Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 337.00 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 115 / 76

The good news continues. Not quite as fast as I'd like, but it's nice to see some progress. Also, blood pressure is down again.

Water In, Water Out

I've weighed myself a whole bunch of times today, and my weight is jumping all over the place. I'm 99% sure that isn't due to the scale I'm using, which means my weight is actually changing. It's got to be because of differences at different times of day between what goes in and what comes out.

I'm pretty sure most of it is water. As I understand it, the dietary guidelines say to consume 8 cups of water per day. I drink 15 to 25 cups per day.

(By the way, that's not as high as it sounds. For one thing, because I eat very little in a day, I'm not getting water from food. Many of the foods you eat in a day include a considerable amount of water. Lettuce and broccoli, for example, are more than 90% water. Carrots and apples are about 85% water. Some of the water goes to make up for that. Besides, unless you force yourself to drink way beyond your thirst, excess water won't hurt you.)

Each cup weighs about half a pound, so I drink 8 to 12 pounds of water per day.

So, all day long it's drink some liquid, go to the bathroom, drink some liquid, go to the bathroom...several pounds of water in, several pounds of water out. The amount I can drink before my bladder fills up depends in part on what else I've had to eat. Food in my stomach slows the absorption of water into my bloodstream, and salty foods cause me to retain water rather than eliminating it right away. On the other hand, my blood pressure medication causes me to eliminate water faster.

It's a roller coaster, and my weight goes up and down with it.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 338.25 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 118 / 78

Whew.

I think that puts me back in control of my diet. I've lost 4.5 pounds in the last week, which is pretty good. Of course, I had a nasty uptick last week.

I assume the large loss this week is a start-of-diet loss, like the 20-pound loss I had during the first two weeks of the year.

A more meaningful statement would be that I lost 1.25 pounds in the last month. That's not very good, but at least I'm now moving in the right direction.

Meanwhile, check out the blood pressure. I'm below 120/80. Having either number higher than that would put me in the pre-hypertension range, which is where I've been for several months now. I imagine this is just a random fluctuation, meaning I'll be back up next week. But I'm going to enjoy feling virtuous for a while.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 342.75 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 125 / 86

Gained just over three pounds over the last three weeks. I knew that was going to happen. I restocked my place with healthy foods, and I think I've got the diet back on track. We'll see next week.

Bad Weekend

I've been bad this weekend.

My wife and I took an extended weekend vacation, and I ate rather a lot. Aw hell, I ate like a pig. It wasn't all quality, either. Oh sure, I had a very good steak dinner with appetizers and desert. I also had my absolute favorite pizza. If I'm going to break the diet, it's better to do it with my favorite foods instead of crap.

But I also had crap: A bacon cheeseburger. Not a bacon cheeseburger from one of my favorite burger joints, either. I got this one at a friggin' Cracker Barrel. What the hell was I thinking?

Add to that some fried chicken. Some of it was good stuff, but I also had some McDonald's Chicken Selects with ranch sauce. I can still taste it. Also, I had a whole bunch of vending machine food and some really, really bad cheese fries from a concession at a convention center. And a quarter pound of chocolate covered malted milk balls.

I was intentionally taking a vaction from the diet. I wanted to have a few really nice meals. I went overboard with the other stuff, using the "diet vacation" as an excuse.

I'll be a while dieting away this crap. I think maybe I'll start a fast on Monday.

Busy Times

Last week, I was busy and forgot to weigh myself before I started eating and drinking, and I'll be out of town this Friday, so there'll be no weigh-in then either. I'll pick it up again next week.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 339.50 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 128 / 87

Not bad. I was celebrating my birthday with different sets of friends all weekend, and it meant a lot of food. I had a big steak dinner on Saturday, my favorite pizza on Sunday, and barbecue on Monday. And I still lost 1.25 pounds. That worked out well.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 340.75 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 128 / 88

Not too bad. I only gained 3/4 of a pound, and that's with a big meal still in me. Also, my systolic blood pressues is back down.

I've been hovering around 340 for a few weeks now. I need to start pushing on toward my next milestone of 320 where I'll take another set of pictures.

It's my Birthday and I'll Eat If I Want To

All of a sudden I'm overcome by a...feelin' of brief mortality. 'Cause I'm gettin' on in the world, coming up on forty-one years—forty-one stony gray steps towards the grave, you-know the box awaits it's grisly load. Now I'm gonna be food for worms. And just like Charles Mingus wrote that beautiful piece of music "Epitaph" for Eric Dolphy. I say "So long, Eric...so long John Coltrane and Charles Mingus...so long Duke Ellington and Lester Young...so long Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald...so long Jimmy Reed...so long Muddy Waters...and so long Howlin' Wolf."

41 years old today. I don't actually have any feelings of brief mortality, but I love that introducory monologue to "Woke Up This Morning" by Alabama 3.

Big turkey dinner tonight, lots of mashed potatos, followed by pie.

I may just skip tomorrow's weigh-in on purpose to avoid contaminating the data with an anomalous measurement. Yeah, that's it.

(Oh, and thanks for the link, Bubba.)

Oops.

Yeah, no Weight Check this week.

I was dealing with a household appliance emergency on Friday morning and forgot to take measurements. By the time I remembered, I had already eaten lunch and drank a Double Gulp full of Diet Coke. All that food weighs enough to throw off the weight measurement, and the food and activity will throw off the blood pressure. No point in measuring.

Besides, I'm pretty sure my weight went up. That cold I had last week probably artificially lowered my weight quite a bit.

Quiet Trials

Regular reader (only reader?) Don Juan de Bubba asked me in an earlier comment if I'm noticing an increased level of energy as I lose weight. I don't know. But I have been noticing that as I lose weight I become able to do things I couldn't do before. I've been blogging them as "Trials" of one kind or another.

(If you aren't overweight, some of the trials are activities that you probably do without noticing. I'm living a very different life from most of the rest of you because of my weight, and I thought you might be interested in hearing about it.)

Here are three small trials I've passed recently:

Trial By Couch (Sitting)

Getting up off the couch from a seated position has not been easy for me in the past. I couldn't just lean forward and stand up because my stomach limited my movement and I weighed too much to lift myself to a standing position from that low to the floor. I would have to lean over and put my hand on the nearest arm rest, then transfer as much weight as possible to that arm and use it to force myself up off the couch and over into a standing position.

In the past week or so, I've been able to get off the couch from a sitting position by just throwing my weight forward on to my legs and forcing myself up with my knees. It's not an instinctive thing. I have to make a special effort, and it doesn't always work, but it's doable. It's something new.

Trial By Rolling Over

You wouldn't think rolling over would be a hard thing to do, would you? But think about it a minute. If I'm lying in bed next to my wife and I want to turn over from my left side to my right, I can't just roll in one direction or another until I'm laying the right way: I'd bump into my wife in one direction and fall off the bed in the other. Rolling over isn't really rolling over, it's more like rotating about your longest axis while remaining in place.

To do this, you have to lift your body off the bed enough to reduce the friction so that your rotating body can turn without moving to the side. And when you weigh 400 pounds like I did, lifting your body that way isn't easy. I used to have to twist and rock and move my legs and arms just right to lift myself up with one leg and both arms and push my body around with the other leg. It required some thought and coordination.

No longer. I don't know when it happened, but at some point I started being able to roll over without having to make an effort. It may not seem like much to be able to roll over easily, but trust me, it's a real pain in the ass if you can't.

