As of July 10 I was halfway through my weight loss bet to lose thirty pounds in six months. I have bet $3000 that I will lose the weight. If I manage to lose the weight then I win $600 plus get my $3000 back, if I don’t win the bet then I lose $3000. I have since found out that the max you can win in addition to the amount you bet is $600. If I had bet $600 I could have won $600 for a total payout of $1200. That is obviously a lot better return on investment than my bet. The extra $2400 I bet wasn’t totally without benefit though. I was able to place that bet with a 2% back credit card so I did get a nice amount of credit card rewards from placing the bet. Additionally, the thought of losing $3000 scares me a lot more than the thought of losing $600.
My starting weight was 226 pounds so I need to get down to 196 pounds to win the bet. At my July 10 weigh-in I weighed 211.4 pounds. If I round that down then I have lost a total of 15 pounds in the first three months. That means I have lost half the weight I need to lose and am exactly on track to lose thirty pounds in six months.
However, I would like to lose the weight before the six months is up. Not losing all the weight until the last-minute doesn’t give me any margin of error in case something goes wrong. Ideally I would like to have all of the weight loss by the end of August or early September. After a strong start of losing twelve pounds in the first month my weight loss has been very slow the last couple of months. I am going to continue to try to lose weight while I’m working, but I don’t think I’ll be able to lose weight quickly enough while working. Therefore, once my current work project is finished I will take some time off. I plan to give biking the Katy Trail another try. I know from past experience that I can lose weight quickly from hiking and I think I should experience similar weight loss from biking. It will be hot for biking, but it would be worse if I was hiking. I’ll update my bike plans once I know when the bike ride will be.
Usually the last few pounds are also harder, but you are off to a great start.
Thanks. I plan on going on a long bike ride in August which should speed up the weight loss.