretty much flat, I've been burning progressively more calories over the course of the diet. That means net consumption, which is just food consumed minus energy burned, has actually been decreasing over the course of the diet.

So why has my weight loss stalled? It's possible that I simply measured at a point that was artificially low last time. In fact I had a period when my weight went up during this period. Here's the full graph of my weight over the course of the diet:

As you can see, by May 10, my weight actually jumped above what I had reported on May 6, and even two days ago I was above my May 6 weight. But I think there's a bigger issue, which is that my body may have adapted to a lower level of caloric intake. In order to make additional progress, I'm probably going to have to eat even less. So for the next week I'm going to adjust my target calorie balance 200 calories lower. I'm going to replace my highest-calorie snack (a granola bar) with carrots. I'm going to eat lots of carrots. Then I'll get back to you on Friday and we'll see if (a) I was able to keep to that diet and (b) whether it made a difference.

For an example of the kind of workouts I've been doing lately, see below.

Yesterday I did my first speed workout since Boston, a 6*800 that left me nearly completely spent. But I was able to keep all the splits under 2:55, which isn't bad, considering! I followed that up with another run in the afternoon, and then did 6 miles plus weights today. Here's hoping the lifting will result in some benefits both in weight loss and strength gains. The Garmin plot below is the 6*800s.