It’s been a quiet month on the blog front, mostly because I don’t have a lot of organizing energy lately. I should be able to put these up once a month at least, so true to the promise to myself, I’m putting this one up now.

The last month has been pretty good to me in my diet. There has been a lot less roller-coaster-ness than there was in the previous months, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel that I might be able to hit my goal before I head off on vacation in the middle of September. That would be nice. In regards to my diet, I’ve been mostly still keeping with the keto diet that I have been on before, focusing a lot on the protein and fat portions and limiting myself when thinking about carbs. Lately I have been loosening up on the restrictions of the diet lately, and not watching the ketostix as much as I did when I was hard-core on the diet. Now I just am kind of passively trying to stay below 50 or 75 carbs a day by not eating any bread in general, and counting the carbs along with the calories that I’m eating.

Lately weekends have been a pretty good deal for me, because I told myself last month that I was going to start letting myself eat a little more freely over the weekends. So I get to give myself a treat on Saturday before we go out to the farmer’s market here in town and have some pancakes or hash browns. I’ve found that some of my tastes have changed though, since the last time that I have been eating out “normally”. I’m ordering a lot more things with peppers and tomatoes in them, and with cooked onions. They are pretty tasty and give an otherwise bland breakfast omelet some more zing. I’ve also been avoiding a bunch of carbs by having pancakes with sugar free syrup. Almost every restaurant which serves breakfast will have some kind of sugar free syrup available, which means that you won’t just be pouring on the carbs when you eat your cakes. I am likening it now to asking for diet soda - because I have the sugar free syrup, I can have a couple of pancakes.

In the last month or so, I’ve decided that I need to start upping my exercise. I mentioned last month that I had a new course for my training, and I started interval training. I’ve stuck with the running course pretty religiously, because I think it has a good mix of hills and slow climbs along with some falls, and goes far enough afield that I can feel accomplished every time. It also helps that it goes past five of the parks here in northeast Minneapolis, so I get to have a little bit of nature on the walk.

The running pace has been going up a little bit, but I am staying with the type of training I was doing before, which is a two minutes walking to one minute jogging or running throughout the whole course. You can see some of my intervals on RunKeeper (look me up and add me if you want). I really like the graphs on there, because it shows how fast you run and it is really nice. I am still logging at dailymile as well, because I have more people cheering me on at that site. At any rate, my best pace has been improving dramatically lately, with the best pace dropping over a minute in the last month to 11:25 per mile. I’m really happy about the fact that there is such a tangible improvement from these runs. I’m hoping that I can make my goal of doing the course in less than 45 minutes by the end of the year.

After a rocky graph last month, it is heartening to see that most of this month’s graph is green. I have a little blip above the line at the end of the first week of August, but it is working out pretty well for me, and the weekly loss is spot on to what I have been aiming for on the calories scale, so it works out overall. I am somewhat terrified to see what these will look like when I start ramping it down and eating a little more. I am worried that my body will rebel at the idea of eating more foods and start gaining weight instead of just going to a steady state. I am really, really close to the “before and after picture” goal that I set for myself, and with any luck I will post it with next month’s report.

The yearly graph looks great. I have even apparently sped up my weight loss in the last two months, despite the heavy upwards blip around the fourth. I’m slightly worried that my next vacation will have a similar uptick, but a graph like this will make me just get right back on track and lose any gained pounds.

I’ve mentioned my transition to a different period a couple of times in this month’s report. I’ve decided that I want to get comfortable where I am for a little while, at least when I get to the next goal that I have set for myself I will start focusing on toning and being more fit instead of losing weight necessarily. If I’m lucky, I’ll still lose some of the pounds just because I will be getting rid of some of the excess fat rolls that are on my body. I’ll still be posting monthly on my progress, but it will start focusing on fitness and such instead of just the diet itself. I’m hoping that by keeping really close track of everything, I won’t have a problem staying at around the same weight until the end of the year.