Tuesday Weigh In

Weight: 235.5
BMI: 40.42

I'm 2.5 pounds away from not being morbidly obese. Two and a half pounds. Wow. It makes me shiver just thinking about it.

When I started this blog, I said in my very first post that the goal I was using to drive myself was the idea of not being morbidly obese:

My name is Hadley. I'm morbidly obese. On July 7th, when I started my weight loss journey, I weighed 278 lbs. I'm down a bit now--I hit a new low of 270.7 yesterday--but not by much. I have a lot of weight to lose. I need to hit 145 to no longer be overweight. 145 lbs is, essentially, a world, 58 leagues, four languages and two centuries away, so I won't be focusing on that number much. Sure, yeah, it would be nice and maybe I'll get there eventually. For now though, it's such an alien concept I can't even really focus on it.

So I don't. I focus on not being morbid.

Morbidly obese is one of those icky, icky terms. It's one of those shock terms. Scary words. A scary concept. And yet, also day-to-day reality for me and millions of others.

Right now, my goal is just to not be morbid.

For that, I need to get to 233 pounds. That's a trim 45 pounds away from my starting weight and 37.7 pounds from my current low. It's pretty far away, there's no doubt about it. If you do the standard 1-2 pounds a week with the occasional slip up, you could spend anywhere between half a year and a year on it. But, 233 pounds is something I can imagine. It's a place I can see myself getting. And it's a place I'm going to go.

I am two and a half pounds away from not being morbid. Wow.

This Saturday I found myself staring at my stomach. For the first time, really, it felt smaller than it used to be. I felt smaller than I used to be. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've known for a while that I've been getting smaller. My old clothes are way too big for me. When I do comparison pictures, the difference is clearly visible. The bathtub feels a bit roomier than it used to. But this Saturday was the first time I ever looked at a part of my body and just thought, point blank, "wow, that's smaller."

I'm a bit over four months in at this point so I know the luster should have worn off, but it just hasn't yet. These days I wake up and I'm just blown away by how much I've accomplished. I've entered some sort of twilight zone where there's not a doubt in my mind that this is forever, this is for real, that I will succeed.

Anyway, two mini goals for the week:

1. I'm going to push myself really hard to get to not morbid by next Tuesday. It'll be tough. I haven't put up a 2.5 pound week since early September, and I only did one pound this week. But, I think I can do it, and at the very least I'm going to try.

2. I'm going to get back into the habit of posting every weekday. Yes, work is still pretty crazy and Arabic is hard, but taking time to blog and comment on other blogs makes everything else much easier. So, see you all around the blogosphere!

Tuesday Weigh In

Well, I bring some bad news, some good news, and some better news.

The bad news: I'm horribly stressed at work. I'm going in at 7am and leaving at 8pm, except for the two days a week where I have Arabic, where I need to leave at 5:30pm, be in class until 9pm, and then work until I feel like I'm going to pass out.

The good news: This too shall pass. Things should calm down substantially after next Tuesday, and I'm looking forward to resuming daily posting.

The better news:

Weight: 236.5
BMI: 40.59

That's 2.3 pounds in one week. NICE. It also puts me past the 40 pound mark, which is, well, NICE. Oh, and did I mention it means I've lost over 7 points of BMI and 14.93% of my bodyweight? Yeah, that's pretty snazzy. And I'm a mere 3.5 pounds away from no longer being morbidly obese.

So, I'm struggling at work, and I miss blogging, and I miss all my blog buddies, but at least I get to report back to you guys that in spite of the stress I'm still a weight losing machine.

I hope the rest of you are having fewer life issues, but just as much weight loss success. Take care and I promise I'll start with real posts again soon!

Tuesday Weigh In

Weight: 238.8
BMI: 40.99

Well, I'm muddling through.

Last week I weighed in at 239.8, which means I lost exactly one pound this past week. I've been having a pretty rough time at work, to say the least. I've had a very mixed time with the diet, but I'm still managing to pull out more good days than bad ones.

Anyway, this is me checking in to say I'm alive, reasonably well, vaguely sticking with the plan, and will start regularly posting again as soon as I can. Here's to hoping things are better for the rest of you!

Tuesday Weigh In

Weight: 239.8
BMI: 41.16

First of all, YAY. Okay, I know it's actually not that great. It's a 1.2 pound loss week to week. That's far from fabulous. But, at the same time, YAY.

I'd been having a really rough time of late. I just wasn't all that motivated, and as a result, I wasn't putting the effort in to make me get big losses. And as I kept seeing the small losses, I kept getting more and more discouraged.

I spent 42 days in the 240s. That's a lot. In comparison, I spent only 30 days in the 250s and 25 days in the 260s. It means I was losing an average of only 1.67 pounds/week, which is okay, but not where I want the number to be.

It feels so, so nice to be in a new decade on the scale. In this decade, I will finally drop my morbid label. Right now, I feel motivated and inspired. I had a great day yesterday, burning 3000 calories, eating only 1200, and doing an Arabic class to boot. Today, I'll do the same. (Sans, you know, three hours of arabic.)

I've made great progress, and I can make more. Just watch, the 230s are going to fly by. I can feel it.

Scariness Ahead

One thing I occasionally do out of habit, even though I've been comfortably ensconced in my job for about 10 months, is check the employment opportunities at other places where I'd think of working later in my career. Since people typically stay at the job I have for only a year or a year and a half (sometimes 2 years, but that's rare), I had been planning on ramping up a job search come December.

On Friday, however, I saw something moderately close to a perfect job. It's a policy analyst position, in my field, and they're looking for someone with pretty much exactly my experience and education. (Although they do say a BA or MA in economics, and I only have a BA. So, I don't mean to suggest that I'm a slam dunk for it, but I do fit the requirements. This think tank is also one of the rare few that will hire policy analysts without Masters degrees, although there's sort of an understanding that you'll pick one up eventually.) I'd get to publish my own research, and self-direct my own projects. It's also not short term, and I wouldn't feel pressured to look for another job two years down the line. It would be perfect. It's the sort of job I've dreamed about, and it's the sort that doesn't come up all that often. After hemming and hawing a bit on whether it would be rude to apply when I've only been here less than a year--general consensus was that it would probably be close enough to the year by the time they actually finished the hiring process that I could go ahead--it seems like what I ought to do is apply for the job. And I will, probably tonight or tomorrow, assuming I can get over myself long enough to do it.

The issue is, basically, I'm petrified. I wasn't expecting to be looking at jobs when I was still this heavy. And yes, I'm less ridiculously fat than I was when I interviewed for my current job in December of 2008. But I'm still, well, ridiculously fat. I'm morbidly obese. I'm just not even close to where I wanted to be when I started doing interviews.

Being fat makes me less likely to get hired and more likely to get paid less even if I do get the job. That sucks. But honestly, there are so many ways in which I'm just not ready for this job yet. I don't want to be extremely fat in front a whole new group of colleagues, and colleagues I'll be around a while at that. If I were to get the job they'd likely take a picture of me to post on their website, and I'm so not ready for a photo of what I look like now to be the first thing someone who does a google search for me finds. There are so, so, so many ways I'm not ready for this.

But I think I should try to get over myself and apply anyway. It's likely I won't get the job, but if I do it would be great for my career. Sure, there will be fears and challenges and it will suck to start my next job fat, but it's worth it. I just need to face my fears and do it. There's no harm in trying.