Trial By Long Ride

Whenever I'd ride for more than about an hour in the car, my legs would get stiff. Getting out of the car would be slow and painful. If I remembered it, I could make getting out of the car easier by tensing and relaxing my leg muscles for a couple of minutes before getting out of the car. I never really thought about why this happened.

I don't know when it happened, but I've realized recently that my legs no longer hurt after a long ride. I'm not sure how my weight contributes to this, but I'm assuming that it has something to do with losing weight. In any case, it sure feels good.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 340.00 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 136 / 86

Since the beginning of the year, I've lost 60 pounds. I feel pretty good about that.

I apparently lost five and a half pounds this week. I think what that really means is that last week's high weight was due to a transient condition. Maybe I was retaining water for some reason, such as too much dietary salt. Hmm. One of my blood pressure pills is a diuretic. Maybe I missed one and took on some water.

Actually, there's another explanation for how I could lose so much weight in a week: I've been sick with a cold and haven't been very hungry. You know, if scientists could figure out why that happens and put it in a bottle, it would make one heck of a diet pill.

My blood pressure is quite a bit higher than last week and I'm not sure why. I did have more trouble than usual getting a good reading on the blood pressure monitor. It quit several times with an error that usually means the cuff is not positioned correctly. Also, one time the reading was 137/62 which I didn't trust because the diastolic pressure looked way too low. I've always recorded every reading I take, but I decided to throw that one out and run it again. I got a more normal reading. Maybe there's something wrong with the monitor.

Another possibility is that I took the test under different conditions. I usually take my pressure shortly after getting up and before I eat or drink anything much. This morning I forgot I had to take my pressure and I ate breakfast first. Maybe the food in my stomach or the caffeine in my blood caused my pressure to rise.

The Size of My Clothing, Part 2

Don Juan de Bubba said...

Actually your decision to not go up a size is actually what doctor Phil recommends. He also recommends against pants with elastic waist etc.

That was my thinking some time ago. I was at a size 48 and my pants were getting tight. I didn't want to go up to a size 50. Psychologically, that just seemed too huge. I wanted to stay a size 48.

So whenever I'd buy pants---which happened a lot because they'd keep tearing---I'd try on size 48's in several different brands and styles until I found which ones were least uncomfortable. They were still tight, but I told myself that if I wore pants that were too small it would encourage me to diet.

It didn't work. All that really happened is that I spent about two years wearing pants that were uncomfortably tight. Eventually, I gave in and bought a couple pairs of size 50s. They fit fine. I was comfortable.

I don't know. It seemed like the right decision at the time. Maybe I should have stuck with it a bit longer...

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 345.50 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 128 / 83

Oops. Gained a half a pound. I'm not quite sure how that happened. I went out with some friends on the weekend and pigged out a bit, I had a nice Japanese dinner on Wednesday, and I had two sandwiches and 8 Dannon yogurt cups on Thursday...okay, maybe I do know how that happened. And BP's back up too.

I'm going to have to be a lot more careful this weekend.

The Size of My Clothing

Continuing my answer to Don Juan de Bubba's question below, the answer to "Have you noticed a difference with clothes?" is definitely yes.

Most of my pants have a size 52 waist. Hmm...Let me explain to any ladies reading this that in men's cloting, a size 52 waist means that it's 52 inches around my waist. Men's clothes, for the most part, are sized in actual units of measurement rather than the strange meaningless numbers used for women's dress sizes. But I digress...

I've worn size 52 for many years. However, last year, after I hurt my back, one of the clues that I had started to gain weight again is that my pants started getting tighter and tighter. Toward the end of the year, just before I started the diet, I had real trouble fastening my pants. I'd have to grab real hard on each side of the fly and exhale in order to close and button them. The belt was a struggle too.

I suppose I could have just solved the problem by buying pants with a 54-inch waist, but I didn't want to accept that I had gained so much weight. Normally, I'd feel a bit stupid for not accepting the obvious reality, but in this case I'm convinced it helped lead to my decision to diet. I didn't plan it that way, and I don't normally torment myself to encourage change, but that's how it worked out.

I normally wear comfortable shorts when I'm in the house, so I only change into regular pants when I leave the house. At some point, I started planning my day around how many times I'd have to go through the trouble of putting my pants on. Realizing the absurdity of that situation is one of the things that made me decide to diet.

All that has changed now. My pants started fitting better almost instantly, probably because my stomach and intestines were no longer bloated with gas-making food.

Getting dressed is no longer the chore it was becoming. It's a normal thing now. You know, like it is for everybody else.

I've noticed lately that my pants are a little loose. I can tighten the belt, but there's definitely a bit of loose fabric bunched up inside the belt. And the belt itself is also looser, causing me to go from the largest-size notch position to almost to the smallest-size position. The notch change isn't necessarily meaningful, since leather belts stretch out from being worn, but it's better than going the other way.

I'm also starting to fit into my nice dress shirts again. The buttons don't pull any more and the collars aren't as tight.

I'll have more to say about shirts in another post.

Measuring the Changes

In a comment below, Don Juan de Bubba asks:

Are you doing any other measurements besides the two we see? Have you noticed a difference with clothes? energy level?

The only other regular measurement I get is my pulse, which my blood pressure monitor displays each time I take a reading. That looks like this:



The blood pressure monitor has to detect my pulse in order to find my blood pressure, so I guess since it has the data anyway, it might as well display it. In general, a lower resting heart rate is better, but this isn't a resting pulse: This is a sitting-at-the-computer-taking-my-blood-pressure pulse. Heart rate has so much natural variability that I'm not sure the readings mean much.

(I started to write about the other parts of the question, but it was getting too long. I'll write more later.)

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 345.00 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 118 / 81

I lost only 3/4 of a pound. That's about what I was expecting. I think if it as converting last week's temporary water loss into a permanent loss of fat.

I'm not too concerned about this because (unlike three weeks ago) I'm still on the trend line for my weight loss. That is, what I think of as my true weight loss—the loss of body fat—should continue on a slow, steady downward trend, even though my measured weight will bounce around due to transient weight such as water and food.

Here's a chart of my recent weights, with a dashed trend line drawn in by hand:



I think this means that while the last few weeks have had their ups and downs, I'm still losing weight.

Oh, note also that my systolic blood pressure has dropped out of the pre-hypertension range. I'm not sure that's cause for celebration, but it's a pretty good thing.

Anxiety

I'm not real enthusiastic about tomorrow's weigh-in. You see, last week's weigh-in was a bit of a cheat. I had almost nothing to eat on the day before, so I lost quite a bit of what I think of as "dynamic weight" (digesting food and retained water) by Friday morning. Also, I pigged out a bit on Wednesday because my wife got a bit of good news and we were celebrating.

I just weighed myself, and I'm heavier than my last weigh-in by a few pounds. That means I'll have to practically fast again today to get my weight to drop. It might work, but what do I do for next week?

Have You Heard the News?

I'm sure anyone reading this has heard some news about the new federal statistical study that found that being overweight is not as unhealthy as once thought.

Here's what it comes down to: Over a year, people who are overweight are less likely to die than people of normal weight. People who are underweight are slightly more likely to die.

There are several thoughts about why this might be. One is that the ranges are simply wrong: The normal healthy weight for a human is higher than we had thought. This fits well with the emerging theory that exercise has a greater effect on health than previously thought. Part of the apparently unhealthy effects of gaining weight could really have been due to the accompanying decrease in physical activity.

Another theory is that some of the ill effects of weight gain can be offset with medicine, and that this is less true for some of the ill effects of being underweight. There are also reasons to believe that the diseases and failures of old age are less destructive of those with a little meat on them.

