Tuesday Weigh In

Weight: 248.2
BMI: 42.6o

This is a really good weigh in. Last week's Tuesday weigh in was 251.6, so today represents a loss of 3.4 pounds week to week. A nice number. Today's weigh in also means I've now lost over 5 points of BMI. The 5 point mark is in some ways a particularly big deal: losing 5 points of BMI is enough to go from "Obese" to "Normal." Of course, I'm still very, very, very far from either regular obese or normal, but it's nice to dream.

The weekend with my brother was fun and interesting. Throughout my scale was way up (to the point where I was worried I might not lose this week) but I think that was a function of the departure from my normal schedule. On the basis of this morning's weigh in, it seems as if I was losing weight throughout, even if the scale didn't show it.

Honestly, and I know this is going to sound weird, but this weekend made a life of normal weight eating feel, well, normal. Fine, acceptable, fun even. My brother is the only normal weight person in my immediate family, and this weekend, although it was at my house, was really on his schedule. On Saturday we walked to a small local place for lunch: I ate a delicious BBQ beef brisket sandwich. It was rich and filling, but small. I didn't eat any sides or extras. My brother ate a sandwich and like me, no sides or chips or anything like that. Then we walked to a museum (the International Spy Museum, if anyone's curious). We walked around the museum. We walked to a movie. We didn't eat popcorn or anything there, or snack at any other point during the day. We walked home afterward. Then walked to a restaurant for dinner.

I could keep going, but here's the gist of it: we ate out, and ate well, but not too much. We walked everywhere. We didn't snack. It was normal. It was sustainable. It was a great weekend, and a weekend that felt like "hey, I could live my life like this."

In different but related news, the wavering continues as to whether I'll end up pushing my deadline back from 10/15 to 10/25. The current sustained loss needed (2.876) is higher than my initial sustained loss needed (2.833). It's still better than what it was looking like a day in (2.920). I think for now I'll keep it as is, since if we look at the whole week I did indeed beat the needed pace. However, I'm still not certain. As of now, a day where I lose .4 pounds is a bad day in terms of the goal, even though I know that is and should be a good day. I have to lose .5 pounds for a day to be a winner, and that, quite frankly, is more than I can manage. Still, just a few good days should push it below the 2.800 mark, which would return .4 days to wins, which they are. The sustained losses needed for both my long term goal and my long term stretch goal are at all time lows: they're now at 1.507 at 2.125, respectively.

Oh! My brother did mention that they're going to have me and his fiancee's sister walk down the aisle on the wedding day, so that's a bit of added pressure/inspiration to keep this thing going. He didn't explicitly say "bridesmaid" so I don't know if I'll technically be one of those, but I will be in the procession. Scary!

Weigh ins, challenges, and what's worth reading

Weight: 250.1
BMI: 42.92

There are lots of great things about being weighing in daily. There's some evidence that weighing in every day (as opposed to less frequently) might be beneficial for losing and maintaining weight. I find it motivating and helpful in staving off binges: there's no time for recovery, no chance to hide my mistakes. But, there are a few parts of daily weigh ins that suck. Like, when you do everything perfectly, like, say, eat 1200 calories and go on a two hour walk, and instead of rewarding you, the scale just says "meh."

Today I was hoping to see the 240s. I worked really quite hard yesterday to make sure I'd get a glimpse of them. But, sometimes, that's just not your luck. So, I'm up .1 pounds.

I'm also starting to worry if I'm maybe being too ambitious with my mini goal. Today's small gain (and the passage of time with the lack of a loss) combine for a scary 2.92 sustained loss for the rest of the goal, which is pretty darn close to the wrong side of reasonable. It's not all lost, though. On July 31st, after all, I was looking at a needed loss of 2.95 to make my last goal, and I made it with time to spare.

I think at this point I'm going to stick with it. It might be a bit too hard, a bit more than I can really do, but I'd rather be pushing myself than feeling like I can slack. If I don't make it, I don't make it, but I'm going to try.

One thing that will be absolutely key is not messing up this weekend. Describing how we're going to handle the holiday is part of this week's GAG challenge. (The second part of the challenge is a recipe, which I will pitifully attempt later in the post.)

My challenge this weekend is going to be sticking on plan with my brother around. He's coming down from Philadelphia on Saturday around noon. Since he's not coming till relatively late in the day, I plan on waking up early and getting in a good long workout. Lunch is probably going to be Five Guys. There, I'll get a little bacon burger with lettuce and tomato. Not the best, but better than it could be. We'll end up getting an order of fries, but I plan to eat not many of them. I'll try to discreetly count them out beforehand. That night we're going out to dinner at Matchbox. I'm planning on the cast iron roasted chicken. I'll eat the carrots first, then the peas, then some of the chicken. I'll avoid all the potatoes.

