Losing a part of me

Category: Changes

  • Day 858

    I had a feeling yesterday that I couldn’t shake that I would not be losing weight this morning. I had four great days of weight loss, and my body was going to steady or correct its trajectory and slow things down. This despite knowing that I had jogged 5km and had not veered from the weight loss program. Leslie reminded me that whether or not I lose weight on one given day should not be taken as an omen, but also that I might lose weight, but not as much as I had the previous four days. She was right of course… on both parts. I dropped a little over a pound this morning. I am going to keep doing what I am doing… even on days when I do not like what the bathroom scale tells me.

    Something else that I admitted to Leslie yesterday is that I am angry with myself for having thrown away so much of my weight loss progress over these last seven months. I was doing so well, and then I pissed it away (or rather ate it away). When I felt that my weight was safely below 250 lbs. I vowed that I would never let it go above that number again. I dropped below 250 ‘for the final time’ on September 17, and was going to keep at it… and yet it happened: on November 24 my weight peeked above that ugly number, and then ten days later it would jump above it and stay there… and there it is today. It only took 15 days to jump above 260 (which I had dropped below on August 21, vowing never again…) and yes, I was going through a rough spot… but suck it up Mitch! Don’t eat your feelings! It would take nearly three months for my weight to peek above 270 (March 4 for the first time, and then permanently on March 10). I had dropped ‘forever’ below that number on July 13, after a long diet break. I had not weight more than 280 since February 18 (first hit March 21), and my last weigh-in over 290 lbs. was January 31, 2023 (where I spent two days May 21-22).

    It took me 68 days to drop from 250 lbs. to 238.6 (Oct. 18 – 31 days), and then back up to 250 (Nov. 24 – 37 days). It took me 119 days to drop from 260 to that best weight, and then back up to 260 (December 19). It took 223 days to drop from 270 to by best weight and then gain it all back. The numbers for 280 lbs is a staggering 382 days… and for 290 lbs. it is 417. It took me 201 days to drop from 290 lbs. to my best weight ever… it took me 216 days to gain it back.

    What a fucking waste of energy.

    Leslie reminded me that we cannot change the past, we can only focus on now and the future. While this is true, I hope that tracking the past and studying it may help me to not repeat it.

    I am essentially starting the program anew with a fresh head, so it should not take me 200+ days to drop 42 lbs. … but just knowing that I wasted so much of it – I essentially threw away a year – upsets me. Getting back on track is hugely important, and I will do it. As of this morning’s reading on the bathroom scale, I am 41.6 lbs. from my best weight ever.

    Assuming there is no way that I will continue to lose over a pound per day, I would be happy if by the time Leslie arrives (in 38 days) I could lose another 15-20 lbs. I had originally told her than my goal was to drop to 270 by then, but I am amending that because I know that for that week I will not be on the program. If I could stay below 270 (or even 265) by the time she leaves the next week then I would consider that a huge success, and I will at that point get back onto the program.

    How long will it take for me to get back to my best weight ever? In other words: from today, how long will it take for me to lose 42 lbs.? I don’t know… but I would like to set a goal for the end of the September. That gives me 126 days to lose 40 pounds, or a little under 2.5 lbs. per week. It is an ambitious goal, but hopefully an achievable one.

    For the short term, I would really like for my pants to fit better… and for my sports jackets to start fitting again. I would like to be able to comfortably wear my guayaberas this summer, which I was able to do when I was last in Cuba (I have another 5 lbs. to lose until I weigh what I weighed on my last trip, but I am still 16 lbs. bigger than I was the previous month). I need patience.

    While my weight did drop again today, it is the first day since I started that I could not cross off a goal on my fridge tracker. To quote Maxwell Smart: Missed it by that much. Hopefully I’ll be there tomorrow.