Yet another theory is that the effect is due to the study's use of BMI (Body Mass Index) as a measure of fitness. BMI is a simple height-and-weight calculation that does not take into account whether the weight is fat or muscle. If many of the overweight people are really just fit and heavily muscled, it's no surprise that they live longer.

I suspect, as most people do, that it's a little bit of each of these things and that further statistical studies will tease the truth out of the data.

None of this matters to me. Here's why:

The study defines normal weight as a BMI between 18.5 and 25. The overweight segment stretches from 25 to 30. These are the people least likely to die. When they say the study shows that being overweight isn't bad for you, they mean the people with BMI between 25 and 30. People over that will still have problems.

My BMI is 48.

That makes me morbidly obese, which is a fancy way of saying that my weight is a serious health concern. This is actually very good news, because when I started this diet, my BMI was 56, which made me super morbidly obese.

I've got a long way to go before I'm in the range where the new study would matter to me. At my current weight, getting down below 250 (nearly 100 more pounds to lose) would be a major achievement. My ideal is to get back down to my high school weight---before I went to college and sat at a desk all day---which would be 220 pounds. By comparison, the high end of the overweigh range for me is 215, so I'd still be obese.

It's hard to imagine that I'd ever get down below 200, and getting below 180 to the normal weight range seems downright silly.

By the way, they say that underweight people are more likely to die. Running the math, I'd be underweight at 132 pounds. Does it surprise anybody that a 5'11" guy weighing 130 pounds might have health problems?

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 345.75 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 123 / 81

Much better! Whew.

Between not losing any weight 2 weeks ago and forgetting to check last week, I was worried that I had lost the will to continue the diet. Will power is like that sometimes. It goes away and it's hard to get back because, well, that would take will power.

It looks like I'm still on track. That's a good thing.

Oops!

Forgot to weigh-in this week. I pig out a bit over the weekends, so I'll just wait until next Friday to weigh myself again.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 354.50 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 123/ 82

Dammit. Didn't lose any weight.

I knew this was coming too. I didn't lose very much last week, and I could feel my control slipping away. I've been eating a lot more fast food than I should. Ordering a burger and fries sometimes is okay. Ordering a burger and fries every day is a problem. But that's what I've been doing: I've let sometimes shade over into every day.

Part of the reason for this is that I don't have enough healthy foods in the house anymore. No Hope & Tim's soup to fill me up in the morning, no salad for dinner. No whole-grain bread as filler. I need to stockpile these things again.

That's the long-term solution. The short term solution is to do what I did to start this diet: fasting. Two days. Starting right now.

The Mechanics of Measuring My Weight

In a comment below, Don Juan de Bubba asks "Where did you find a scale that worked for you?"

The short answer is that I bought a Healthometer model 402KL Physician Balance Beam Scale from an outfit called Balkowitsch Enterprises:

http://www.balkowitsch.com/products.php?catid=17

Now for the long answer. My background includes some science and engineering, so I've given this a lot more thought than...well...than anyone needs to.

The Healthometer 402KL is the same kind of scale your doctor has. You get on and the beam at the top bounces up and the nurse adjusts the sliding weights until the pointer on the right side is floating in the center of its little metal loop.

If you followed the link, you can see that a scale like this is much more expensive than an ordinary bathroom scale. The list price is about $230, but Balkowitsch has them for $170.

So what costs so much? Or more to the point, why did I think it was worth spending $170 for this scale when I can buy a bathroom scale from Target for under $50?

First of all, this scale performs better than most bathroom scales. That's because it's a balance beam scale, not a spring scale. Let me explain:

A spring scale uses a system of levers to direct the force of your weight to compress a spring. This is useful because springs generally have a linear response to an applied force: The distance the spring compresses is directly proportional to the force on the spring. If the spring compresses 1 inch when a 100 pound person steps on the scale, it will compress 2 inches when a 200 pound person steps on. The spring is connected to the dial mechanism so that the dial turns as the spring is compressed. The markings on the dial convert this compression into weight.

Spring scales are not the best way to measure a person's weight. They tend to be sensitive to your position and movement on the scale. Most spring scales will visibly change their measurement by up to 5 or 10 pounds if you change the way your weight is distributed left-to-right or heel-to-toe. Since I only lose about 2 pounds per week, the errors are larger than the change I'm trying to see.

A digital spring scale still works on the same principles, except that the spring's compression is measured with some kind of sensor that puts out a voltage in proportion to the spring's compression. The scale's display does some simple math to calculate body weight from the voltage.

This isn't much of an improvement. The spring mechanism still jumps around because the person standing on the scale is moving. This means the voltage from the sensor is also jumping around, which would make it hard to read the digital readout. For this reason, digital scales usually "lock up" the reading rather than showing the moment-to-moment changes. However, the number they lock on is somewhat random. Step off the scale and step back on and it will probably lock up a different number.

You can compensate for this variation somewhat by weighing yourself several times and taking a middle value. This reduces the effect of random errors, but it doesn't do anything about systematic errors. That is, if I change the weighing procedure from one week to the next, it could shift the whole set of weight measurements. For example, I've had digital scales that would show weights differing by 3-5 pounds depending on which foot I stepped up with first.

What it comes down to is that spring scales don't produce repeatable and reliable measurements. If this week's measurement is lower than last weeks by a pound, is it me or is it the scale?

Balance scales operate on a different principle. The traditional balance is an equal-arm pan balance like the one carried be the Goddess of Justice in all the statues. There's a pretty good picture of one at the Michelli Scales site. Operation is simple: Put the test sample to be weighed in one pan, then place various members of a set of known calibrated weights in the other. When the scale is perfectly level, the weight of the test sample is the same as the weight of the calibrated weights.

A physician's balance beam works like this, with a couple of differences. First, it uses an unequal-length beam, longer on one side than the other, to take advantage of the physics of leverage. The turning force on each side of a beam is equal to the weight times the distance from the pivot. The weight of a 200-pound man can be therefore be balanced by a 20-pound counterweight that is 10 times further from the pivot. The physician's scale uses several such levers to divide down the weight of the person until all it takes is a couple of small weights.

Because the turning force is proportional to the distance from the pivot point, the balancing force of the counterweights can be adjusted by sliding them along the beam. When the scale is in balance, you can read the positions of the counterweights to find the amount of weight they must be balancing. It's a very useful principle.

It's also inherently more stable. With a spring scale, when the user moves, the change in force makes the spring move; but when the spring moves, it changes the amount of force it's applying. The spring and the user are both moving and changing the forces on the weighing mechanism, but not at the same time, so the mechanism wobbles back and forth a lot. With a balance scale, the user manually sets the counterweights and then lets go. Even if the user moves, the counterweight stays the same. As soon as the user stops moving, the scale is back in balance.

Also, a spring scale's mechanism has to move over the whole weight range of the scale, whereas the balance scale is constrained to move only near the balanced position. If the pointer is pegged in either the direction, the user adjusts the weights until it's free again.

So the balance scale is inherently more precise and resistant to measurement "noise." I can carefully adjust the counterweights until the pointer is in the exact center of its movement range and read my weight to within about a quarter of a pound. If I step off and then back on, the balance scale will still balance out at the exact same weight.

When it says I've lost weight, I believe it.

