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.