I signed up for my first DietBet in mid-March, about 6 weeks after I had T2. I was done breastfeeding and very ready to make some progress toward getting the baby weight off. I started at 182 lbs, and 10 bets (and 4.5 months) later I’m below my pre-pregnancy weight at 152. I feel I’m nearing the end of my DietBet run because my weight loss pace of just under 2lbs/week is going to get a lot harder as I get closer to my goal weight. I’ve made over $200 so far!

I’m going to try for a streak of 11 though, and I’m hoping you’ll join me for the month of August? Here is the link to my DietBet, beginning August 1st. Signing up, weighing in, keeping up with the game, and weighing out are all explained really well on the website and you’ll be walked through the process as you go. If you get confused leave a comment on the game wall and I, or someone else who has done bets before, will help you work through it. (If you work hard )28 days after you start, you’ll have less body fat AND more money in your pocket. What’s not to like, right?

My parents, whom I am currently living with, can attest to the fact that I can’t stop raving about Fat Chance by Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF. My cliffs notes takeaway from this book can be summed up with the following statements:

• The lipid hypothesis (fat makes you fat) is false*. Fructose is causing the spike in obesity and metabolic syndrome.
• Calories are not processed equally.
• Everyone has the responsibility to manage their own health and make good choices. But not everyone has reasonable opportunities to do so.

Sneaking into the kitchen and eating gummi bears straight from the bag at 2 years old. I was a sugar addict practically from birth. Read more →

Today the scale showed me that I have lost 10% of my body weight since TWLC4 began. I started at 177 and today I weighed 158 (which is only about 2 lbs from my pre-pregnancy weight!) I don’t have any great progress pictures yet, but you can sort of see what’s going on using my DietBet weigh in/out photos.

Before

The progress

 

If you’ve fallen off the wagon, come back! Start weighing in regularly on the Google Doc and participate in the Facebook group again. It helps, I promise.

At this rate I might even be able to hit my goal weight by this round of TWLC! Something I never would have believed could be possible. I’ll write up what I’ve been doing when I take some nicer pictures at the halfway point.

 

I’ve moved back into weight-loss mode full-time (it will be a glorious day when I don’t have to devote so much time to this anymore!) and I’m gearing up to start That Weight Loss Challenge 4. Last year I started it around my birthday and so I figured I’d start another one around the 15th of April again. We’ll have the Facebook group (I just removed everyone from the existing one so we can start fresh and try to limit the group to active members), and we’ll use DietBet for the prizes (I’ll explain more later), and I’ll offer up a Jenna Cole session once again. It’s going to be awesome. And I’m not going to get pregnant and drop out halfway through this time :).

For the past two weeks I’ve been using an app called The Eatery to track what I eat. It’s like someone took my food blog idea, and gamified/social-networkified it!

Source

The idea is really simple. Take a picture of what you eat, and rate it on a scale of 1-100. 1 is fat, and 100 is fit. Then your food will be shown to other people using the app and they will say where they think it is on the scale of fit to fat. Then the app takes all of your data and creates a variety of charts/graphs to show you how you’re doing over time.

The gamification aspect has been really effective for me, as I constantly find myself thinking “Do I really want to eat this? If I do, I have to take a picture and show Eatery and then my score is going to go down.”

 

Source

The company, Massive Health, has been acquired by Jawbone and I’m not sure that they’re going to keep the app going indefinitely. That’s fine with me though, as it’s doing what I need to do right now. And if they integrate the app into the Jawbone UP I’d probably consider buying one just so I can keep using it! That’s how much I love this app!

I’m writing this post in part because I hope that Jawbone will see it and think about maintaining the app (fix the ability to connect to Facebook friends please!) but also because I’m wondering if anyone else is using it, or would like to start using it? I think it would be fun to compare our weekly scores and see if we can beat each other.

 

It’s taken me a long time to get these pictures put together, in part because the process is a bit of a pain. Now I’m kind of glad it took so long because I think it’s really motivating to see these pictures when we are two month into the progress and losing steam (I’m not the only one going through that right?)

ALL of these ladies are superstars and I hope you will take the time so leave some encouraging comments.

Lydia

4.26%

Amy

6%

Laura

7.87%

Joy

10.05%

Paula

13.36%

Alicia

20.49%

Ali

21.87%

Leah B

26.29%

Brandy

Start: 198.5

End: 140.8

57.7lb lost, 29.07%

The best part about seeing these pictures? I think the results from TWLC3 are going to be EVEN BETTER.