This brings me to the second reason for buying the Healthometer balance scale, which is that it has a large enough range for my weight. Most bathroom scales only go up to 300 pounds or maybe 330 if they're based on the metric system. My scale, like the one in my doctor's office, uses two weights: A coarse weight that fits into a series of slots to indicate 50-pound increments from 0 to 300, and a fine weight that slides smoothly to get an exact balance. The the fine weight on my scale is marked with quarter-pound increments from 0 to 50, implying precision to about 4 ounces. The real level of precision, however, depends on how careful you are in balancing the pointer in the center of its range. I think I can get the full quarter-pound precision out of it.

So if one weight goes up to 300 pounds and the other goes up to 50 pounds, how am I weighing myself, since I'm over 350 pounds? The scale comes with a counterweight that can be hung off the beam to shift the weight range up by 100 pounds, for a maximum weight of 450 pounds. Thankfully, that's more than I needed.

(I imagine that doctor's offices get the scales with the counterweights too, but I assume they've lost them, since they never go get them for me. The nurse usually just makes something up. Lately I've been telling them not to bother. When I go back, probably later this month, I'll have accurate data for the doctor.)

By the way, I found the dealer, Balkowitsch, on eBay. I was satisfied with their service. They promised delivery in two weeks and got it to me in about 4 days. The scale itself is built cleanly and solidly of strong materials and was carefully packed for shipping. In its own way, it's a fine measuring instrument.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 354.50 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 133 / 87

Lost 1.75 pounds. I had fast food a few times this week. Maybe a few times too many.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 356.25 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 129 / 84

Lost 2.25 pounds. Like last week, I didn't expect to lose that much. I had a bit of pizza on Wednesday and I thought that might slow the weight loss.

Also, my blood pressure is down a bit.

Scaling Factors

To keep myself going on this epic journey of weight loss, I've started making a photographic record. I took the first set of nine photographs on January 3rd, the first day of my diet. The photo set starts with a close-up of my face and includes full-body shots from the front, back, and both sides, two closer shots of me raising my arms, a side shot of me bending over, and a shot of me in a weightlifter's muscle pose just for kicks.

I weigh myself every week, just to prove I'm still losing weight, but I didn't want to take pictures that often. First of all, taking the pictures is a lot of work. I setup the camera on a tripod and start the timer then quickly pose for the shot. After the camera snaps the picture, I check the image, figure out what went wrong and where to stand or what to do to prevent it, and go again. What with sorting through the pictures and processing them, it takes about 2 hours.

Second, weighing myself is a test I need to perform regularly to confirm that I'm continuing to lose weight. The photos, on the other hand, are intended as an illustration of weight loss rather than a test, so they only need to be taken when they will show something.

I decided, more or less arbitrarily, to photograph myself again when I dropped through 360 pounds, which would mean I'd lost 40 pounds, or 10% of my body mass. That happened officially this last Friday, March 18, when I hit 358.5 pounds. That night, I took a second set of photos.

I added one of the photos next to the original photo in the header above so you can see the change 40 pounds brings. (Yes, that's always been me in the photo.) Not that much of a difference, is there? Side-by-side, I think I can see a very slight change. I was hoping it would be more obvious, but I guess I weigh so much that it takes a lot more than 40 pounds to make a difference. The problem is that fat is three dimensional, although only two dimensions matter.

Let me explain.

If I were to suddenly double in size, my weight would far more than double. My body is 3-dimensional, so I'd be twice as big in every direction: twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as thick from front to back. That would give me (2 x 2 x 2 =) 8 times the volume and therefore 8 times the weight.

Working the math backwards, in order to double my weight, my size would have to increase by an amount that when multiplied by itself three times gives 2. That is, my body would have to be scaled to the cube root of 2, which is about 1.26.

However, my body doesn't gain wait by scaling equally in all directions. When I gain weight, it's not because I've gotten taller. I gain weight by adding to the layer of fat that's wrapped around my torso and limbs. My bones don't get any longer, they just accumulate fat around them. Seen end-on, my limbs and torso increase in cross section. I gain weight radially.

This radial expansion is essentially two dimensional, so my weight is proportional to the square of the change in the width of a part of my body. Doubling my weight would require my size to scale up by the square root of 2, which is about 1.41.

Now let's look at what's happend to me in the last two and a half months. I lost 10% of my weight, so my size must have scaled by roughly the square root of 0.9, or about 0.95. In other words, the visible width of my body is still about 95% of what it was at the beginning of the year. In concrete terms, I only lost 5% of my stomach.

That's just barely enough to be visible. Both images above are cropped from larger ones. I just cropped the first one back in January to show my torso. It's 141 pixels wide. A 5% reduction should shrink it by 7 pixels to 134.

I processed the second image this weekend, cropping it to look as much like the first one as possible. I didn't count the pixels, and it was much larger when I cropped it. I shrunk it to a vertical height of 200 pixels like the first image and posted it up there. Only then did I do the math in this post. I just went back to check and, amazingly, the width came to exactly 134 pixels.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 358.50 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 134 / 87

Lost 2.25 pounds, which is much better than I exepected. Blood pressure is up a little bit, but still not officially high.

I've just passed the 40-pounds-lost mark. Work to do...

My Favorite Food

This is going to be a tough week for the weight check, but I knew it was coming. When I first started this diet, I almost succumbed to the temptation of my favorite food, but my wife talked me out of it. Part of how we did that is that we agreed to have a special meal this week, because this week is the anniversary of our first date. So, a few days ago, I got to pig out on this:



Damn that was good.

It's a lot of calories, however, and I still haven't cut out the yogurt—although I've cut down—so I suspect I'll be overweight on the weigh-in. It was worth it.

The Cause of All My Troubles

I believe I've identified the cause of all my dieting troubles this week.

I lost about 1.5 pounds when I would normally lose about 2.5 pounds. The 1-pound difference means I consumed about 3500 more calories this week than I should have.

That works out to about 24 of these:

Yeah, I've been eating a lot of these yogurt cups (150 calories). Not just the strawberry one pictured here, either, but also the Strawberry Banana, Blueberry, Cherry, and Peach. 24 cups in a week is only a little more than 3 per day. I've been having them for breakfast as well as for a late-night snack, and sometimes as a mid-day snack. Sometimes I eat the Light variety, which only has 90 calories, but often I have a lot more than just 3 in a day, although usually the yogurts displace something else I would have eaten. All in all, 500 calories per day (a little more than 3 yogurt cups) doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.

To make matters even worse, yogurt is high in fruity carbohydrates, so they probably have been generating a blood sugar spike and crash that leaves me hungry for other things.

I like these yogurt cups a lot, and I thought I could control myself, but I think I may have to cut them out completely. Maybe I can cut back to 1 or 2 a day. If I have them in the evening, the blood sugar crash won't occur until I'm asleep, when it's kind of hard to snack.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 360.75 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 132 / 85

Lost 1.5 pounds. Diastolic blood pressure up a bit.

Dammit. That's the least I've lost in any week so far.

Trial By Staircase

Here's something new. I can now walk up the stairs without support.

Ever since my knees started hurting so much, I've been helping myself up the stairs. At the very least, I've been leaning against the walls to balance myself. It's a sort of lean-with-the-elbow-and-take-a-step kind of process.

(I'm not entirely sure why it's helpful because pressing sideways against the wall can't possibly reduce the vertical load on my body, can it? I guess I could be pushing down a bit, because pressing against the wall produces some friction that would keep my hand and arm in place while I push myself up. It doesn't feel like that though. In addition, whatever sideways force I get from pushing against the wall must be matched by an equal and opposite force against my feet, otherwise I'd push myself completely away from the wall. But this force has to be transmitted through my body, so by pushing against the wall, I must be increasing the forces going through my body, not decreasing them. My best guess is that by leaning I change the way my body stabilizes my knee joints, probably by bringing the larger leg muscles to bear on the problem.)

