10 Down and 20 to Go (or 18 Down and 34 to Go)

It seems like forever when I started with the "body composition" focus and one of the first things I did was join Weight Watchers. For those of you not familiar, when you join Weight Watchers they give you three choices on how to pay:

• An unlimited monthly


• A 10 pack of coupons to use once a week. If you miss a week you are supposed to pay anyway.


• Pay week to week.

Of course, the unlimited monthly is the cheapest option as I guess they have a fair share that keep on paying even when they "drop out". I decided to go the 10 pack route. The guilt looking at the coupons helps keep me going.

This is my 10th week and I'm out of coupons. I need to buy the next pack and realized that I have two 10 packs to go before I take a little weight loss break to focus on my race day performance. This is where the 10 down and 20 to go came from.

Today was also a weigh in day. Today's result showed down 0.8 lbs for a 10 week total of down 18.0 lbs. The only disappointment was that most of the weight loss happened in two weeks. Out of the 10 weeks, I had 2 weeks were I was down a lot (-9.2 [week 1] and -4.2 [week 9]), 6 weeks where I was down a little bit and 2 weeks where my weight actually went up (boo, hiss). In order to hit my race day target, I need to lose 34.2 more lbs in the next 20 weeks (or average of about 1 3/4 per week). On the high side, but still doable.

Bringing this back to the world of triathlons, the good news is that my power to weight ratio on the bike is improving (the power is going up while the weight is going down) and I have less to lug around during the "run." The bad news is that I'm going to need new race clothes and a wetsuit. I no idea of the size that I would need.

I like having these problems.