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.