Often, I use the hand rails to push or pull myself up the stairs, using my arms to take some of the load off my legs. Since humans stopped swinging through the trees several million years ago, this is probably not a healthy way to use my arm muscles and joints. I've been noticing some pain in my shoulders.

However, a few days ago I was coming up the front stairs and I decided to try coming up the stairs without holding on to anything. I just forced myself up the stairs to the third floor by pumping my legs—you know, like most people do—and it worked. By worked I mean that my knees didn't hurt. Not at all. Not even the next day.

I wouldn't want to start climbing a lot of stairs, because that would obviously still hurt, but this is an important change. I used to sort of save-up trips outside, to the car or the dumpster or the basement, to minimize the number of trips up and down the stairs. The question "Will I have to climb the stairs for this?" was a meaningful part of planning my day. Now, not so much.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 362.25 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 132 / 83

Lost 2.25 pounds. Blood pressure down a bit.

Battling "The Crave"

I went for a ride tonight. I do that sometimes late at night. I just get in the car and tool around for an hour or two on the nearly empty streets, listening to the radio.

After a busy day writing software, it helps to concentrate on something else for a while. I'll drive to an area I haven't been to lately and explore the streets. Or I'll pick a destination like a new restaurant I've heard about, just to give me somewhere to go. I'll focus on how the car steers entering the turns, and how it accelerates coming out of them. Every once in a while, I'll pick out another car on the streets and follow it for a little while, in a non-threatening manner, being careful to lose it after a few turns so the other driver doesn't start to worry.

For no particular reason, I haven't done this since before I started dieting. That's probably a good thing, since getting a bite to eat was always on the agenda. As it is, I spent the whole drive tonight convincing myself that it would be a bad idea go get a bag of slyders the night before my weekly weight check.

Breakfast of Champions

Hyzaar, Norvasc, aspirin, a multivitamin, a calcium supplement, more of vitamins C and E, folic acid, selenium, isoflavones, beta carotene, and fish oil.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 364.50 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 134 / 85

Lost 2.5 pounds. Blood pressure up a bit but still controlled.

I'm going to try reporting my weight to the nearest 1/4 pound from now on. It's what the scale reads. I'm not entirely sure that this isn't just a random number, but we'll see what happens.

Advice Anyone?

I've got another fan who just emailed me out of the blue. She's offered to help me out if she can. I really appreciate that. It's just amazing to me that people on the net will offer to help like this.

The problem is, I'm not sure what kind of help I can use.

I guess my biggest weight loss problem is simply controlling my eating habits. For example, one of the foods in the refrigerator is these little cups of Dannon yogurt. They're only 150 calories and make a great snack. Of course, I should limit myself to just 1 or 2 a day, but as long as they're in there, it's easy to say that one more won't hurt. After all, it's only 150 calories. Of course, if I keep using that rationale for yogurt and other foods, I can end up eating a lot more than I planned. That sort of self-control is not one of my strengths.

I've generally found that this sort of self-control problem is not the kind of thing other people can help me with, but if anyone out there has any good suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 367 pounds

Morning blood pressure: 127 / 82

With a margin of error of I'm using a new scale this time.

Lost another 2 pounds (maybe) and my blood pressure is down a bit. It was a good week.

Adjustment and Estimation

I lost five pounds in one minute today.

No, I didn't amputate anything.

My new balance-beam scale arrived today. I thought I had ordered the HealthOMeter 402LB, but what showed up is a 402KL. The only difference is that the KL has a dual scale for pounds and kilograms, so this is fine. Took about 10 minutes to assemble, most of which I spent looking for the right nut driver because I didn't want to use the stamped metal wrench that came with it.

I weighed myself on the old scale and got 375 pounds. Then I stepped over to the new scale and got 369+1/4 pounds (+/- 1/4 pound). So then I took a leak and came back. The old scale now said 373.5 (it reads in 0.5 pound increments, which I've been rounding up in my measurements) and the new one balanced dead-on at 369. I've decided to assume that all the old readings are 5 pounds high.

UPDATE: I've adjusted all previous Weight Check posts to read five pounds lower, as an estimate of my true weight at the time.

Ordered a New Scale

I decided to replace my scale. I had thought it would be good enough, but this last week has been very frustrating. It turns out I can get a pretty decent scale at reasonable prices if I shop around (and if I don't mind it being big and heavy). Instead of another digital scale, I went with a HealthOMeter 402LB balance beam scale, just like in a doctor's office. It should be here in about 2 weeks.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 369 pounds (estimated)

Morning blood pressure: 132 / 85

Maybe.

I thought I had a pretty good diet week, so out of curiosity, I weighed myself last night. 379. Gained 3 pounds.

No way. I know I had a good week. The only risk is that I've had a few more Dannon yogurt cups than I should. But those things only have 150 calories each, 90 if they're low fat, so to gain 3 pounds I would need to consume (3*3500)/150 = 70 cups of yogurt. That's ridiculous.

Anyway, this morning I weigh myself for the official way in and I've lost 5 pounds overnight. As I've mentioned, my scale is not the highest quality, because those are too expensive for my weight class. I have to step on with a consistent pattern every time, and I have to weigh myself several times and pick the one that seems to show up the most. Today, for example, I had one reading at 372 which I ignored.

Maybe I should look into a better scale...

I've Got Fans!

I've got fans! Well, a fan. Okay, someone stumbled onto this during a search for Hope & Tim's soup and wrote me a nice email.

This blog is mostly just my personal journal. When I was starting the diet, I had all these ideas, and I thought, "I should write this down." I was going to just start a Word document for gathering stuff, when it occurred to me that I could use Blogger to manage the whole thing. Then, finally, I realized that if I did it all anonymously, someone might read it. Besides, writing for an audience gives me a reason to try to keep it organized and keep it going.

Of course, now that I know someone might actually read it, I'm going to make an effort to post more often. Really I am.

Phase 2 Diet Plan: Motivation

I wrote this a few weeks ago, before I started to notice that I was feeling a little better.

Not much going on right now, so I think I'll document a little of my weight loss plan.

Phase 1, which is now complete, was a short fast to create a psychological break between the old way and the new way. It was only a couple of days and was really pretty easy.

In addition to losing weight in the coming months, I also want to improve my aerobic health and my heart. That means I'm going to have to exercise. I can't do that right now.

The main problem, as I have mentioned before, is my knees. If you've ever wondered what it's like to weigh 400 pounds, the answer is that it's painful. My knees hurt all the time. If I make several trips up and down the stairs, or if I spend an hour or two wandering around the Home Depot, I'll feel it in my knees the next day. I tried taking a few brisk walks to exercise my heart (it doesn't take much to hit my target pulse rate) and my legs hurt for days.

Now you might think that my knees probably hurt a lot back when I weighed 300 pounds too, but they didn't, not like this. Oh, I could make them hurt if I overworked them, but climbing stairs didn't hurt. A brisk walk didn't hurt. Standing didn't hurt.

I need to make that pain go away.

Phase 2 of my diet plan, currently underway, is a crash diet to lose weight very quickly. The goal is to lose enough weight that the joint pain stops. Then I can gradually start to exercise.

I'm guessing that this will happen when my weight is down below 350 pounds, although it wouldn't surprise me if I have to get down to 300 to undo the damage. That's not running weight, or even jogging weight. Brisk walks, swimming, and treadmill maybe. Running will probably not be reasonable possible until I'm down below 250.