    I should mention that I did two things worth mentioning yesterday: I did indeed jog my 5km (although I did not walk the rest of the hour, so my workout ended up as 5.23km in 49m51s). I also got through the day sans almonds, which means that I was probably at 940 calories on the day. I’ll call those both huge successes, as I had not previously been able to hit the 5km mark, and it was only the second day that I was able to get through the program without the added help.

    It is a wet and rainy morning in Burlington, and I am glad for the treadmill. I think I’m going to publish this entry and then change into my kit. Owing to the weather, Princess Sophie did not want to go for her usual 1.5-2km walk this morning, and so I am still under 1000 steps. My next jogging goal is 6km, followed closely by jogging for a full hour. Will I make it? We’ll see… but as I have said before, I may be tracking my workouts, but I am not competing with myself. My goal is to get into shape, and not to hurt myself.

    Have a great day!

  • Day 550

    Yesterday I realized a real change in myself and my eating. Leslie and I did go for lunch to the Chicago-style pizza restaurant, and we did share a 12” deep dish vegetarian pizza (which unfortunately did have green peppers in it despite our asking for it without). I had three of the eight slices, and we packed the remaining three slices to take home with us. We then went for our coffee and beignet, which was delicious, although Leslie assures me that she can make better… and I believe her. So far, none of this is a change. Yes, I stopped after three slices, and I might have eaten a fourth… but that’s not huge. What is huge is that when it came time to eat dinner I thought about the pizza in the fridge and knew that I could not possibly touch it. I might have it tomorrow… but I had a much lighter dinner than that.

    Over drinks and cigars on the patio I thought of my trips to Chicago back in my ‘road warrior’ days, when I was traveling to different cities to teach every week. In July 2012 I was in Chicago for a week and I probably ate deep-dish pizza every evening for dinner. What I should say is that I ate an entire deep-dish pizza every evening for dinner. It would have been the smallest one on the menu, but it was still quite significant. As I mentioned to Leslie, there were very good reasons why I ballooned to nearly 400 lbs. To think that I have not only changed my attitude to not want to eat like that, but also my physiology to not being able to do it… that is a huge change. I suppose the ravages of aging play a part in this as well… I had just turned forty at that point, and I look back at my old self from the far side of my fifty-first birthday and realize that I wish I had done a lot of things differently. It is never too late to start developing good habits, and I am trying.

    Despite the planned cheating of the pizza lunch and beignet dessert, and because I planned for that and ate properly the rest of the day, I was pleased to see a drop in weight from yesterday of nearly a pound. I was completely surprised… but pleasantly so.

    I woke up earlier yesterday morning than I have the last week and thought briefly about going for a walk. I decided instead to make a cup of coffee to enjoy on the balcony with a cigar while chatting with family and reading my book. I did not regret it, but I did tell Leslie that if I were to wake up early again this week that I would go out for a walk. I decided then to go one step further: I would set an alarm for 7:00am every morning and try to walk. While I made a mistake with the alarm for today, I still opened my eyes around 7:15am and did go out for a walk. While the mercury would top out at 103° today, it would not reach that until a bit later. I walked 5.6 miles (9km) at a pretty good pace, and by the time I got home it was still only in the high-80s. I showered and went about my day feeling good in the knowledge that I had exercised.

    I picked up salads for lunch as usually. The plan had been to eat the leftover pizza for dinner. I decided, not wanting to eat such a heavy meal after my evening class (which only ends at 8:00pm), that I would have the pizza for lunch and save the salad for my evening meal. I suspect that was the smart move on my part. I will know better once I step onto the bathroom scale tomorrow morning.

    I had a very productive business meeting in the afternoon, and am home in time to start teaching, which I will do once I press publish on this piece, which I will do now.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 368

    There are changes that are happening to my body gradually as I lose the weight that are neither immediately obvious to me nor impossible to ignore. A few days ago, Leslie and I were on video chat, and she told me that for the first time ever she could visibly see my collarbone. As the padding peels off, the body that is supposed to be underneath all of that fat somewhere will gradually show itself. I did not think much of it at the time, but a day or two later I realized the implications. What will my body look like when it is not insulated by two hundred pounds of fat? I do not know… but I know that I am looking forward to finding out. I look at myself today and then look at a picture from a month ago – not even a year ago, but a month ago! – and I see huge changes. I then look at people on the street, at the gym, at the store, and wherever else I see normal people, and wonder how I will compare to them when I am at their BMI. It is exciting, but it is daunting.

