Starting

Skinny Bunny and I have decided to lose 5 pounds over the next five weeks. Skinny Bunny, who for mysterious reasons still sticks to her old name -- Fat Bunny -- can be reached at her blog. And yes, I am the one who called her fat over IM. I would never have dared do that in her face.

A long part of our IM discussion revolved around body fat, and the much controversial Tanita scale, which is to body fat measurement what the electric chair is to the death penalty, that is, an unreliable method that uses electricity. However unreliable it is, you can eliminate the noise by averaging over enough days, and you can hope that the bias is constant so that the changes really mean something.

For your information, Skinny Bunny, I computed my body fat from my BMI according to the site you mention (please, use links, you will save three seconds to each of your ten thousand readers), and I get 20.25%, which is more than Tanita's claim about my lipidic self, that hovers around 18%.

There is a good reason why I want to lose weight. It is easier to lift 97 pounds than 100 pounds, and hence it is easier to lift oneself on a trapeze if one is 3% lighter. It is also more elegant not to have flabby shapes emphasized by the tight top I will wear during my forthcoming trapeze recital. At last, I would like to see what it's like to be less than 150 pounds. Just to see what it's like. It is difficult to imagine a better reason.

If you want to lose 5 pounds out of 139, and you want this to be fat only, you need to reduce your body fat percentage by 5/139. It happens to be 3.6%. This assumes that the Tanita doesn't have a bias, and we know it has, so if Skinny Bunny succeeds in this reduction, it probably means that she will have lost more than five pounds.

As a treat, at the end of these four weeks, we will do the same measurement in the evening, in a very humid bathroom. This should give us good numbers.

Strategy: snoop on Skinny Bunny's blog, steal her best ideas. Not a single sweet thing, no more fast carbs, and running (I went this morning, for the first time in months).