In any case, the real end of phase 2 is not when I hit some target weight, but when I can exercise. That's the sort of thing where I have to keep trying now and then until it feels right. Once I can exercise every day without joint pain, phase 2 will be over.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 371 pounds (estimated)

Blood pressure: 133 / 87

Down three more pounds. Cool.

Blood pressure is up slightly, but some variance is expected in BP measurements.

Slipping Away

It's not been a real good week for the diet. I had popcorn at the movies on Sunday. I had another Wendy's Combo meal on Tuesday. Yesterday I kept snacking on things like low-fat yogurt which, while not quite unhealthy, probably put me over my calorie target.

The fact that I can't give a rough estimate of yesterday's calories is a sign that I'm starting to drift out of the mental diet mode. Another sign is the very low rate at which I'm posting new entries here. I need to get back in the groove. To that end, I didn't eat anything during the day today. For dinner I'm having a salad and later a broiled hamburger, probably with a low-fat yogurt for desert.

I'm also going to start reading this giant diet book published by the American Dietetic Association. I think it will help me to keep thinking about the diet more, which I hope will discourage snacking.

Weight Check

I goofed yesterday. I stopped at Wendy's drive-through for a Diet Coke and decided to reward myself with a Single w/cheese combo (hold mayo and onion). That's about 440 calories for the burger, and another 440 calories for the fries. Actually, the cheeseburger itself isn't too bad and tasted great. I should have done without the fries; they didn't taste as good as I remembered them. As it is, I had cream of mushroom soup for breakfast at 340 calories and some mushrooms for dinner at maybe 300 calories. That made yesterday almost a 1600 calorie day.

Nevertheless...

Morning weigh-in: 374 pounds (estimated)

Blood pressure: 128 / 84

Lost 4 pounds. And my hypertension is gone again.

I'm starting to enjoy this. 26 pounds is only about 6% of my weight, but it makes a lot of difference at the margin. My knees don't hurt like they used to. Getting in and out of the car is noticeably easier. Climbing the stairs takes less out of me, and I don't have to hold on as much. Tying my shoes is easier. All these little things are getting better.

Also, I took in my belt a notch yesterday.

McDonald's Made Me Fat

I am appalled by the idea of suing the providers of things used abusively. It was wrong for booze. It was wrong for tobacco. It's wrong for fatty food.

However, I can understand why these two kids would sue McDonald's. I mean, I'm opposed to such things on principle, but I imagine that if a lawyer approached me and told me I could make millions of dollars by filing a lawsuit, I don't know that my principles are that strong. Millions of dollars.

That's a hint, by the way.

Benefits of Marriage

Had to dig the car out of the blizzard on Saturday. After that, the wife and I ran some errands and ended up pretty near my favorite pizza restaurant. I had pretty much decide to go off the diet and have a pizza, but my wife talked me out of it. The same thing happened again on Sunday with some french fries. I'm not saying I would have gone forward with either of them (I've passed up temptation before) but it sure is nice to have some help.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 378 pounds (estimated)

Blood pressure: 140 / 89

Lost 2 pounds.

That's what I was expecting, but I had really started to get used to losing ten pounds per week. Sigh.

Also 140 is the limit, so my hypertension is back. I take some consolation from the fact that the blood pressure I record here is the average of two measurements, so one of them was OK.

I blame the cheesburger. Last night I caved at the McDonalds drive through and had a cheesburger. Only 300 calories more than planned, but still not a good thing.

This and That

Had a big weekend. In the food sense.

My wife and I had plans with friends to go to one of our favorite restaurants on Saturday. I knew I'd want to eat a lot, so I ate a very small breakfast and then held out for a huge dinner of filet mignon with assorted mushrooms. Part of my plan for this diet is that if I'm going to break it, I'm not going to do so unless the food is amazingly good. It was.

Last week I bought some salmon filets at CostCo. A single container with three fairly large ones. I managed to prepare one of them, but with my limited diet, I never got around to the other two, which are now past their expiration data. I guess bulk purchases of perishables don't go well with a diet plan.

Weight Check

Before I get to it, a few notes:

One of the things that has amazed me on this diet is how quickly I noticed some changes. For a while now, putting on my pants has been something of a chore because they are tight at the waist. They fit fine everywhere else, but I used to have to exhale and fight to button them up, then again to fasten my belt, even though I'm in the last notch. However, at some point during the last two weeks, putting on my pants became much easier. I suspect some of it must be due to less bloat, but still, the change is dramatic.

So here's how it turned out:

Morning weigh-in: 380 pounds (estimated)

Blood pressure: 132 / 80

That's another 10 pounds in a week. It must be some sort of water weight or something, because there's no way I burned ((10 lbs * 3500 cal/lb) / 7 days/week = ) 5000 calories a day. Make that 6000 a day, because I was eating about 1000 a day. Soldiers on maneuvers only burn maybe 4500 cal/day.

Anyway, note also that I no longer have high blood pressure, at least for today. My blood pressure is still in the prehypertensive range. I'd like to get it down below 120/80. Actually, I am taking some medication for hypertension, so technically my high blood pressure is under control.

I just looked up my blood pressure medication at WebMD and one of the drugs contains hydrochlorothiazide, which is a diuretic, meaning it works by encouraging my kidneys to eliminate water faster than normal. I wonder if its action is contributing to my quick weight loss...

Magic Mushrooms

I ate a lot of food last night, but I don't think I hurt the diet too bad. I had bought a big 20oz package of portabella mushrooms from Costco earlier, and I decided to fry them up. They were really good. My wife had some, but I must have eaten nearly a pound of them.

The good news of course, is that mushrooms don't have a whole lot of nutrient value. A whole pound of these is only 120 calories (and very filling, so I may be onto something). On the other hand, there's all that fat from frying. I used 4 tablespoons of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, at 90 calories each (mostly unsaturated, and with no cholesterol or trans fats). That's 360 calories for the whole batch, or maybe 270 for my share, for a total of about 400 calories for dinner. Now that assumes that all the fat went into the mushrooms. I doubt that since there was some still in the pan, some soaked up when I dabbed them with paper towels, and something was going up as vapor while I cooked...

Still, a pound of food for 400 calories isn't too bad.

Thick Politics

You may have heard of the Hardee's Monster Thickburger by now. It has 2/3 of a pound of ground beef and tops out at 1420 calories. Even to me, that's a lot of food. Besides, I prefer Fuddrucker's.

What's amazing to me is that on some blogs, this is a political issue. Are the blue-state folks trying to control what everyone eats? Is the massively fatty Thickburger just another example of the self-indulgence of the red-staters? I think some of them are serious about this. Good grief. Sometimes a hamburger is just a hamburger, folks.

Stealth Soup

Just tried the Cream of Mushroom soup sold under the Hope and Tim's Fresh Soup line, and it was outstanding. It was a thick soup with a strong, rich flavor. At 170 calories per cup, it's not too bad a way to start the day, either. It's a bit high in fat, but maybe that will cause it to digest slower and I won't get hungry again too soon.

I was going to include a link to the soup somewhere, but Google comes up shockingly empty. The only thing I found was this review in the Google Cache. I guess there's also a website at www.hopeandtim.com but it's obviously under construction. The whois records for the website indicates ownership by Tim DeLong at atlantisfoods.com, but that website has nothing about the soup (although Atlantis Foods is indeed owned by Hope and Tim).

