One down...

It's hard to believe that January has been and gone already, although surprisingly, I've managed to maintain my new healthy (well, healthier) regime despite all of the temptations otherwise.

I think the main difference this year is that I've accepted that there's no way I'm going to say I'll give up my Friday nights out and stick to it. Equally, there is little point shedding loads of pounds one month, only to let it all creep back on later.

So, my target has been to try and lose one pound a week, every week, which sounds pretty lame but it does seem to have had a more lasting effect. In fact I'm now only one pound short of shedding a stone since my bathroom scale horror towards the end of last year.

A useful motivational tip I picked up was to get weighed every day, but rather than getting excited or depressed about movements either way on a daily basis, keep track of a moving average over a few days. That way, you may have put a couple of pounds on one particular day, but the moving average tells you you're still on the right track.

If things aren't really going quite to plan at first, just work out your average over a longer period of time, so as long as you've lost anything at all, the average still goes down. The added bonus for me was that it provided an excuse to indulge my geeky spreadsheet obsession, plotting the daily results and using them to calculate moving average weights, target heart rates, lean body mass, BMI, etc. then creating some groovy little graphs.

I guess it would also be prudent to check the battery on the bathroom scales again...