Dan Nied's Fortress of Weight Loss: Day 143

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.