The Health Assessment

My work, AEP, is pumping a lot of money and propaganda into keeping its employees healthy. One of the things we do is an annual health screening, where you take an hour off work, go have your blood pressure checked, get weighed and measured, get a flu shot, and have some blood drawn to check your glucose and cholesterol. I skipped this last year (for some reason that was important then, but is so insignificant now that I can't remember what it was, naturally), and the year before was when I was pushing 255.

The last time I had a health screening at work, I was winded any time I had to walk up a single flight of stairs. This year I walked from the 8th floor to the 16th for my morning exercise before going down for the screening. Here are the numbers they gave me:

Category	My measurement	Desired range
Total Cholesterol	123 mg/dl	Below 200
HDL Cholesterol	39 mg/dl	Over 50
LDL Cholesterol	63 mg/dl	Below 100
TC/HDL Ratio	3.2	Below 4.0
Triglycerides	104 mg/dl	Below 150
Glucose	109 mg/dl	70-99 fasting, Below 140 non-fasting (I wasn't fasting)
Blood Pressure	100/66 mm Hg	Below 120/80
BMI	21.36	18.5 - 25
Body Composition	15.5% Body fat	For males 30 - 39, 11.4% - 19% is the "Good" range

So, a few notes. First, I'm going to live. I had 2 cups of milk, two cereal bars, and two pop-tarts approximately 3 hours before the test, and my glucose level still came back just slightly over the normal range for fasting. So, it's unlikely that I have diabetes. I expected my body fat percent to be less, but I'm still just barely in the "Good" range for males aged 20 - 29, and since old men like me always try to measure ourselves against our younger counterparts, I feel smug.

My HDL, though, I don't know what's up with that. It was low last time, and low the last time my doctor drew blood. I get plenty of aerobic exercise, I've never smoked, I don't drink, and I eat plenty of soluble fiber, and I've definitely lost weight, many of the things suggested to increase one's HDL level. Perhaps I should eat more fish. Dunno.

One of the perks AEP is throwing at employees to keep them healthy: cash incentive. Attend a screening, fill out a web form, get $100 in the form of a Visa gift card. Talk to a "coach" about it later, set some goals, achieve them, get another $100 card. Think about this for a minute: There are over 21,000 AEP employees, each eligible for this program. AEP is will to throw, just as cash incentives, not including the cost of people to process the information, draw the blood, the equipment, etc., over $4,000,000 at employee health. Four million dollars.

So anyway, this isn't a journal about how fab my company is, it's about me and my health, and hopefully some motivation for a few people who may stumble across this. I was at risk for some serious health problems. My BMI was 31, light activity left me winded, I ate at will, snacking throughout the day. I sat at my desk at work, I sat on my couch at home. My most strenuous activity was mowing my own yard, which left me exhausted and dehydrated from profuse sweating. I had no training in nutrition or fitness. I studied a little on the Internet about food and exercise, and patiently whittled away at my condition. In less than a year, I had lost 70 pounds, and was fit enough to join a soccer team.

...and fit and confidant enough to attract a young, beautiful woman to marry me, to help me celebrate my upcoming midlife crisis.

With only moderate maintenance, I've kept my fitness level and my weight in check, having lost a total of 80 pounds, and having just finished my second year of soccer. And as my recent health screening numbers show, I probably have several active years left in me, and have extended my life by at least a decade, and improved the quality of my life immeasurably. All this with nothing more than moderate, consistent effort, and learning as you go.

You can, too.

Summer's New Low

170.0/171.4

As it turns out, I can get down to 175, and then some. I'm guessing that 165, my high school weight, is where I would bottom out. At 170, the love handles are all but gone, my pecs, biceps, and deltoids look more defined, and the idea of going swimming shirtless doesn't make me anxious.

My other vitals look good: My BMI is 20.64, resting pulse is usually around 58, blood pressure averages 105/60. I can run longer in soccer games, can sprint up the Hoover Dam stairs (no , the other Hoover Dam, in Westerville, here) without getting wobbly-legged, and I am not ravenously hungry all the time. In short, my body has finally adjusted its new weight after I hit the 175 wall a few months ago. I thought I had hit my fitness limit, and went into maintenance mode, but I slowly inched down a few more pounds, gaining more stamina along the way.