Considering that we got it at the local Jewel supermarket, and the review says Costco carries it, perhaps they don't need to advertise. Anyway, I guess if Hope and Tim stay in stealth mode on the internet, this blog should soon rocket to the top of the Google search for "Hope & Tim's Fresh Soup." I'll be famous at last.

Curse You, O-Ke-Doke!

Last night I was feeling very snackish, so I decided to get out of the house and away from the refrigerator. I hopped in the car and drove around for a while listening to the radio. This usually relaxes me, and late at night the only places open are White Castle, and even I know nothing there is good for a diet.

Didn't work. I stopped at a 7-11 for something to drink and couldn't resist some O-Ke-Doke cheese popcorn. Small bag, but still many hundreds of calories, much of it fat.

Dammit. Have to make up for it today.

Popcorn

Went to the movies yesterday. It was very, very hard to get away from the food counter with nothing more than a large Diet Coke. How can I not get popcorn at the movies?

Compliance Issues

Virginia Postrel is blogging a very polite discussion about a New Yorker articles's comparison between two Cystic Fibrosis clinics. One critic is concerned that the article unfairly assumes that the between-clinic difference in patient outcomes is due to physician performance. His concern is that this will create all manner of ill-will between patients and doctors, impairing the patients' treatment. (I am trying to summarize without grossly mischaracterizing the debate. And I'll bring this around to dieting in a moment.)

One of the causes of different outcomes in CF treatment is patient compliance. The critic's position is that the study treats patient compliance as an attribute of the clinic's performance. He is a CF patient, and he probably views compliance as something that is his responsibility, not his doctor's. When choosing a clinic or a doctor, he is planning to comply with the program, so the clinic's or doctor's compliance experience does not enter into his choice.

However, a manager of a CF clinic might look at it differently. Patient compliance levels are a big contributor to his clinic's performance, and if there is a statistically significant difference between his clinic and another, or between the individual doctors in the clinic, this is something he might want to examine closely to see if there is room for improvement.

Even a patient might want to look at compliance levels because they are presumably affected by the clinic's capabilities to make it easier for patients to follow their treatment plan. As a patient, you might want to pick a clinic that makes this easier for you.

A similar calculus applies to picking a diet. The big national studies of the effectiveness of different diets include the effects of participants who quit or who fail to follow the diet. When picking a diet plan to follow, however, I'm tempted to disregard this part of the study. After all, I'm planning to follow the diet.

I've been reading several books on dieting, in part just to keep my mind focussed on the topic, and I'm starting to think that maybe I should be thinking more about a diet plan that's easy to follow.

Ouch

After surviving the snow on Thursday, I somehow hurt my right knee on Friday evening just by walking around the house. I think I must have stepped over something on the floor and landed my foot unevenly on something else, but I really don't remember. It felt like a bruise on something just below the kneecap, on the left side. It hurt when I put too much weight on it.

So, I stayed inside the rest of the day and rested. Saturday morning I felt a little better, but I rested all day then too. I don't want to overstress whatever it is instead of letting it heal. I do wonder if I should be doing range-of-motion exercises, but that hurts a bit, so I'm assuming not.

Anyway, Sunday morning the knee is feeling better. I'll try getting out of the house today and see what happens.

On another note, I ate more than I should have on Saturday. The wife bought some angel food cake on Friday, and on Saturday I overindulged a bit. Now angel food cake is very light, and even though I ate half the cake, that's only about 360 calories. I also ate a couple of apples I probably shouldn't have eaten. That brings it to 560 calories. This was in addition to the 900 calories I'd planned on eating, so call it about 1500 calories. I still lost weight yesterday (with a BMR somewhere in the hight 2000's) but not as much as I wanted to.

I'll have to be more careful today.

Weight Check

Morning weigh-in: 390 pounds (estimated)

Blood pressure: 139 / 93 mmHg

I'll be doing this every Friday morning from now on.

By the way, most bathroom scales these days top-out at or below 330 pounds (150 kg), a factor which contributed to my troubles because once I went over the limit I stopped weighing myself. Eventually, I got smarter and looked for a scale that could handle my weight. This is a specialty item, so you probably won't find at it WalMart. The scale I settled on is the Siltec PS500L which tops-out at 500 pounds. There are other Siltec models with variations in the position of the display and maximum weight.

Make no mistake, this is not a fine measuring instrument. It's shows a different weight depending on whether I put my feet together in the middle or spread them out a bit. I even get different readings depending on which foot I step up with first. However, most of the other scales I could find at the time were much more expensive, $400 or more compared to the PS500L at $170 or so. I don't know if the others would be more accurate either, perhaps they were just more durable or better looking.

I get around these problems by stepping on and off several times with a consistent movement and taking the most common reading.

For my previous weight-check, when I stepped on it read 440. Yikes. I knew I was near 400 but didn't think I'd gone that far over. When I stepped off, I noticed that the scale didn't zero properly but dropped back to 35. I turned it off and on and tried again and got proper zero readings and a weight of 405.

That's another problem with the low-cost PS500L, it has an on-off switch that you have to remember to turn off when you're done. Otherwise the batteries wear down. (I had to replace them today.) It can also accept an AC adapter.

UPDATE: I later became dissatisfied with this scale and bought a new one. The weigh-in amount at the top of this post has been adjusted to reflect my estimated actual weight based on adjustments calculated using the newer scale. The weights in the body of this posting, however, are the actual readings I obtained at the time.

Trial By Snow Shovel

Had to dig the car out of the snow today.

This was a bit of a concern.

You see, I got a lot heavier since last year. I'm not normally a very physically active person because of my weight and by inclination. To make things worse, a few years ago I became self-employed, which means I didn't have to get out of the house very much. That alone caused some weight gain, which was shocking at the time because I hadn't realized that going to work was so much exercise.

But apparently my level of physical activity still hadn't hit bottom , as I found out about 9 months ago. That was when I injured my back. Not a spinal injury, but some muscle was complaining very emphatically whenever I moved the wrong way. I was in a lot of pain, so I spent about a month lying down on the couch watching television. When it got better, I spent perhaps another month lying down as much as I could to encourage it to heal completely.

(This, by the way, is probably not the right way to heal your back because it allows the deep muscles to relax too much. However, my back is fine now, so no harm done...to my back.)

After that, I spent a few more months lying down whenever I could because, well, it had become a habit, I guess. Also, although I didn't realize it at the time, I was gaining weight. For the first time in my life, I started to feel regular pain in my legs, especially my knee joints. Naturally, when my knees were hurting a lot, I'd lie down some more to rest them. You can see where this is going:



It took me a really long time to figure out what was happening. Oh, sure, my pants seemed tighter, but it happened slowly enough that I just didn't put it all together until about November. By that time I had gained 50 pounds.

This was some sort of wake-up call. If the weight gain continued, I realized, I was in danger of becoming immobilized, trapped in my home. Very scary. That's what ultimately led me to resolve to lose weight when the new year came.

So anyway, this was the first time I would be doing the hard work of shoveling snow since I started having joint pain. I was afraid that I would either injure myself or be unable to complete the task. I should have shoveled out yesterday, but I was a little afraid of what would happen, so I stayed home instead. Of course, this leads right back to the idea of being trapped in my own home again. So today I went out and gave it a try, not sure what to expect.

Turns out, no problem. Just a little joint pain, no worse than after an hour of grocery shopping.

Onward.

Tasty Food

Lunch was Uncle Ben's Rice Bowl Spicy Beef and Broccoli (370 calories). Later in the afternoon, I had 12 ounces of tomato juice (60 Cal). There may be one more mean tonight. Obviously, this is a low-calorie diet, not a low-sodium diet, huh?

