Monthly Measurements, November 2013

I’ve been meaning to start doing my body measurements monthly again, but I haven’t been able to get on the band wagon.  The last set of measurements I took was at the very end of August, so that would be September 2013.  It’s important to track at one month granularity since each of the diet phases is going to be only three months.  I therefore need to get cracking with being consistent at measuring at the beginning of each month.

Although I’m banging out lots of miles training for my first marathon, I also had a series of vacations with lots of indulgences.  The upshot of all that is that I packed on several pounds over the last two months.  It shows up in my percent body fat, my weight and my various measurements.  The weight is probably a little higher than it actually is since I ate a ton of sodium yesterday, but it’s not so off that it’s in the wrong direction or indicative of a trend.  I’m not interested in cutting weight, but I will say that I’m at the upper end of the scale/percent body fat where I still feel healthy.  My peak “this feels great” for me is between 14-16% body fat and about 173-180 pounds.  Too much lower than that and I am ravenous.  Too much more than that and I start feeling more sluggish.  Since I’m training for my first marathon I’m not interested in cutting calories to reach some theoretical ideal weight.  I’ll therefore address that after that is done, if I don’t just let it fall into some equilibrium status on its own during the experiment.