This may sound like so much bragging, but it took me 10 months to go from 185 to 175, a much harder struggle than going from 255 to 185, which took less than 6 months. Somewhere along the way I lost my desire to get "the pump", and focussed more on taking care of other things in life, like keeping Stacey's life enriched, wooing a new wife and doing what I could to get her and my new stepdaughter settled at my house, and keeping my job... the same types of things that can lead one to get out of shape in the first place. I didn't get back out of shape because I still set aside some time to maintain my body, and still paid attention to what I was eating, but my transformation into Superman was slowed markedly.

I don't exercise as vigorously or go hungry as much as I did when I was doing my peak weight loss last year, however I still try to do situps and pushups regularly, take walks for lunch, walk my dog in the morning, lift freeweights at least once a week, play soccer on the weekends, jog occasionally, and lay off the fat and sugar. I stay active, and I keep toned, but I haven't progressed much on my old goal of bulking up.

Failure? No. My new life that weight loss and exercise gave me (a smokin' hot wife who loves me, social opportunities with friends and family, the NCAA and AEP corporate challenge soccer teams, coaching my daughter's WASA soccer team) have taken up some of the time I'd normally be in the gym, fantasizing about the cool life I'd some day have when I was fit and sexy. I have that life now, my ultimate goal, so I have succeeded. Becoming as muscular as bodybuilding competitors may or may not happen, but that would only be icing on an already tasty cake. Mmmm... cake.

One Year - The Results

Morning weight: 176.0
Trend weight: 177.6
Starting weight March 14 last year: 255
Starting weight - today's weight: 78 pounds.



175 seems to be where my body starts to bitch. I've been as low as 175.2 for a single day, but I tend to settle around 177/178, and as I get under that, my body gets panicked cravings like it did the first few days I started my diet last year. At 178, my fiancée smiles when she sees me without a shirt on (same girl from last post, we ended up seeing wedding bells in the future after all), I can bench press without the old shoulder pinch, walk up flights of stairs without knee pain, do pushups without my elbow popping, hold the Yoga position "Dolphin Plank" (my new favorite warmup exercise) without lower back pain, and make it through the day without crashing at 5 when I get home. I'll take it.

My goal to beef up hasn't been panning out very well. I'll keep on that. I have stopped going to the gym constantly, and have been doing maintenance workouts at home with bodyweight exercises and freeweights. During the indoor soccer season I started getting knee pain, so I gave up soccer, jogging, and elliptical trainers in favor of walking, to give the knee time to heal up. It has healed, and I have been starting flexibility exercises again to get myself ready for the upcoming spring season. My wind has taken a hit, as the last week of lunch hour stair climbing has shown me, but I'll be able to get that back. Most of our local snow has melted, and I'm anxiously awaiting the sun drying up the leftover mess, then I can start taking walks to Hoover and doing wind-sprints up the stairs again.

Overall I'm happy with the maintenance I've been doing over the last 4 months. I've been consistently under 180 pounds since November 1, and I've reduced how closely I monitor my Calories. "This seems about right" has been working pretty well, and I've broken my habit of constantly seeking starch and sugar.

I'll write some more after soccer season starts to either reign victorious over knee and endurance issues, or whine like a little girl. Time will tell, but I put the odds of success in my favor.

Week 25 - End of Phase 1

184.2/185.2

I hit my goal weight of 185 pounds on August 21, two days after my last post, and I've reached a stable weight between 183.8 and 184.2 for the last week. If I examine myself closely, I can still find flaws and little pockets of fat I'd like to work off, but all it takes is a casual glance at the two pictures below to see that my work has already paid off in spades.

The end of phase one of my plan is complete. I lost 70 pounds in 160 days, reduced my average resting heart rate from 74 to 59 (I crossed the 60 bpm mark just this last month), and 28 minutes on an elliptical trainer is a warmup to strength training rather than an exertion that leaves me wobbly and wiped out for a day. Additionally, I can play soccer again, and I'm not too god-awful at this point.

