Week 15

204.0/208.3

"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon." - Napoleon Bonaparte

Success! Arbitrary success, that is. My BMI has fallen below 25, marking me officially not overweight, my bit of colored ribbon. The category change from overweight to normal is meaningless, but the change in my quality of life that I have fought long and hard for over the last 15 weeks is real.

I have lost 51 of my planned 70 pounds, and my time in the gym is really making a difference pushing past the plateau I was stuck on a few weeks ago. As always, I'm monitoring myself very closely, pain levels, fatigue, blood pressure and pulse, daily weight, and happiness (hard to measure, but being cranky is a good warning sign that you're pushing yourself too hard, or not sleeping well enough), and right now everything is tip-top.

The regular exercise naturally has other benefits than just losing weight, such as increased strength and stamina, and better cardiac health. My resting pulse rate over the last 10 measurements averaged 66.3, down from an average of 73.8 on my first 10 measurements in March. If I throw some more math in here, it gets interesting. Let's say I do an hour of exercise a day at 140 beats per minute, and am at 66.3 for the rest of the day, and compare that to 73.8 all the time with no exercise:

Then:
73.8 * 60 * 24 = 106,272

Now:
66.3 * 60 * 23 = 91,494
140 * 60 = 8,400
91,494 + 8,400 = 99,894

Difference: 106,272 - 99,894 = 6,378

6,378 fewer beats per day, and that's assuming I'm getting a grueling workout every day, which I'm not. At my old pulse rate, that divides out to over 86 minutes of beating a day that my heart doesn't do any more. Every day, therefore, can now be said to add 86 minutes to my life, just from the improvement in heart rate, not counting the added benefits of less stress on the heart, lungs, bones, and joints from walking around 50 pounds lighter. Not a bad payoff for 15 weeks of effort; I've put more time into tech projects at work that are, to put it lightly, much less fulfilling.

The risk of overdoing things is still there, as I learn my new body's limits. I feel like I did when I was younger, except that my body has aged, making me stay focused on safety and moderation, or risk injury. Take my back, for example. It is currently sore as hell from helping a friend move on Monday. I came to help full of energy and spirit, trying to get an armload of heavy stuff as often as I could, and eager to jog back to the truck to get the next load. And I pushed a little too hard, which I discovered the first time I sat down after we finished emptying the trucks. The difference this time from the last time I helped someone move, was that my back was only sore, not thrown out, and I was able to return to work the following day. Today I plan on going back to the gym, but for a low-impact, cardio only romp on the elliptical trainer, and save any strength training for when I've had two complete days to heal up. Much better than the last time I helped someone move, last fall, where I woke up the next day with a bruise in my left rib cage thinking I was having a heart attack.

Lastly, a few people helping move my friend were firemen he knows. I'm not into hero worship, although I have appreciated firemen long before 9-11. I arrived on scene after I got off of work, roughly 3:30. The firemen had been working since 10am, and those mofos worked harder after having been at it for 5 hours than I did fresh. All of them were strong, and courteous, and none of them complained or doubted that they could lift something, and they trusted their partner to carry his end when they worked together on the bigger furniture. How could you not respect that? Plus, they all left in better condition than I did, showing me that, while my weight is lower and I'm stronger, I still have plenty of room to improve.