The Speculist

With all the insight living three states away provides, I think what your experiencing is what my fellow gym rats and I used to call "plateauing" Phil. You've been real careful to moderate your rate of weight loss, but even so you've gotten ahead of what your metabolism reacts to. Your basic choices are to let your system re-regulate to it's new state of equilibrium (which can take several weeks) or to shock your system either through a different diet or more restrictive one (a several day long water-only fast, for example) or begin a much more extreme erercise regimen. If there's no particular time constraint (you're not training for an event of some description that has a fixed, external-to-you requirement) then I suggest simply maintaining your present regimen for a few weeks and re-asses then. Unless there's some underlying health issue that's only now surfacing, you'll almost certainly begin losing again with no additional changes required. To relieve frustration/tedium through this period, you might try experimenting (cautiously) with your calistenics routine. Try small changes in your hand placement relative to your shoulders when doing push-ups, for example. Putting the heel of your hand in different locations relative to your shoulder (closer together, wider apart, further down the chest or above the shoulders) will exercise the involved muscle groups in sufficiently different ways to encourage greater growth and expend more calories for the same period of time spent exercising. Varying and extending the angle and time spent in stretch position(s) also offers surprising results for a relatively small investment of time, particularly in combination with deep, controlled breathing during the extended stretch.

You're doing good pal, plateau's are just part of the process.

You should tally the number of comments each week and the weight loss for that week.

Would there be a correlation?

Will,

Thanks for the common sense advice and the encouragement. As a matter of fact, I've been trying lots of different approaches to the exercise routine. More on that in an upcoming post.

Ivan,

I'll check it out. Offhand, I would guess that I get the most comments for major events -- either a major milestone or a major setback.