Sunday morning we'll walk up to the Dupont Circle Farmers market and I'll get some fruit for breakfast. Sunday afternoon and night he's going to be at a friend's bachelor party, so I'll go for a long walk and possibly do a gym workout. We might have to do some sort of breakfast on Monday, but it'll be okay. Both Sunday and Monday will be one meal things, so I can easily make up calories the rest of the day.

As far as a recipe, well, I don't have much experience cooking healthy things for large crowds. So here's a non cooking but still bringing something survival guide:

2 pints of strawberries
1 pint of blueberries
4 packets of splenda

Wash both fruits. Quarter the strawberries. Mix it all together with the splenda, which will help the cut up fruit keep in the afternoon and make it desert-level sweet. Bring a can of fat-free Redi Whip. It's 5 calories for two tablespoons, and the perfect touch.

And, there's my mini-challenge. I'm not sure I enjoy the writing silly response challenges as much as I like the rest of the competition, and may end up opting out of them before too long. The camaraderie (go, team Prancer go!), the competition? I'm there. The drudge homework assignments? Eh, perhaps not so much. (Don't take this as a knock against organizer Mrs. Sheila in any way shape or form. She's fabulously awesome and I'm so grateful she set up the challenge.)

I mean, why do we blog what we blog? If you look at a given post, each sentence and each paragraph has a point, a reason why we wrote it in the first place. Maybe it's to hold ourselves accountable, or to help ourselves figure out something and to help others do the same. Maybe it's to share good news, to (hopefully) make someone laugh, or just to link to something we think is really frigging awesome.

All of you people who stop by and read this blog, I adore you guys. I read your blogs, if I know about them, and comment if I can. There are others who read regularly but leave no footprints beyond showing up on Google Analytics. Every single one of you I know seems awesome from everything I can tell, and I'd be willing to bet on the coolness of those I don't. Because I have these awesome readers (not many, but awesome nonetheless), when I post stuff, it ought to be things that are worth reading. The simple act of posting something says, Trust me guys, I think this is worth your time. And, seriously, "Cut up some fruit and toss some artificial sweetener in there so it won't spoil"? That's not worth reading.

What if I had a better recipe? Would that be worth reading? Well, it might be, but I have no experience whatsoever with this. At 23, I'm just on the cusp of adulthood, and I've only lived as a post-college grown up for a year. I have not once in my entire life tried to cook something healthy for a large group of people. Sure, I could post a recipe I find online and hope it will be good, but I can't vouch for it, I can't say, trust me because I just won't know.

I posted what I was going to do with my brother and the "recipe" not because they were illuminating, helpful, or fun, but because I'm a dirty, dirty point whore. I love accolades and credit of all kinds. When I used to play video games with my brother as a kid, I could spend ages jumping up and down trying to get on a box to get on another box to get a single coin. "Hadley, it's not worth it," he'd tell me, but by gosh if there was a coin there I wanted it. Because that's who I am. I don't do things half way.

So, I'm going to have to figure out what I want to do as far as the challenges. I'm sure, down the road, there will be ones that I have an interesting take on that will work as normal posts. But for the rest? I just don't know. Maybe I'll accept that doing all the mini challenges isn't for me and just pick and choose a few. Maybe I'll cordon them off with a "WARNING: Lame post of Lameness" title so you unsuspecting readers don't accidentally wander in. Another theoretical option would be to actually research all the challenges enough that I could do a good job on them, but since the effort required would be far inordinate to my amount of care, that's just not going to happen.

Sigh.

The contemplation shall continue. Do you guys think you have an implicit contract with your readers to provide, well, posts that are worth reading? How would you approach the whole mini-challenge thing: try to do them all, or ignore all but the ones I find of interest? Do you have any experience with challenges and mini challenges in the past? And last but not least, how totally lame was that "recipe"?

Anyway, I hope you all have a fantabulous Labor Day Weekend. Enjoy your day off (if you get one) and take some time to treasure your family and friends. In all my "how I'll deal with food issues this weekend" shpiel, I left off how incredibly excited and happy I am that I'll get to see my brother. At the end of the day, there really is nothing more important than the ones we love.

I hit my first goal!

Okay, I know I might have kind of given it away in the title, but check out this weigh in:

Weight: 250.0
BMI: 42.91

Ahhh! YAY! Okay. I should not just write random screamy things as they do nothing to illuminate the post, but by god I just cannot stop smiling.

