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.)