I've reached a cardio fitness level at least equal to what I was in high school, a weight only about 9 pounds heavier, and my soccer game I'd estimate is on par or better with The Stork in my senior year. I can now keep up with aggressive adults on the field (for a while) and I'm at about 30% going head to head defending against hotshot strikers. I'm still improving, and I don't kid myself that I'm good enough to be cocky on the field yet. I've got to be able to recover faster from sprints, and learn how to really handle a ball well before I'll feel any attitude is appropriate. It will come, all I need to do for now is keep showing up to games and convince my team, who has had a losing season, that they should keep me around.

Time and practice (and wind-sprints) will fix all that, but what I'm planning for Phase 2 is to buff up. My in-shape self has always been scrawny, and it would be nice to have some muscle on me. At the moment, I'm substituting Egg Beaters for eggs, and skim milk plus whey protein for whole milk, and when my gym opens back up (some parts of it are closed for annual cleaning and repairs), I'm going to try out some HST principles in the gym, using weight training to build muscle instead of just an extra Calorie burner.

Over the last few months, I've toughened up some bones and ligaments with the exercises I already do and the extra calcium from all the milk I drink (about a quart a day now), and my major muscle groups are already fairly toned. I guess that's as good a starting point as any, and I believe that my experience with injury prevention, obsession with self-improvement, and my general problem solving algorithm will all lend themselves to helping me figure this out.

I may not post regularly any more, as the fun of watching the weight numbers drop is over, and from past experience I know that it takes a lot of time for your weights to go up at the gym. If I start to look muscular, I'll post some pictures, otherwise, I'll chime in with a status anytime I think something interesting has happened.

Wish me luck, I'm venturing into unfamiliar territory.

Week 22

186.2/189.9

Well, my TickerFactory chart is getting interesting. The graphics code creating the text for BMI and weight can obscure the endpoints if you get too close. I'm getting too close:




I think I need to study more about how food works. It seems that if I eat low fat, high protein foods that total 1600 Calories, I am an order of magnitude more hungry at the end of the day than if I eat the same number of Calories in a higher fat, carb-heavy diet. And while I'm at it, I need to learn more about exercise physiology. If I'm jogging until I'm winded, I lose more weight than if I do a 28 minute stint on an elliptical trainer at the gym, making me believe what all the HIIT buffs say about creating an oxygen deficit. Of course, the only difference is I can work out on a low-impact trainer several days in a row before it kills my legs, but after jogging I need to take a break the next day for my muscles to heal.

So basically even though I've succeeded in losing 68.8 pounds in 22 weeks, and I've gone from looking like this...



...to looking like this...



...I still have some information gaps. I've learned a lot about motivation and being true to yourself, and about injury prevention and monitoring your health as you get in shape, but there is a lot of science out there mixed in with a lot of "try our new amazing revolutionary system!!!", so sifting signal from noise can be difficult. I think there's nothing for it but for me to finish my studies of health, and write my book, make my millions.

So I'm only 1.2 pounds from goal of losing 70 pounds. I'll finish that up sometime this week, and when I do I'll officially be in phase 2: Add Calories and build muscle mass. High protein foods and add more strength training to my workout routine.

More news in a couple weeks, more pictures in a few months to showoff my progress.

Week 20

190.4/194.6

"Everybody's got plans... until they get hit." - Mike Tyson

On vacation I ate more than I intended to, more sugars, more snack foods, and bigger meals. On the first couple days, I gained a little, and then plateaued for most of the week, and finally lost a smidge towards the end, back to where I started. I exercised mainly with situps, pushups, and jogging, which was nice. My body healed up all the microtears and such from my heavy workouts at home, and I increased my jogging distance to about a mile before I need to walk and catch my breath.

After a week with no net change in weight, I came home and promptly got ill. Not the first time I've gotten sick after a vacation. Like the last time I blogged about being sick (9 weeks and 25 pounds ago, to be precise), I had the same thing happen. One day I had a scratchy throat, which I chalked up to the Carolina pollen being worked out of my system, and put in a thunderous workout at the gym, and was half-dead the next day, having to call in sick to work. I'm feeling a little better now, and have managed to drop a few more pounds without much in the way of exercise. No overexertion until I'm back to 100%.