I started this journey on July 7th. Using that as day 1, today is day 59. When I started, I declared a mini goal of getting to 250 pounds by September 15th. This is the equivalent of 28 pounds and just an eensy bit over 10% of my starting weight. Hitting it required dropping an average of 2.8 pounds/week. Today, September 3rd, 12 days early, I finished my first mini goal.

What now? Well, it's time for a new mini goal!

So, I've got two long term goals, which I call my long term goal and my long term stretch goal. My long term goal is to not be obese at my brother's wedding, which would mean getting my weight down to 175 by August 14th, 2010. My long term stretch goal is to not be overweight at my brother's wedding, which means hitting 145 by that same 8/14/2010. When I started, that meant losing a little under 1.8 pounds/week for my normal goal, and losing a little over 2.3 pounds/week for my stretch goal. Because I've been going above pace, the sustained loss needed to hit those milestones is now a bit over 1.5 pounds/week and a bit over 2.1 pounds/week respectively.

Once I set my first mini goal, I knew the weight I was going to attach to my second mini goal: 233 pounds. At 233 pounds, for the first time in too long, I will no longer be morbidly obese. Morbid is such a wretched word, such a wretched concept, one label I just can't wait to be rid of. My next goal is to not be morbid.

But I need a deadline. Some people don't like deadlines (weight loss isn't a race, after all), but for me they're helpful. It gives me a discreet point to work towards, and an expectation of pace. By attaching a deadline to my goal, I'm more likely to work harder and lose the weight faster.

So, 17 pounds. Back when I thought I'd be hitting 250 on the 15th, I sort of assumed that I'd make Halloween the deadline. Plugging that into calculators this morning (thank you fitday!) that meant a pace of 2.05 pounds/week. That's slower than my stretch goal, and thus way too slow for a mini goal. Mini goals are meant to push me.

The next meaningful date I could think of was Saint Crispin's Day, which is October 25th. An October 25th deadline would mean a loss of 2.29 pounds/week. This is above the pace needed for my stretch goal. The main benefit is that doing things around Saint Crispin's day is just totally badass. I could be all "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers we" and whatnot.

But, I asked myself, is 2.29 enough of a stretch while you're still this high? I weigh quite a bit right now. This, in many ways, sucks. But having so much to lose gives me one substantive benefit: moving myself around burns a heck of a lot more calories than it would for a person of reasonable size. Because I still weigh so much, dropping a given pound is comparatively easier than it will be down the road.

So I tried pushing it up a bit more to the 15th, the ides of October. (Did you know the ides only take place on the 15th during October, March, May and July? In all other months they're on the 13th. In other news, I am a gigantic nerd.) Fitday says this means losing 2.83 pounds/week. This is a slight bit more than my last mini goal (which started at 2.80 pounds/week) but is slower than the actual pace I've had thus far of 3.32 pounds/week.

My new goal is to lose 17 pounds by October 15th.

It's going to be tough. That's a high number. I'll need to push workouts and keep mistakes few and far between. But it's also eminently doable. If I want to, there's not a doubt in my mind that I can make it.

The comments you guys left yesterday were just incredibly insightful. Several of you brought up that "easy" isn't quite the right word, and thinking about it more I realized that's true. The pain of recovery and long term restrictions are not to be underestimated. I started drafting a bit more of a response to all the good points you guys brought up last night, but that got preempted by my WOOHOO 10% post. So look for that in the near future.

In the mean time, I'm still smiling. I've lost 10% of my bodyweight. I've improved how I look, lowered my risk of disease, and quite a few other things. I'm happy I stuck through, and I'm proud of myself for doing so. I hope the rest of you guys get to have just as fabulous a day as I'm having.

On weight loss surgery

Weight: 250.6
BMI: 43.01

-1 pound day to day, -27.4 all in all. I'm getting really close to the 10% mark.

Anyway, I read a lot of blogs. I love blogs. I comment on many of the blogs I read (I love both giving and receiving comments). There are a few I read pretty much daily but rarely comment on. One of those is The Blubber Blog. Lynn, its author, just had weight loss surgery. Like just had it, as in a few days ago.

Lynn's a great writer, and I like her blog, but I have problems commenting on it because, well . . . I'm looking for a good way to say this. I think it's primarily that weight loss surgery makes me uneasy. It's not that I think it's wrong per se. I mean, we're all fighting the same obesity demon. Who am I to say that one way is less valid or less right than any other? Losing weight the old fashioned way is hard and I shouldn't cast stones at someone for choosing not to walk that road. Plus getting cut up isn't exactly easy. I mean, yes it is in that you're knocked out and lie there while surgeons do the actual cutting, but it obviously takes a whole bunch of courage to go under the knife.