Phase 2 of my diet plan is to lose a lot of weight quickly. I'm not skilled enough at meal planning to figure out how to balance everything out, especially with calories reduced. Also, I need some taste in my food to avoid going batty, and for me that means salt.

Phase 1 Complete

Phase one of my diet plan is complete after only two days.

I wanted to start this diet by fasting: No solid food or any liquids with calories. I could tell some story about cleansing my system of impurities or allowing my digestive system to rest, but that's not really it. I don't believe either of those things are necessary. It's more of a psychological thing.

First of all, I didn't want to go straight from big holiday food fests to small diet meals. That would be depressing and the small meals would suffer greatly by comparison. Instead, I wanted to have a short intervening period without any food to make me appreciate what little food I'm going to allow myself during the next phase of my diet.

Second, I read an interesting comment on overweight eating habits a long time ago, and I think it applies to me. Most people decide to eat when they start to feel hungry. Overweight people like me, on the other hand, decide to stop eating when we're full. As soon as we get that not-full feeling, it feels like time to eat again. This makes a lot of sense to me, so I wanted to remind myself of what an empty stomach felt like.

In addition, I discovered that when I don't eat food, I don't get that after-meal food coma. I was awake and alert both days.

My original plan had been to fast for three days. However, when I got home Tuesday evening after two days of fasting, I decided out of curiousity to weigh myself.

If I plug my weight, height, sex, and age into one of the basal metabolic rate calculators on the web, I get a value of about 3000 calories per day, which means I burned 6000 calories during a two-day fast with no replacement. By the usual calculation of 3500 calories per pound, I should have lost 1.7 pounds.

Instead, I lost 9 pounds. How is that possible?

For one thing, my digestive system emptied out over two days. That's probably a couple of pounds. As for the rest, based on my understanding of what I've been reading about health and nutrition, here's what I think happend:

I had only just stopped eating, so a lot of my energy during the last two days must have come not from fat, but from the short-term supply of glycogen stored in the liver and muscles. Glycogen is a carbohydrate and stores 4 calories of energy per gram, so 6000 calories is 1500 grams of glycogen. Each gram of glycogen is bound up with about 3.5 grams of water which is eliminated from the body when the glycogen is used up. Doing the math, if I burned pure glycogen, I'd lose almost almost 15 pounds.

In reality, I didn't actually burn pure glycogen (for one thing, I don't think the human body has 6000 calories worth of glycogen) but some combination of glycogen and fat. Burning a 55/45 mix of glycogen and fat uses up all 9 pounds. If 2 pounds were food in my digestive system, a 40/60 mix uses up 7 pounds.

(Actually, I probably didn't really burn 6000 calories. The usual BMR estimation formulas were never normed against obese people and don't take body composition into account. Calories burned by physical activity are burned by muscles, not fat, and most of my body weight is fat. If I only burned, say, 4000 calories, then I must have burned about a 70/30 mix of fat and glycogen.)

Anyway, I was now hungry, I was looking forward to any morsel of food I could get, and nine pounds was an awful lot to lose in two days. So I declared victory and nuked up a dinner of Stouffer's stuffed peppers (360 calories).

It was delicious.

Atkins and the Lone Ranger

Why Not Atkins?

I have several reasons, and there are a few other things I want to try, but I'm not ruling it out forever.

One reason, and I admit it's not a very good one, is the almost cult-like following Atkins has accumulated. The "My diet is better than yours because I can eat steak" crowd is a bit of a turn-off. Some people take it to an extreme and seem to advocate eliminating all traces of carbohydrates from their diet. It's almost as if carbs were a poison rather than an essential nutrient. I don't understand how these people don't get brain damage or heart failure.

I contrast this with Lone Ranger's friendly recommendation of Atkins in a comment to the Food Values post below. It's obvious that Atkins has worked very well for him: An 80-pound change in weight makes a remarkable difference in the quality of life, as he clearly elaborates. I appreciate you sharing the good news with me, brother.

I may yet end up in the Atkins camp, but it is not for me right now. For reasons I'll get into some other time, I'm going to stick with my own plan for a while.

Raman Noodles

I have no idea what Raman Noodles are, and I've never tried the product, yet I just spend a couple of minutes staring at a Maruchan Instant Lunch Roast Beef Flavor container imagining how this might taste. Warm, and rich, with that heady aroma of roast beef drifting up...I'll bet that'd be the best soup ever...

Almost broke my fast. I've gone from being tempted by french fries to being tempted by noodle soup. I suppose it's progress of sorts.

Food Values

I'm off to 7-11 for some more Diet Coke (something about the fountain service just makes it taste better).

Normally, I might pick up a breakfast of Pop-Tarts, the Frosted Cherry ones. That's really not a good idea, because, well...look at this:

• McDonald's Biscuit, Bacon & Egg & Cheese: 430 calories
• Kellogg's Pop-Tarts, Frosted Cherry: 426 calories

The key point being that I can have a tasty hot McDonald's breakfast biscuit with freakin' bacon for a cost of only 4 calories more that the Pop-Tart. Now I know dieting is a slow process, and every little bit counts, but that 4 calories really doean't matter.

(The calories come from different sources: There's more fat in the Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Biscuit. It's a difference worth remembering, but with the low calorie diet I'm planning, it won't much matter what it's made of.)

Actually, I'm going to fast for another day if I can stand it, so no McDonald's or Kellogg's today.

The Road Less Fattening

Just got back from the 7-11. Went to get myself a Double Gulp of Diet Coke. (Diet softdrinks have negligible calories, even in the 64-ounce size).

While I was there, I thought about getting a snack. They have ice cream, popcorn, Poptarts, sushi, pizza, sandwichs, and other stuff I like to eat. However, I managed to walk out without getting anything.

Earlier today I hit a drive-through McDonalds for a large Diet Coke and thought about ordering some fries. Or even my usual order, the number 2 meal, with two cheeseburgers, fries, and a large drink. Man, I could almost taste those french fries. But I just ordered the Diet Coke.

This is my life.

From here on out I have to resist the urge to eat foods even though I'm not hungry, just because I would enjoy eating them. Actually, it's worse than that. I'll be dieting. So I will be hungry.

More on my plan for survival later.

Strange Healthcare Economics

I needed to call my Doctor's office to get my cholesterol value for the previous post. I first asked them if they could fax me my last blood test, but they said they don't do that because it's "cost prohibitive."

A family practitioner makes about $147,000 per year. Figure at least double that for overhead, maybe triple or more. And they can't afford to fax me something?

Assuming that my doctor isn't just a wacko, there's probably a reason for this. Little things like this must really eat into his revenue. Still, you'd think that they would be able to expend the money as a courtesy. I've had smaller businesses spend more money on me. There must also be very little incentive in the doctoring business to provide these kinds of little services to customers.

Weight Check

Body mass: 400 pounds (estimated)

At a height of 5'11" that's a calculated BMI of 56, which is described as super morbidly obese.

(For the metric speakers among you, that's 1.80 meters tall, weighing 181 kilos.)

Blood pressure: 149/100 mmHg

Total cholesterol as of two months ago: 190 mg/dL

Welcome

My New-Year's resolution is to lose some weight.

To serve as a reminder of thoughts I've had, decisions I've made, and ideas I've entertained, I'm going to keep a journal. I've never kept a journal before, but I'm going to try to keep it up.

Because it seems like the thing to do these days, I'm blogging it.

In the unlikely event that anyone out there finds this interesting, let me know. I'd love to hear from you.