Turns Out My Office Is a Lucky Place

There are exactly four fat people in my office. There's one guy who's at the very top of the food chain who's quite heavy. One of the administrative assistants a floor down from me is fat. And there's one other fat guy who does some sort of facilities/mail room stuff, although I'm not sure exactly what he does. And then there's me.

The point I'm trying to make is that being fat here is relatively rare. I stand out, I'm an exception. Career pressure is certainly part of my motivation to work on losing the weight now. One of the things I'm finding out, though, is that there are even more previously fat people around here than there are fat people.

When I got my job in January, I found out within the first few weeks that one guy had recently lost 80 pounds. He was still losing at that point, but he was within a pretty normal range by the time I met him. I'm pretty sure at this point he's entered maintenance.

In the spring, I found out via photo that another, more senior guy, also had a heavy history. At a lunch over the summer, it came up that another low level policy person (his job is comparable to mine, but he's been here about two years) had lost 50 pounds after coming to work here but before I met him. He said he'd done it just by cutting out soda and walking more.

And then yesterday I found out that the only other girl on my floor (girls are a distinct minority at my office, but my floor in particular is almost girl-free) had also dropped quite a bit of weight, again after arriving here but before I'd met her.

My office, it seems, is therefore quite a lucky place when it comes to battling the bulge. There are as many former fat folks as there are current fat folks, which is quite a bit better than the standard odds out there in the world. Maybe it's that being fat is rare, and people don't like feeling like the exception. Maybe it's just that these are smart, dedicated people who realize when they get to DC that their weight will hold their careers back. Or maybe, just maybe, it's a very lucky place to lose your excess pounds.

Either way, I feel a lot less lonely knowing that I'm surrounded by people who have been where I am, even if it's not something I'd feel comfortable talking with them about. And I feel a bit more confident knowing I'm surrounded by people who have succeeded in doing what I now attempt. I can and will do this.

Tuesday Weigh In

Weight: 243.5
BMI: 41.79

Last Tuesday I weighed in at 245.9, so today represents a perfectly solid 2.4 pound loss. I'm up .1 pounds day to day, but I'm not going to focus on that. Instead, let's look at the good:

1. Losing 2.4 pounds/week is more than enough for either my stretch goal or my long term goal.
2. My BMI's now 41.79. This is the first weekly weigh in I've had where my BMI is under 42.
3. I've now lost 12.41% of my starting weight. This is the first weekly weigh in I've had where I've lost over 12% of my starting body weight.
4. I've now lost a total of 34.5 pounds and have 98.5 pounds left to lose before I'm of normal weight.
5. Only 10.5 pounds to go till I'm not morbid! Next week, that number will probably be in the single digits.

These are good things. I also want to use this post to check in on my Hot 100 goals:

1. Have two "Biggest Loser" (6000+ calorie burn on my Bodybugg) days a month. I didn't make it for September, but I tried valiantly. I'm pleased with my attempt. Next attempt is October 4th (this Sunday), but I'm probably going to only shoot for 5000.

2. Work out an average of 5 days/week. Easily accomplished. If you count lunch time walks, I've worked out ever day since Sunday the 20th. (Technically the challenge started on the 23rd.) If my almost-daily lunch walks--each of which burns over 400 calories according to my bugg--don't count, then I didn't work out on Thursday.

3. Go to the Gym at least 15 times each month. If you start back on Sunday the 20th, I went every day but Thursday and Friday. Since this is a monthly goal and the challenge didn't technically start until the 23rd, it's hard to judge, but at the very least I fulfilled the spirit of this goal by going to the gym often and working out hard while I was there.

4. Keep average calories below 1400, and don't exceed 2000 in a single day. Easy peasy. I upped my calories to a minimum of 1200 not too long ago, and have been meeting that. I haven't gone above 1400 for probably a few weeks, and certainly not since the challenge has begun.

Well, that's that. I'm pleased with the weigh in, and pleased with my week. The bugg has been an excellent motivator, and I'm incredibly glad I've got it. Here's to making this coming week even better!

Edited to add: Monica asked me in the comments if the front desk guys were still bugging me about spinning classes, and the answer is an unfortunate yes. (Newer readers: the full story is available here.) Last night I arrived right before a spinning class was about to start, and he asked me if I was going to it. I said I didn't think so, and he was all "oh come on you should go!" I said I was in the mood for the elliptical instead and hurried on by. Passing the front desk gauntlet is easily the worst part of going to the gym for me on weekdays. At least the more aggressive class pusher is only there Monday through Thursdays, right?

Essentially, I still hate it, it still makes me want to get in the habit of working out in the morning so I don't have to deal with getting pestered, but for now I'm just brushing it off.

My First (attempted) Biggest Loser Day

I spoke last week about how I was going to try to do a 6000 calorie burn Biggest Loser Day, as a way of challenging myself as well as trying to burn some extra calories. In the end, I didn't make it to the 6000 calorie burn mark. But, I think it's possible to get there (or get close, anyway) and I'm looking forward to trying next week.

