Fitness Friday: DietBet Musings

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While I've been off the blog wagon for a bit, I'm happy to say I've stayed firmly seated on the fitness wagon. Thanks are due, at least in some part, to my wild-hair decision to sign up for the Blogilates June DietBet.

What is a DietBet? Basically, it's dieting meets social media.  You sign up by contributing to the betting pot (in my case, it was a $25 buy-in), and the goal is to lose 4% of your body weight in 28 days.  If you achieve your goal, you're a winner.  Period.  Everyone who wins splits the pot even-Steven.

Since I was already on a lean-out kick, it seemed like good idea.  I won't lie, the lure of the $149,000 pot helped.

In some ways it did turn out to be a good idea.  Yes, I won.  So did a bunch of other people, which means my total payout was $44.69.  I did some great workouts.  I exercised some caloric discipline.

BUT . . .

I rediscovered why I didn't own a scale for the first eight years of my marriage.  My husband's only demand when we made our gift registry was that we could not get a scale.  And this was perfectly reasonable: he had seen me go from the (admittedly) chunky - over 170lb - happy, take-on-the-world girl he fell in love with, to an underweight, calorie-crunching, moody and insecure 117lb shadow of myself, all in the space of 18 months. (I'm 5'6" with a curvy build, if you were wondering.)

I was fortunate to recover on my own without professional help and hang on to the positives (in particular, a discovery of and love for fitness) while learning to measure my health by other standards.

All of this to say, I think DietBet has got a great thing going, and doing a DietBet could serve as a great way to kick off a longer-term weight loss campaign, or maybe light a fire to lose those last five pounds.

But because it is only scale-number based, it's something to be careful with.  My husband began noticing my scale-obsession at the end (and the week following - it was hard to break the weigh-every-day habit!).  My sister sent me a somewhat passive text that simply said:

I remember how it was when you were super obsessed about the scale . . .

(The unspoken P.S. to her comment was the reminder that she called me Skeletor during that same time.)

So for me, my DietBet experience will fall in the same category of some extreme roller coaster rides I've been on: glad to say I did it once, but never, ever will do it again!

P.S. If you're interested, here is Cassey's official Blogilates DietBet recap.

How do you measure your weight/health/fitness progress?