Assignment: What Chris Is Doing...

Slow and steady weight loss has been achieved by doing the following:
(1) Getting smarter about what and how much I eat ... I use the Lose It application which is easy because Jeri Lynne uses it and can share recipes so entering the nutritional information is not onerous.  It's also helped because I can look up the nutritional information before I order something in a restaurant - a surprising number of things I thought would have been healthy are NOT and better choices are usually not too difficult to find.
(2) Exercise ... Didn't do it before and what a difference it has made.  So far I've only walked (with a tiny bit of swimming while traveling).
(3) Attitude adjustment ... basic physiology courses teach that the parasympathetic nervous system controls "the 5 F's": (1) fight, (2) flight, (3) feed, (4) fear and (5) reproduce.  Neurochemically this is all controlled mostly by doapmine and, as any addict will tell you, no matter how motivated you are to quit or do something different almost nobody wins in an argument with L-dopa!  What I discovered is that most of my dopamine-based cravings for chocolate, etc. are satisfied after one or two bites; now that's all I take.  The attitude adjustment was just paying attention to when I've consumed enough and in establishing just who is in control of what I do.  (I now look back with disgusted regret at how many Charlie's large Snickers shakes I kept shoveling into my mouth even while they were making me physically sick I'm quite embarrassed.)
(4) Making sure I consume at least 1,500 mg of (1S,3R,4R,5R)-3-([(2Z)-3-(3,4-dihydroxyphenyl)prop-2-enoyl]oxy)-1,4,5-trihydroxycyclohexanecarboxylic acid every day.  From food or synthetic extract doesn't matter - I try to get a good 1.5 grams each day.

Since starting the competition I've measured and tracked every calorie consumed (including fat, carbohydrate, fiber and protein gram and each calorie burned from both daily activity AND exercise.  Careful recording of this data has allowed me to measure weekly calorie deficits, exercise totals and many other parameters.  Because I have enough scientific and statistical training to know the difference between anecdotal observation and understand the difference between correlation and causation I have done various statistical analyses of my weekly % loss as a function of each of these measurements. Unfortunately, of the four things I described above the only one that I can say has made any statistically significant difference is #4.