Wherefore art thou, Treadmill? (The Diet, Day 9)

If you tuned in to yesterday’s episode of the Diets of My Life, you know that after one full week of dieting I lost exactly nothing, according to my bathroom scales. By mid-morning I was at Bed, Bath, and Beyond purchasing new scales. Clearly there was something malfunctioning.

My scales are quite suspect. They are old. My floor is uneven. They give different readings depending on where they are positioned on the floor. No amount of attempting to adjust the balance changes that fact. It seems likely they are unreliable.

So I got some fancy digital scales that laid claim to being “highly accurate.” Maybe they are since they say exactly the same thing no matter how many times you kick them over to a different spot on the floor. The problem with that high accuracy, however, is that they say I weigh ten pounds more than the other scales did. What a double-whammer of a day to first lose nothing and then find an extra ten pounds.

My friend says I should take the new scales back for a refund immediately, but I suspect they might actually be more accurate than the old ones. I think I’ll try a two scale system for a while and see what happens.

I don’t know. This is just too harsh to sort out right away.

The end result, though, is that the only way I’ve been able to live with myself is to pull my treadmill out of hiding. I did 30 minutes on it last night. I’ve done 15 so far today, but I plan to have another round before long.

I’ve been walking in the mornings with Patricia of next door. We walk for about 25 minutes on average, I think. We may be doing a whole mile in that time, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. We take dogs with us and stop a lot.

Because I’m feeling desperate, I couldn’t leave the results of that to chance. I had to do some calculating.

You have to burn off 3500 calories to burn off 1 pound. That means you need to burn off 500 calories per day in order to burn off 1 pound per week through exercise. If you can burn approximately 100 calories per mile from walking, you need to walk five miles per day to meet the 1 pound per week goal.

I won’t be doing that. The best I can walk a mile right now is in about 20 minutes. Unless there is some sort of new math involved that I don’t understand, that means I need at least 1 hour and 40 minutes worth of walking per day to meet a five mile goal. I actually need a little longer since the first mile is a more leisurely mile.

I’m about to start back to work, and I do understand my personal limitations–physical, temporal, and otherwise. I’m going to set a goal of walking 2.5 miles per day. I’ll count the mornings as 1 mile. That leaves me with thirty minutes of treadmill time remaining.

That’s somewhat depressing when I consider that I’m setting a goal of walking enough to lose an average of 2 pounds per month. It would take 20 weeks of that just to burn off the extra 10 pounds I found on the new scales.

I’m going to try not to think of it that way. I’m going to attempt to fill my head with a bunch of yammering about heart, lung, bone, and joint health instead. If anyone would like to give me a sales pitch on that, I’m listening.