OK, fuck it. I need goals

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I hate mak­ing goals because then I might fail at them. Well, tough shit. As Super­Sleuth says, “I’m not afraid to be a fail­ure.” Well, I am afraid to be a fail­ure, but I guess I can “act as if” for a few min­utes to doc­u­ment some goals. If I’m gonna screw up, I may as well do it in front of every­one else and not try to pre­tend that things are going accord­ing to plan.

So, by the time Burn­ing Man rolls around, I want to weigh 70 kilos and be able to bench­press my own weight in sets of eight.

Right now, I weigh 83 kilos and I can bench­press 55 on a good day. That makes my body weight 13kg too high and my bench 15 too low. Burn­ing Man is August 25th, basi­cal­ly four months away. Ear­ly gains always come faster than late ones, so my ear­ly goals will have to be more ambi­tious than the lat­er ones. This is com­pound­ed by the fact that mus­cle is denser than fat, and so as I build strength I’ll be putting on weight as I go along. So for my weight I’m going to set goals like so: 1st month 40%, 2nd month 30%, 3rd month 20%, and fourth month 10%. For my bench­ing goals I’ll divide it a lit­tle bit more even­ly: 30%, 25%, 25%, 20%.

So my bench goals:

April 18: 55kg (121 lbs)
May 15: 59.5kg (131 lbs)
June 15: 63.25kg (139 lbs)
July 15: 67kg (147.4 lbs)
August 15: 70kg (154 lbs)

and my weight goals:

April 18th: 83kg (183 lbs)
May 15: 77.8kg (171 lbs)
June 15: 73.9kg (163 lbs)
July 15: 71.3kg (157 lbs)
August 15: 70kg (154 lbs)

That means that my most aggres­sive weight loss will be in the next month, drop­ping 5.2kg, or 11.5 pounds. That’s sig­nif­i­cant, but I don’t think it’s in the crash-diet range.

I have no idea if these goals are real­is­tic or any­thing, but I need to have some sort of met­ric to see where I’m going. I sup­pose I could make up some cycling and run­ning goals too, but I’ll think about those later.

Published by splicer

3 Replies to “OK, fuck it. I need goals”

  1. You can lose a lot weight
    You can lose a lot weight when it’s most­ly water weight at first. Peo­ple can eas­i­ly lose 4 – 5 pounds a week the first 2 weeks on Weight Watch­ers from changes in diet, pri­mar­i­ly increas­ing veg­gies and decreas­ing processed snacks and food (lots of sodium)

    You’ll be build­ing mus­cle mass, which weighs more than the fat it’s replac­ing. You might be bet­ter off using mea­sure­ments as your scale instead of weight if you’re plan­ning on gain­ing muscle.

    Since I start­ed run­ning and walk­ing, my weight’s stayed the same, but my pants are much loos­er in the waist than before.

  2. Thanks.
    I know the num­bers
    Thanks.

    I know the num­bers are a lit­tle arbi­trary, but ulti­mate­ly the goal is to be able to bench­press my body weight. If I can do that with­out los­ing any weight, than that’s fine, but my plan is to do it this way. We’ll see what actu­al­ly hap­pens. Con­sid­er­ing the amount of trad­ing mus­cle for fat I’ve done in the past six months to a year, I think I can trade back sig­nif­i­cant­ly and still lose weight. 

    I agree that mea­sure­ments are a bet­ter met­ric, although even that is mis­lead­ing because of the den­si­ty issue. I can’t get a den­si­ty mea­sure­ment reg­u­lar­ly, so I’ve got to find some way to measure. 

    In any case, we’ll see where I am in a month or two and it’ll be a learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me, I’m sure.

  3. Pingback: Goals, again - Monochromatic Outlook

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