I start each spin with a big cup of hot coffee, early on a quiet Sunday
morning. To prepare for your spin you might want to collect any journals and charts you’ve kept, as these might help answer the four questions.

At the start of a new spin we always answer our four questions:

1. How did you do on meeting your spin goals for last week?

Not so good. My weekly feedback system is to weigh myself, so I
did that first. My spin weight loss goal is to lose one pound a week and I ended up gaining a pound!

I did reach my exercise goal of walking on the treadmill for 30 minutes four times for the week, so that was good.

And I did figure out my _base_ line average number of steps taken
each day.

2. What is standing in the way of meeting your spin goals?

Where did the weight gain come from? That was a bit of a shock. I must have eaten too much. I don’t keep a food journal, so this is only guessing, but I went through a lot of changes last week, so I may have eaten more than usual.

I changed jobs last week, which threw me off. I need to make some
changes to make up for my different environment. Where I worked before, we had good cheap salads for sale in the cafeteria.

In my new job, we don’t even have a cafeteria. And in my old job I had to walk a lot. In my new job I don’t have to walk at all.

To see how life changes can make you gain weight, take a look at Strategy 7. Changes in Your Life Means Changing Your Plan.

I was lazy and I didn’t use the daily check last week. That wasn’t
smart. If I had performed a daily check I would have caught the
weight gain earlier and responded faster.

3. What are your spin goals for the new week?

I am still going to try to lose 1 pound during this spin. There’s no
reason to try and lose more. I’ll just keep doing the right things and once I find the right mix of strategies the weight loss will happen.

I’ll check my portion sizes very carefully.

I’ll add in another exercise session and go 5 minutes longer on my existing exercise sessions.

I need to find a way to eat a better lunch. I need to find some moves to walk more at work.

I want to find some smaller plates and some tall thin glasses to help me maintain my portion sizes better (see the Use Smaller Plates and Bowls strategy).

Oh, and now that I know my _base_line number of steps, I’ll try finding
2,000 more steps each day.

Every morning I’ll implement the daily check step.

4. How will you meet your goals?

I am going to read The Honest Calorie Estimation Method strategy
to help develop my portion control skills.

All the other goals are pretty simple and don’t need a plan.

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.

This morning I figured out a new move! This is always exciting.
Every morning I wake up and refill the water bowls for the dogs. We have two dogs so we have two bowls.

Every morning I walk to the dog room to get both their bowls, walk to the kitchen to fill them both with fresh water, and then I walk back to the dog room and set the bowls down. I have done this for
years and the dogs have never once said thank you!

Of course, I always want to be as efficient as possible, so I make one trip. The drive for efficiency is almost always a bad move.

It dawned on me today that I was missing an opportunity to make a
quality weight loss move. If I made two trips, one for each bowl, I’d naturally get more exercise.

You might say “big deal, that’s nothing.” Well, it’s actually twenty extra steps a day. So I would be getting 20 extra steps per day, and there are about 2,000 steps in a mile, so over 100 days I would be walking an extra mile. Walking a mile burns about 100 calories. Over 10 years I would burn off one pound worth of calories because a pound is about 3,500 calories. Don’t worry about
the math; we’ll cover all this later in more detail.

But you are still probably saying “big deal, a pound over 10 years, that’s nothing.” Well, alone it’s not much. But what if I can make 100 such tiny moves? That would be 10 pounds over 10 years! Now that’s a big deal, especially when you are trying to maintain your weight loss.

And that’s how the Designer Way works: continually searching out and making small improvements that add up to big results.

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.

Driving to my new job, I have to pass by a really nice donut shop. I couldn’t take it anymore. The temptation to drop by on the way to work was too much.

So I made a move. I found another route to work that didn’t go by the donut shop.

That’s an easy 1,000 calories a week saved.

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.

I tried some of the ideas from the Volumetrics book at dinner tonight
(see the Pump Up the Volume strategy). I added more vegetables to the sauce, which made the meal more filling and it has fewer calories than my old recipe.

Daily Check: No change in how my clothes fit.

I got one of those computer programs to remind me every hour to get
up, stretch, and take a little walk.

That adds another 500 steps to how much I walk every day.

I also stopped by the store to buy some smaller sized dishes.

Daily Check: Clothes feel a little looser.

I checked my spaghetti dinner portion sizes and they had crept up again. So did my salad dressing portion size. I always seem to add more as time goes by.

I think I’ll make the move of prepackaging my spaghetti into the correct portion sizes again. This worked before, but I just drifted away from doing it.

And I’ll also use a measuring spoon when putting dressing on my salad.