Here's my burn for the attempted Biggest Loser Day.

As you can see, the day started out pretty well. I walked to the gym, did an hour on the elliptical, then lifted, then 20 minutes on the elliptical, and walked home. At home I ate lunch, and then went for a walk to Eastern Market. You can see the activity for that listed from 1pm to a little after three. Notice, however, how choppy it is. My feet were sore, and I was exhausted. Midway through, it started pouring. When I came home at 3:30 or so, my plan to take a 30 minute nap actually turned into me passing out until nearly 8pm, at which point I said "eh, this isn't happening."

The biggest problem, in my opinion, was that I hadn't fully recovered from the night before, when I decided to go out on an 8 mile walk on a lark:

See that giant chunk of activity from 7 to 10:30? That, in my opinion, was my main mistake. It left me blistered and exhausted, and the end result was that I wasn't able to give my all the next day.

I also think I found myself overly intimidated by the 6000 number, and perhaps would do well to just aim for 5000 on my next attempt (which will be this Sunday, since Saturday morning I have the Foreign Service Written Exam).

I can do this. It's a challenge, no doubt about it, but it definitely is doable. If I hadn't fallen asleep, while I don't know if I would've made 6k, I definitely could've gotten up to 5000.

In other news: Jo at 282.5 has now officially lost 50 pounds! If you haven't already, be sure to go over and congratulate her.

It depends on what your definition of is is

Well, actually, it depends on what your definition of morbidly obese is.

The most common definition, and probably the fairest, is a BMI greater than 40. However, there is another, alternate definition "100+ pounds overweight." Yesterday, no matter which way you cut it, I was firmly in the morbid category. Today, not so much.

Weight: 244.8

Normal weight for someone my height tops out at 145. This means I am no longer 100+ pounds overweight! As of this morning, I am a mere 99.8 pounds over a normal weight. Ah, the things we can rejoice in when we're as far gone as I.

Seriously, even though I think the 40+ BMI definition of morbid is more valid, today marks a substantive milestone for me. My weight loss goal is no longer in the triple digits. And 11.8 pounds from now, I won't be morbid by any definition. Good stuff.

In other news, last night I decided that I was going to stop messing around and make sure I get to 1200 calories every day, even if I feel like I don't really need the last 250 or so.

Now, conventional wisdom in the dieting world is pretty definitive on the "You must eat 1200 calories a day or BADNESS." The badness they most typically threaten people with is that if you eat fewer than 1200 calories a day, your body won't lose as much weight as if you eat just at or slightly above this mark. There's also some shebang about how it's bad for your body and how you need nutrients and whatnot. (The last point is one I mostly agree with, although I'm not entirely convinced of it's importance. Losing weight is self starvation, an inherently unhealthy process. The result is healthy, the value of shedding excess pounds makes it healthy on balance, but the self starvation part still pretty trying on your body. I'm not, for example, 100% convinced that the value of getting things done more quickly--thus spending fewer days starving yourself--isn't worth more than the value of getting perfect nutrients along the way.)

But okay, my real objection is with the idea that if you go below the 1200 calorie low bound, your body will go into "starvation mode" and that you'll lose less weight than if you were above it. It strikes me as absolute nonsense that one would lose less weight at 1150 than 1250 a day, or less weight at 900 than 1200.

The first thing that bugged me about it was that it clearly broke basic rules of physics. Diet industry, meet Conservation of Energy. You see, my buddy conservation is a rule. A real science-y rule, not one of your made up diet ones. That said, I do understand that bodies are complex organisms, and that going below a certain point could trigger your body to do other things that conserve energy, but it's not going to be enough to make up the difference. I'd absolutely 100% buy that because of your body's response there are decreasing marginal returns as you cut more calories (for example, that going from 1800 to 1700 would be worth more than cutting from 800 to 700, even that the cut from 800 to 700 only produces as much bonus weight loss as going from, say, 1800 to 1760), but decreasing marginal returns does not mean the effectiveness stops all together.

Besides, there's absolutely no way that all those people who are out there in the world starving are really just doing so because they're hitting 1300 calories a day, and if they only ate 1100 they'd be unable to lose weight. Ridiculous.

And then there's the fact that when you get into more medical settings, they do use sub 1200 calorie diets with great success. The 1200 calorie rule isn't just nonsensical in theory, it's flat out wrong in practice. Gastric bypass patients, for example, will be on a 600 calorie diet for a few weeks post op. Physician supervised very low calorie diets do exist for rapid weight loss.

So, all that, but: I'm committing to myself to hit the 1200 calorie mark every day for the next two weeks. This is tough for me. I enjoy heterodoxy for its own sake and I hate doing things that I can't independently make sense of. But after seeing my bugg burn values for the past few days (3527 Wednesday and 3172 yesterday), it occurred to me that relative to burn, the extra 220 or so calories I save on sub 1200 days just aren't worth it. I'm better off spending my mental energy pushing myself to get off the couch again to go for a walk than questioning whether or not I really need miracle whip on my daily sandwich (30 calorie difference), and is picking turkey over ham or roast beef (15ish calorie difference) really worth the decreased enjoyment.