    I do not know what was so different yesterday, but I felt like I went to the washroom a lot more often than I usually do during the day (and with power and force each time), and then only woke up once in the night to pee. I did not eat or drink anything different that I can think of, other than that at the cigar event I went to I drank a few bottles of Dasani water (which is not my favourite but was all that was available). I will say that I did walk more yesterday than I have in a long time – it was a relatively nice day (for the middle of January in Canada) and I ended up with just short of 12,000 steps… walking HRF accounted for 1.6km, and when I could not sleep in the afternoon I walked just short of 5km. It was not a power walk, and I did not turn on my app, but my fitness watch tracked it, nonetheless. I suppose the exercise does help somewhat. I remember thinking yesterday evening that I seemed to be peeing more than I was drinking (quite the feat!) and I was sure to see a drop on the bathroom scale this morning. I came in from that event late (I had driven into Toronto without my phone, let alone my meal replacement) so I had it when I came home much later than usual, so I was worried that would counterbalance the good of the day. Nope! The bathroom scale registered nearly a full pound drop from yesterday!

    On that subject, I have written extensively about milestones and short-term goals. Since the very beginning of this journey when I started keeping a journal, I have said that every ten-pound loss – into the 320s when I was at 329.8 lbs., down from 330.2 lbs. – was a huge milestone. Since I started back on the strict program ten days ago, I have also realized that every change to the last whole-number-digit of my weight feels huge. Yesterday morning my weight finally dropped to 292.6, down from three days of 293.6 and then 293.2. This morning it dropped to 291.8 lbs. It is unlikely that tomorrow that last integer will change again, but every change to that ‘ones’ column feels like an accomplishment. Whether it is or it is not, it is a sign of actual progress… especially after the two-month plateau that showed such little progress, and when it was made on one day, it was so often eliminated on the next.

    I have another busy day today. Starting in a few minutes I have a study session with a couple of friends for a couple of hours; after that I am driving into Toronto once again to spend some time with another friend who is going through some stuff. If I cannot give wise advice, then I can at least be a friendly ear to let him talk out his own issues. I will bring cigars because that is what we do… it is not the solution for everyone, but for a cigar smoker, a good cigar is more than just a comfort and an enjoyment; it is a conversation starter and can be the lubricant to letting one more freely share difficult emotions… something that many (if not most) men of an age were never really comfortable doing. Unlike yesterday, I will bring my meal replacement with me. My study session is scheduled to go until 12:30pm, so before I leave the house, I will have my second of the day, and will bring my third with me in case (as I expect) I am there longer than a couple of hours. I will endeavour to take my phone as well, but I think I am going to start a new habit of turning it off when I am in serious conversations with people. I notice that since starting my medications I am less likely to pick it up to look at it every time it beeps or buzzes. I can go one step further and change it from being an appendage to something I pick up when I need to… and not a constant (and disrespectful) interruption.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 357

    Yesterday was a very long and busy day. I have no problem teaching a twelve-hour day, but usually when I teach, the lectures are broken up with labs that the students do. The class I have been teaching during the day these last two days were lab-free, which meant my only breaks from lecturing were for the morning and afternoon breaks (fifteen minutes each), and lunch (an hour). The evening class started the minute the daytime class was finished, but thankfully there were a couple of labs for the students to work on while I finally rested my voice… and of course finished yesterday’s journal entry.

    I know I should not be worried, but today is the first day of my transition onto the full meal-replacement program. It is the first day that I will not be eating a meal. I had my first meal replacement this morning, and while it was no different from how I started my day yesterday or the day before, I somehow feel less sated by the shake. It is as if my body knows that there’s nothing more substantial coming later in the day. I have to steel my resolve and get through it. I remember from the last two times that I started on the full program that the first few days are not very pleasant. It is only when the ketosis kicks in (the process by which your body burns its own fat for energy, rather than carbohydrates) that I will be back to full energy. Until then, I can expect my mood to be unpleasant (to be polite). Fortunately for all (other than myself), I can be pretty good at masking that to the outside world. It would not do for me to snap at my students!

    I wrote yesterday that I was worried about how I would adjust to the smaller meal (one piece of chicken instead of two). I am pleased to say that I got through it just fine; my food intake consisted of my morning meal replacement (around 8:30am), my daily meal at 1:00pm, and a meal replacement bar around 7:00pm. I do not know if I actually forgot to eat anything else, but I know that I was extremely busy and distracted, and I did not really feel hunger until I had the bar. When my evening class was over, I essentially poured myself into bed; I watched TV for an hour or so before trying (unsuccessfully) to sleep. I was a bit hungry as I watched, but I knew that eating late at night often had consequences on the bathroom scale the following morning. If the hunger grew into a real discomfort, then I would have eaten something. All of this to say that the reduced-size meal was a success, and when I do transition back from the strict program, I will be implementing that as the new normal.

    I started on a modified program in January last year, and I wrote back then that I knew I was still eating a lot, but that with my size I would still lose weight. I also said that I would make adjustments to the program when it was necessary. When I get back to the modified program, this will be the third adjustment that I am making. The initial modified program included a meal at lunch, and then a salad (with protein, such as a can of tuna or salmon) at dinner. I eventually cut that down to the one meal, which I would eat in the evenings. The next adjustment was to change that meal from the evening to midday. The fact that the daily meal was usually two large pieces of chicken never bothered me because they are mostly healthy protein. I was still losing weight, so it was working. Now, knowing that I have been on this plateau for two months, I have to admit that it is time to make the next change. With that said, there has been so much cheating in that time; I am not only talking about the occasional handful of peanuts; I mean eating out with friends (and with Leslie when she was in town), and snacking, and a few other things that I will not rehash (that were mostly all discussed in these pages). Whatever the cause (which includes stress, anxiety, injury, and mental health issues in addition to the cheating), it is time for me to break that barrier and get past the plateau. You cannot make changes by doing the same thing… so there it is, my next big change; I will be reducing the size of my one daily meal (when I go back to having one daily meal).

    Around New Years Day I posted on one of the Facebook groups that I have lost ninety pounds in the past year, and that I hope that a year from now I will be able to post the same thing. If I can, that would mean a total of one hundred and eighty pounds lost… and down below my weight in the months before I enlisted in the Army. Of course, there is no way that I will ever have that physique again… but how nice would it be to get there? I mention this because only a few days ago I was thinking to myself that if I cannot lose any more weight, and the best that I can do is getting to the 300-pound mark, then it would still be an accomplishment. I know that I can do better though, so I cannot think like that. I cannot be satisfied by half-ass results that I get from doing a half-ass job on the program. I know from personal experience that if I dedicate myself to it, I can do so much better. It was only two and a half years ago that I weighed forty pounds less than I do today; I know that had I not fallen off the wagon, I could have done better then. I know I can do it now… I just have to remember that every day, and so when what I am doing is not working anymore, I have to re-evaluate what that is, and make changes.

    Princess Sophie is on a play date today with Charlie; his mom saw me dressed in my jacket and tie and commented on how spiffy I look. It is the first unsolicited compliment I have gotten on my new look, and I am happy with that. I am rethinking my shirt-jacket-tie combination, but I am glad that someone noticed.

    It is almost 10:00am, and it is time to get ready for class. I will end here, but as it is the first day of my new changes, do not be surprised if I end up writing another article today.

    Have a great day folks!