Calorie Counting - Why It hasn't worked for me yet

I am half way through my six month plan to lose weight, and so far I have only lost a couple of pounds.  I am actually feeling pretty good and according to my wife I am also looking pretty good.  The only thing that is spoiling it is the reading on the scales and the fact that I still have some very tight fits into some of my trousers.


So what is going wrong? Basically I started off doing calorie counting. This was quite interesting but not interesting enough to hold my attention day after day.  I also did the classic personal development mistake of trying to do too much at once.  I want to lose weight, but I also want to get fit.  These two objectives could conceivably be achieved as part of a single programme, but that isn't how I have gone about it.  I started a six month weight reduction programme, then decided to build a daily running habit.  By starting running I increased, slightly, the amount of calories I am burning.  This ought to have helped with my weight loss all other things being equal.  But all other things weren't equal and I found myself eating more.

I actually think the weight loss programme may have stopped me putting on even more weight, but that is pure speculation.  I am now several pounds heavier than I should have been.  So let's analyse what has gone wrong.

First off, I didn't keep up the calorie counting because I was distracted.  I know that my brain can only cope with so many things at once and I have been overloading it with too many other things.  It takes both organisation and will power and I have neglected both.  I have heard a lot of bad things about calorie counting so I was sort of expecting difficulties.  But I have to say that I think that the failure of it for me on this particular occasion has been pretty much down to me rather than any shortcomings of the technique itself.  I'll get back to it and give it another try.  But I won't do so straight away because I am trying something else at the moment - a hight activity burst technique - that is beginning to pay dividends so I will put it off for another fortnight.  The moral of the story is that building habits and achieving goals can be thrown off by a strategic error.  I failed to give myself the right number of goals and have not achieved that which I set out to achieve.  If I were to abandon this weight loss goal now I will have wasted all the effort I put into it.

So from now on I will have to make sure that I take a more strategic view of my personal development goals.  Just having goals isn't enough in itself.  That wasn't what I was trying to achieve, but that is still a valuable bit  of learning.