Don't get me wrong, I still think diet is more important than exercise in terms of weight loss. And the difference eating 2000 and 1200 calories a day is huge, but right now, for me, it makes sense to stay in the 1200-plus club. For these next two weeks, I'm going to hit 1200 even if it means stuffing down an extra cottage cheese before bed. After that, I'll see where things are, and decide where I want to go from there.

I'm still a little in shock from how much I poured out in yesterday post, so apologies for the overshare. I've now officially told you guys a whole heck of a lot more about me than I ever intended, and even shared a few secrets I don't tell people in real life. But that's blogging, right?

Ten Things

Per the Honest Scrap award, ten things:

1. I am absolutely petrified of the dentist, and have an appointment today. This is the first time I've ever gone to the dentist on my own volition: every previous time I'd just been forced by my mother. I'm petrified that he's going to give me horrible news, and have been brushing and flossing like a mad woman since I made the appointment a few weeks ago. I'm pretty sure something's wrong with at least one of my teeth.

2. I am 99.99% certain I have PCOS. When I was a junior in college, my mom sent me an email saying "now that your 21 I think you should know you might have this because I had this." I have a lot of the symptoms (stray hairs I need to pluck, wildly irregular cycle, obesity, occasional acne, and the fact that whenever I google weird things about my body to figure out if it's normal a PCOS forum always shows up). The most common ways to treat PCOS are diet and exercise and the pill. An enormous part of this whole weight loss thing is to get rid of my PCOS symptoms. I'd like to get on the pill, too, but for that I'd need to see a doctor, and well . . .

3. My deepest fear is that I'll get diagnosed with diabetes before I'm able to join the Foreign Service. Once I have it, that's it, there's no way I'd be let in because they need to clear you for worldwide availability. If I got diabetes my life's ambition would be dead in the water, and I wouldn't have the slightest idea what I wanted to do with my life. One of the craziest things about diabetes is that just through diet and exercise, people can improve their health enough that they don't need any medications and can get results in the normal range on the "do you have diabetes" tests. But even though they test as normal and really no longer have diabetes, they count as having diabetes. Which, to me, says "do everything you can to avoid being diagnosed." Right now, if I had diabetes, and I keep losing weight and self cure, as far as the world is concerned, I'm not a diabetic. If I go in and see a doctor, get diagnosed, and then cure myself through diet and exercise, I'll still be a diabetic and can't join the Foreign Service.

4. I don't really think I have diabetes just yet, though. I'm still quite young, and my father didn't get it until his 50s. When I take online tests they say it's possible I have prediabetes and that I'm at risk and should get tested. Still, getting the pill to help with PCOS is not worth the risk of ruining my dream.

5. The only places I've ever lived for any length of time are New York City, Chicago, DC and Paris. I hate crowds, and part of me hates cities. Sometimes I think I should pick up and move out to Montana.

6. I grew up in Manhattan and went to one of the top private schools in the country. Yes, sort of like Gossip Girl, only less salacious. No, not really like NYC Prep, those kids all went to crap schools like Birch Wathen Lolnex. Whenever I meet people from NYC who grew up in the private school circuit, my first impulse is still to judge them on where they went to school. I try not to, though.

7. I once earnestly tried to explain to my college friends that I wasn't rich by using the argument that my parents had sold our second country house to help pay college tuition for my brother and I. As someone who's now seen a bit more of the real world, I now at least partially recognize how ridiculously sheltered I was.

8. I'm still ridiculously sheltered, though. I have an entry level DC salary (read: low) and live in a one bedroom apartment in the heart of downtown DC in a nice doorman building. My parents pay the vast majority of my rent and for all of my clothes and shoes, as well as a few other expenses. If it were up to me I'd live some place cheaper since I don't think the place is worth the rent, but my mom's a bit psychotic about safety, and since my parents were the ones picking up most of the bills I couldn't really argue too hard against it. In spite of that, I'm pretty frugal about most things and place a high value on saving money.

9. My friends from New York are all brats like me. My friends from college are mostly upper middle class kids, many of them the children of professors. I only have one friend who's from a wildly different background and who didn't grow up with the expectation that "of course everyone goes to college." I somehow met him through a friend of a friend of a friend at some event in college, and we ended up somehow hitting it off. He told me he went to UIC, but it turns out he'd dropped out about six months before I met him. When he told me the truth a few months later, I didn't blame him for lying to me.

10. The best $900 I've ever spent was to pay his community college tuition. I finally convinced him to go back to school this semester, but then a series of events (some partially his fault, some not at all) depleted his savings. Convincing him to accept the money was among the hardest things I've ever done, but also the best. I still worry, sometimes, that the money will somehow end up coloring our friendship, but thus far that hasn't been the case. I teared up the first time he emailed me from his new college email address. I am so, so, incredibly proud of him for going back.