Logically, all that, and yet. Maybe the best way I can put it is that while I don't think weight loss surgery is cheating, I feel like it is. I can justify in my head a billion ways in which it's not a wrong thing to do, but some part of me just can't get on board.

This road is hard. A few months from now, hell, maybe a few days from now, I might go off course. She'll have have a whole heck of a lot harder time doing so: weight loss surgery is pretty damn close to a permanent commitment device. It's easy for me to fall off the horse, she pretty much can't.

As I just wrote that last paragraph, I thought about a Freakonomics column from a few years ago that discusses weight loss and commitment devices, including bariatric surgery. (Also, while I'm discussing weight loss commitment devices, I can't not link to this op-ed about using money as a commitment device for weight loss.) I'm going to go ahead and block quote part of the Freakonomics column:

There are at least two ways to think about the rise in bariatric surgery. On the one hand, isn’t it terrific that technology has once again solved a perplexing human problem? Now people can eat all they want for years and years and then, at the hands of a talented surgeon, suddenly bid farewell to all their fat. There are risks and expenses of course, but still, isn’t this what progress is all about?

On the other hand, why is such a drastic measure called for? It’s one thing to spend billions of dollars on a disease for which the cause and cure are a mystery. But that’s not the case here. Even those who argue that obesity has a strong genetic component must acknowledge, as Bessler does, that “the amount of obesity has skyrocketed in the past 30 years, but our genetic makeup certainly hasn’t changed in that time.”

So the cause is, essentially, that people eat too much; and the cure is, essentially, to eat less. But bariatric surgery seems to fit in nicely with the tenor of our times. Consider, for instance, the game shows we watch. The old model was “Jeopardy!,” which required a player to beat her opponents to the buzzer and then pluck just the right sliver of trivial knowledge from her vast cerebral storage network. The current model is “Deal or No Deal,” which requires no talent whatsoever beyond the ability to randomly pick a number on a briefcase.

I think that passage from Dubner and Levitt maybe captures the ambivalence of my feelings. To someone who loses via surgery, I'm happy you won, just like it's great when people do well on Deal or No Deal. It's fabulous to get something (be it money or a new body) that will let you live your life as you'd like to. It's nice when good things happen to people, and I'm happy for them.

But to all the people doing it the hard way, I'm not just happy for you like you're happy for someone when something nice happens. I'm proud of you. I admire you. I respect you. You (and I) walk a long hard road doing it the old fashioned way. You're not likely to win as much money on Jeopardy as you would in an episode of Deal or No Deal, but my hat's off to you because every dollar and every pound was so hard fought.

There's nothing wrong with taking the easy way out, but there's something very right about doing it with nothing but your own willpower to keep you going.

How do you guys feel about weight loss surgery? Am I just entirely off base, or do you agree with me that there's something that feels off about the idea that losing weight via surgery is just as admirable as losing it on your own? Would you ever have surgery, and why or why not?

Thank you for all your wonderful comments on the photos yesterday. All the compliments definitely put a spring in my step. (And for those of you who asked, I did in fact get a new phone, upgrading from an original iPhone to a new iPhone 3G S.)

Tuesday Weigh In (with Bonus Pictures!)

Well, today is my official Tuesday "side of the blog" weigh in. It's also the first day of the GAG challenge and their official weigh in day. (It's pretty damn convenient that they sync up.) And the results are:

Weight: 251.6
BMI: 43.18

I'm required by GAG rules to post a scale picture. I took one (I swear!) but forgot to email it to myself this morning so I could post from work. So, I can't post it now, but I will be posting it as an addendum later in the day.

I did, however, remember to email myself both my before photos, taken on July14th when I weighed 270.5 (I don't have any at 278), and ones I took this morning at 251.6. I'm hoping you guys will be able to tell which ones are before and which ones are after on your own! Well, here goes:

I (stupidly) turned a bit in the profile photo, so the difference is barely noticeable in that one, but I think you can really see the difference around my tummy in the first one. A substantive difference from "beach ball" to "slightly deflated beach ball" if you ask me! My butt/fat right above where a butt ought to be also looks way better in the profile picture, now that I'm really looking at it.

And those are my progress pictures. Now I really should try to crank the rest of this post out before I change my mind and have a "what was I thinking posting photos?!?!" moment. So, I'll just say one more short thing:

Today is Tuesday, September 1st. I'm creating a super short term challenge for myself to get to 250.2 (exactly 10% of my starting weight) or below by this coming Saturday when my brother visits. It's only 1.4 pounds and incredible doable. If I step up the workouts and eat cleanly, I should hit it. Let's start the challenge off right, turn up the pressure, and be done with that first 10% before I see my brother.

Edited to add the promised scale pic: