Going home smaller
So the weekend was ok, nothing spectacular. In N Out Burger definitely called my name, and I got a sunburn. Fun, right?
So I am 259 pounds right now (give or take whatever the off-day did to me, which probably wasn't much), and I have about a month and a half before I head to Detroit for three weeks of largely non-diet related things. Those things will include drinking, eating and, well, that's really the only thing that goes against the diet.
So the question I asked myself today is this: What is a reasonable weight to aim for when I get on that plane on July 16?
Obviously, the ideal answer is 240 pounds. But, I don't think that's really going to happen in a month and a half.
I have to think within reason here, right? So let's see, about six weeks, I am pretty sure I can get down to 250. Certainly a reasonable goal, certainly something I can do without really altering my current habits.
That would be 25 pounds less I weighed when I went home after the 100 days. And I am pretty sure those 25 pounds would make a difference.
Perhaps you can tell that the reaction of family and friends back home is important to me. And I can easily admit that their reactions might be the most important reactions of anyone. All of those people have seen my ups and downs over the years. They've seen me as a 285 pound high school senior, and a 370 pound fatty at 25. Some of them even saw me as an 8 pound, 2 ounce infant nearly 29 years ago.
So they know the saga better than anyone else in my life. Some of them helped define fat as my identity. And all of the people that really matter to me have expressed support in the weight-loss effort.
They all accepted me as I was, which means a lot. And I think they'll all be happy for me, and maybe even a little proud of me, if I come back looking the way I want to look.
Plus, I'll be able to brag about it incessantly and annoy the shit out of them.
So back to the number. 240 is too much to strive for at this point. But 250 makes a lot of sense. It's a round number, only nine pounds away, and falls in line with where I should be at that point in the diet.
But I won't become fixated on 250 now. I've found that fixation on numbers is a bit counterproductive to success. But if I weigh myself on July 16 and weigh exactly 250 pounds, then I'll be pleased. If not, then oh well, it's only a few pounds.
In the coming weeks, I will surely talk more about going back home. But it seems like a good time to warn you about that. This could get very nostalgic as we go along, so be prepared.
As for the diet itself, we're going good now. Sort of on cruise control, I suppose. Like I've said, this becomes a habit after a while, and I wake up in the morning knowing basically what I am going to eat. It might not be too exciting, and it might make you guys a little worried about a lack of variety, but it seems to be working right now.
So that's what counts.
Another new low
Living in California has made me quite the weather pussy.
Time was back in the day that weather didn't really faze me. Back in Detroit, with the burning summer head, the biting winter cold and the regular rain that both Spring and Autumn bring, the weather didn't bother me. You kind of had to buck up and live with it.
But for nearly two years, I have lived in a place where it rarely gets above 80 degrees and almost never gets below 45. Now, in Detroit, 45 is shorts weather. Here, it's winter coat weather.
The four weeks out of the year where the weather gets either unusually cold or unusually hot, are kind of hard to handle. I say this because my balls are sweating right now at 1 a.m. We seem to be in the midst of a heat wave, and it will get up to 100 degrees at least for the next three days. So I am going to bitch about it, especially since I have to stand outside for the next two days in the heat, and I have no decent pair of flip flops to get me through. But that's ok. In a week, it will be back down to 75 degrees and you'll be jealous of me.
So there.
Now that that little rant is over (and thanks for reading), I should offer a little bit of good knowledge here:
Weigh-in on Thursday morning (Told you I would get bored and do it), at 258.8. Hey hey! Yep, that's under 260, and that's officially two-thirds of the way to 240. I am in the final 20 pounds of this thing, and it feels pretty good, I must say.
It's amazing what cracking the even numbers can do for you. This time, it's given me a little more hope that I really can get to where I want to be. And it really feels like I've turned the corner and am very close to the home stretch of this diet.
Also, it makes me feel like I actually know what I am doing with all of this. That's not a feeling that I've always had. Obviously I have done something right, but as the phases change through the diet, It isn't always easy to figure out the right path to choose.
I feel now like I am zeroing in on 240. I still don't know how long it will take, but I do believe it will happen. And that's really the main thing here.
If you don't believe that you can lose weight, how can you do it? I chose 240 partly because I thought it was a realistic goal. I am not trying to get down to 190 here. That is unrealistic. But 240 is a good, solid number that I can either stay at or try to move lower from. It makes sense to me.
So I believe I can get there, especially now, as I move into the 250s and continue to get as low as I have been in my adult life. It's an interesting time to be me, I suppose.
I beat myself up a lot over screw ups, and I constantly tell myself that if I had just stuck with this a little more, I would probably already be at my goal weight. But then it occurred to me Thursday that, in just under six months, I have lost 40 pounds. That's pretty damn good, even if you start at 300 like I did.
So I guess I should stick with it and just see what happens. Certainly I will take a day for myself on this upcoming weekend, but it shouldn't derail me too much.
And, who knows, pretty soon, I might be coming in on the final 10 pounds.
More of my problems
So I am not really bulimic, and I don't think I ever will be. But I don't mind talking about my love of copious amounts of food.
Maybe love isn't the right word. I do love food. I love good food, and I love food that is rich and salty and filled with fat. When I find the right dish of pasta or the perfect pizza, I have no problems eating a lot of it. But I think where my problem lies lately is that I binge without any regard to what I am eating. I don't love binging just to binge, just because I have set a day aside to binge, and just because, for that one day, I allow myself to do it.
I don't mind going to the local Mexican restaurant that has the best nachos I've ever tasted. And I don't mind ordering an extra large pizza from that place around the corner that makes the best pies in town, and working on finishing it all day. When the Super Bowl came around, I had no trouble making my $40 Super Bowl Sandwich and taking 10 hours to eat the entire thing.
But it's when I just binge to binge that makes me think I have a problem. Let's take last Sunday as an example. It wasn't supposed to be an off day, and I was doing just fine until a friend called me to have dinner with her. I tried to pick a place where I could get a salad or something healthy. She wanted very much to go to a soul food place up the road. I relented, and ended up eating ok, but not great.
Now, in my mind, that ruined the day's eating (yes, a VERY flawed mindset, and one that must be fixed soon. Also one that will be talked about in further posts.). So around 10 p.m. I wanted to binge.
What were my options at 10 p.m. on a Sunday? Fast food. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Lots of it, without ever really trying to convince myself I didn't want it. Afterwards, I didn't feel very good (surprise!). I went to the bathroom to do a No. 1, and immediately dropped down to my knees and threw up. It was partly because I didn't feel good at all, and partly to atone for what I saw as a royal catastrophe of fast food binging.
That's where the bulimia idea came in. It got me to thinking about the perils of this weight loss, and how I need to steady myself before I unknowingly bring a whole other world of problems to my life. It's not really worth it if I trade obesity for bulimia. Instead, I'll have to figure out how to eat like a normal person.
Anyway, back to the diet. Good Monday and Tuesday, eating-wise. Yes, I am still eating the same basic foods. (Cereal, sandwich, salad, fruit). I won't apologize for that because I actually look forward to each of those meals. However, I do understand the value of shaking it up every now and again, but it seems that I go through phases with my menus, changing them up every couple of months to whatever I like. I remember in the 100 Days, I went through a stretch of Healthy Choice sausages (which I can't find out here) and a few weeks of nothing but chicken breasts.
I figure at least now I am eating a ton of fruits and vegetables, and also eating egg beater omelets (with fat-free cheese, mushrooms and onions) once or twice a week for breakfast.
And I'll say, that salad is the best part of every day (lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, broccoli, cottage cheese, lowfat thousand island, a few fat free croutons and fat free cheese). And the fruit at night, well it's good, but it also helps me poop. (And that's one of the more important parts of my life).
As for my weight, Sunday's little episode swore me off the scale for a while. On the elliptical, I am punching in 262, and that sounds about right. My next weigh in will probably be on Saturday or Sunday, but I'll probably get curious before then. So I'll let you know.
Still looking to get under 260. That will be a fine day when it happens.
What's Up Chuck
In the grand scheme of things - and is that ever a good way to begin a post? - there are problems, and there are problems.
I have no italicized problems. Let's be perfectly honest here, I live a pretty charmed life, at least as far as I can see. I might get by with few luxuries, but I have a job, a family, a few friends, and several people I truly care about and who truly care about me. I have faults, but I also have talents. I have character flaws, but I am also, at times, engaging and funny and profound. Sometimes I am great conversation, while other times I am kind of a bitch to be around.
I get high, and I get low. I feel each emotion with a certain sense of meaning. But I don't experience either extremely enough to label myself with any form of manic depression.
Nothing too crazy there, right?
Honestly, it's hard for me to take my problems all that seriously. Even when I was nearing 400 pounds and stuck in a small town on the edge of the world, I could never really get down on myself. These things that trigger my emotions are trivial to everyone but me, so how can I really put any weight behind them?
That said, I see a problem that does bear some weight to me, though I am not quite ready to italicize it yet. It sort of hit me today that this could be a real problem for a long time if I don't correct it soon.
I am a binger. When I want, I can eat and eat and eat with no regards to my physical feelings or well-being. When I am done eating, I want more food. When I can't find any more food, I wonder how long it will be before I can eat again. And I take almost no joy in these binges.
I can roll through $20 of fast food if I lose track of my order. I can eat an entire family-sized lasagna in 20 minutes. If I dedicated myself to the sport, I could become a champion competitive eater.
If I were a competitive eater, I would consider my binging abilities a gift from God. But in my current situation, I see it as a very dangerous issue.
Let's do this equation: Binging + Determination to lose weight = Binge and Purge.
I'm not bulimic, but I can see where I might slip into that area in the future. I can see myself, down to 240, torn between keeping the weight off and giving in to temptation. Ahh, but binge and purge! Have the best of both worlds! That way, I can literally have my cake and eat it, too.
This could happen. Really, it could.
But let me tell why it won't happen: I've gone through too much with my weight over the past 2 ½ years to develop another debilitating habit. It's really just not worth it. Plus, I am kind of on top of the potential problem here. Recognition is a handy tool.
Anyway, I just wanted to bring that up on the heels of a pretty bingy weekend. The lasagna thing happened on Saturday, and I was more surprised than worried about the way I wolfed that thing down. It just illustrated to me that I am going have to figure out how to keep this weight off in a healthy way. That's a task I will talk about another time.
Eating-wise, last week was ok, but not great. Minimal weight lost, probably obliterated by the weekend. You don't need to hear me say that I have to buckle down this week and get some weight off. That's the goal for now, starting Monday and carrying all the way through the rest of the week.
Also, sorry about the lack of posts over the last seven days. I got a little lazy, probably one reason this wasn't a great week. Here's to a week of regular posts.
It's not that bad
So I'm working on my washboard abs. Ok, that's not true. At least not yet.
It's not time to work on my abs right now.
But it is time to get under 260. That's the plan this week. Saturday morning, I weighed in at a slight 261, then took the day off. I am thinking that 259 is a pretty achievable goal this week, and certainly it is time for another milestone.
What's amazing to me is the fact that the two weeks off didn't really hurt much at all. Granted, over those 14 days I took no more than five days off, but you would think that would be good for at least seven or eight pounds gained, right?
Wrong.
Here is something I've learned over the last two years: Isolated screw ups won't really hurt the cause that much. And, I am sure, in some twisted way they might actually help you (though I can't really explain how).
Every time I have gone through rough patches in either the 100 Days or the Fortress, I have seen minimal damage done to my weight. I'm not really talking about one or two days of eating poorly, I am talking a week or two of bad decisions that just don't have the body-crippling effect you think they would.
With all we hear about obesity and the national movement towards losing weight and healthy living, we are all scared to death to fall off the wagon. But no one ever breaks that fear down for us. How many of us thought that slipping up on a diet meant you would do irreparable physical harm to your weight loss? I know I did, but maybe I am just dumb.
The real danger of falling off the wagon, though, is the potential mental failure. Certainly one drink will not actually kill an alcoholic. But it might make him want to start drinking regularly again. So maybe it's all about being able to control the urges. Maybe I am lucky that I am so far into this that I don't have to worry about never recovering from a day off.
I am, however, very familiar with the mental danger. I've had plenty of diets derail after a slip up three days in. And it wasn't until my mind was fully focused on the task of losing weight that I was able to overcome that danger. That's also why I didn't begin The Fortress until 16 months after I abandoned the 100 Days. In those months, my mind wandered away from being healthy. A diet wouldn't have been really possible then.
But I remember a day a few months before the 100 Days blog began. I was living in Colorado, pretty damn close to 370 if not already there. One of the basketball coaches at the junior college tried to motivate me to lose weight. So he took me up into the gym that was built into their arena and showed me how to use the elliptical machine. Actually, that was the first time I had ever used an elliptical machine. He made me stay on it for 10 minutes, and I was not happy about that. (Ahh, memories. If I remember correctly, after about three minutes I was gasping for air and felt my throat closing up. I was in pretty bad shape back then. Little did I know that, only a few months later, that machine was going to be the key piece of equipment in helping me become unfat.)
Anyway, as we were ellipticising, he offered up some weight loss pointers (by the way, he was very thin and very in shape).
Only one sticks out today:
"If you have one bad day, that wipes out a week of good days," he said.
Now, 109 pounds later, I am here to tell you that that statement is total bullshit. But you see, I didn't know that at the time. And that statement scared the hell out of me. That statement was probably the main reason, outside of my own unwillingness, that his efforts to help me didn't work. Here was a guy telling me that I had to give up every fatty food I ever loved in order to lose weight.
It just seemed too hard.
But, as I established earlier, that statement was total bullshit. And while I am not saying you can eat like shit every three days and still lose weight, I am saying that if you know yourself well enough, and you understand that you are strong enough to do so, it's really not the end of the world to order up a pizza on a Sunday afternoon. And you know what? It's also not the end of the world to make a burger run the following Monday night. But you have to understand what you have lost -- two days worth of weight loss -- and you have to be willing to embrace the following days as opportunities to advance your goal.
One bad day does not wipe out one good week. In two bad (for me) weeks, I gained two pounds. In one good week, I lost four. Even if you take every single variable into account, those numbers speak for themselves.If the same effort is given to both sides, losing weight might just be easier than gaining weight.
Let's use my numbers to demonstrate that point: I am a 28-year-old male who is 6-foot-3 and weights 261 pounds. My activity level is somewhere between moderately active and very active (hey, exercising five days a week is pretty damn active in my book). According to the calorie per day calculator, which you can find here, I burn 4,171 calories per day without exercising.
It takes 3,500 unburned calories to gain a pound, and 3,500 burned calories to lose a pound. Now, if I take in an average of 1,350 calories per day (which is about right for my plan right now), I will lose .806 pounds per day without exercising. Over a solid six days of eating well, I lose 3.2 pounds.
Now, to gain .806 pounds in a day, I would have to eat just about 7,000 calories.
Here are several ways I could do that at McDonalds:
16 Double Cheeseburgers (440 calories each)
14 Quarter Pounders with Cheese (510)
14 McRibs (500)
13 Big Macs (540)
12 large orders of Fries. (570)
11 Premium Crispy Chicken Clubs (660)
9 Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese (740)
If I have one of each of those items, that turns out to be 3,960 calories (and an unsightly 218 grams of fat).
Now, I should note that I probably jacked that math up beyond belief, and those numbers don't really make a lick of sense. Also, I should say that there are a TON of things I don't know about the human body and weight gain. Nor am I advocating ordering one of all of those from McDonalds and eating it all in one sitting (but I bet I could do it), or ordering 16 double cheeseburgers and eating thrm in one sitting (I know I can't do that).
But my point is that it takes a long time to really gain meaningful weight, just as it takes a long time to lose meaningful weight.
By the way, by my numbers, which we already know are probably wrong, if you are a 40-year-old, 5-foot-7 inch, 250 pound lightly active woman, you burn 2,402 calories per day. If you are on a 1,350 calorie per day diet, you will lose .3 pounds per day, and 1.8 per six days. In order to gain .3 pounds in a day, you have to eat 3,454 calories, or nearly 8 double cheeseburgers.
So my point today is that fucking up isn't the end of the world.
I know, I said that earlier, sorry I wasted your time with all this math.
I stayed the same
Good news on the weight front: I weighed in at 265 tonight.
I decided I should know what I am dealing with after the last two weeks were pretty bad. So I went for the late-night weigh in, because I don't mind the higher numbers at night. After all, I am guaranteed to lose at least a pound in my sleep. So figure that Friday I will be about 264, exactly where I was two weeks ago.
So here's the lesson: You can erase two kinda shitty weeks with five good eating days and three trips to the gym. Sounds like a pointer to take when I am simply trying to maintain my weight in a few months.
So anyway, I am happy with that number, because it could have been much worse. I was envisioning 270-something, and gearing up for a little self-hate session.
But none of that tonight.
So far this week has been pretty damn good as far as eating goes. That was much needed after last week. Mentally, I am in line, which is always important. As far as I can see, I won't get tripped up anytime soon. However, we can't predict the future, and it doesn't seem to take much more than a really bad day to get me going.
Of course, I am working on that.
I am currently pondering whether I want to take an off-day this weekend. It might thwart some progress, but it also might be valuable. Perhaps it will alleviate some pressure from trying to make a big push in May. Obviously the Perfect May probably isn't going to happen. And I really shouldn't make myself miserable as I head down the home stretch. I just don't think that does me any good, and it could make for a much harder fall than I want.
One thought comes to mind. I am now the owner of The Biggest Loser Cookbook, a purchase I made thinking about a future of low-calorie meals. Perhaps I should play around with that a little bit (Even though I can't cook, it might definitely be time to learn.) and I can incorporate it into my off day in order to minimize the negative effects. Actually, that would probably be a great idea. I'll let you know what happens on Monday.
But the news today is that The Fortress is not crumbling. I am still 25 pounds away from my goal. Now, if I can only get past the fact that I was 25 pounds away a month ago, then I think I will be ok with that.
I should go now. It's getting late, and I have to get up relatively early to get to the gym Friday morning.