In theory, I've got just over 5 pounds to go, and hold it there for a few days so the trend line can catch up. I look pretty good now, my stomach being flat most of the time I don't have a meal in me, and I'm back in to regular style 36" waist pants now, which I haven't been able to do since my kid was born 11 years ago. I still have a touch of love-handle, though. I'm not sure if that's going to take care of itself as my abs, obliques, etc. get more toned, I'll need to subtract still more from my goal, or if I'm stuck with them for life. I'll reevaluate when I get there, I guess.

My evaluation now, 64.6 pounds lost in 143 days, dropping my BMI from 31 to 23.2, bodyfat from 37% to 16%, and 6" of waist off of my pants, is that this little project is a raging success.

Back in 2 Saturdays

Week 18

193.8/198.8

"I've been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career." -Martina Navratilova

"What are those numbers at the top, again," you ask? The first is this morning's weight, in pounds, and the second is my trend weight used to offset anxiety about daily fluctuations. The equation for that, from the Hacker's Diet spreadsheets, starting on day 1 with weight and trend equal, is:

Today's trend = (.9 * Yesterday's trend) + (.1 * Today's weight)

I've crossed the 200 pound threshold, both in actual and trend weights, which, as you can imagine, makes me happy. Losing my final 15 pounds, though, is incredibly difficult. I've hit plateaus multiple times, and each time increased the intensity and duration of my workouts, which brought on more fatigue and hunger the next day. It has taken a lot of willpower, and the desire to stray from Calorie control gets worse, as my mind struggles to make me lazy and gluttonous again.

"Hello!" my stomach cries, "Think of the pleasure!"... to paraphrase Eli Wallach. ($10 to the first person who knows the reference.)

On the brighter side, I don't have much longer to go before I can start increasing Calories again. I've been craving protein since my strength training has started to improve. I go through eggs pretty fast now, and on gym days I have given up the TV dinner for the higher Calorie protein bar (EAS' "Myoplex Deluxe"). To some extent, I like the soreness and fatigue, the injuries-without-injury, that show I'm putting in enough effort at the gym. My belly is a fraction of what it once was, and almost non-existent when I stand up straight. However, like Martina, it seems like I've been at this for a long time now.

Now, it's time to take my first week-long vacation since I started the plan 18 weeks ago. My kid and I will be gone until next Saturday, and hopefully the good eating and exercise habits will stay with me. I'll talk about what actually happens next post.

Week 16

200.0/204.4

"We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends." - Eric Hoffer

It's time to start considering how to eat and exercise when I reach the weight I want to maintain. I am 15 pounds from my stopping point of 185 pounds, and have lost 55 pounds, over 20% of my starting bodyweight! Each day I feel better (if you discount being wiped out the day after a soccer game or a heavy workout), and am more and more pleased with how I look in a mirror. Already it is shocking to say to people who didn't know me back in March "I used to weigh 255 pounds." And now I have to figure out how to put the skids on weight loss when I hit my goal, without rebounding back up.

I look forward to being able to eat 2400 Calories per day again. Or more. I look forward to figuring out what my new fitness level will do to my Calorie needs. Will I need 14 Calories per pound? 15? I have the right tools to figure it out: a feel for the Calories in most of the foods I eat, weight tracking spreadsheets from The Hacker's Diet, and discipline. I am no longer a slave to hunger or the smell of food, and I consistently make time to exercise.

Those are the means. The ends are getting to my ideal weight and fitness level, which doesn't really end. You have to stay vigilant to avoid going back to where you started. I plan to hang on to the means, just tack on more Calories to keep from starving myself to death. And even though I'm feeling super-confident right now, getting to my goal is still a month or two away, with unknown setbacks. I'm trying not to be cocky, but I'm really happy to have progressed this far.

It's been a heart-warming week (although some of that may be endorphins, I don't know) as I was able to last longer on the soccer field, lift heavier weights at the gym, and make my doctor happy when he saw me for a physical earlier this week. I had lost 49 pounds since he last saw me (some 2 years ago), and my BP was 110 over 70. In my mind, that made my progress official.

Lastly, at this point I'm finding I have less to say about my quest. "Still losing, still working out, still feeling good, doing good at soccer," etc., does not good reading make. I'm going to limit my updates now to every two weeks, or when something interesting happens. I'm debating what to do after I reach 185, maybe write my book and get famous, or start training for the UFC or Mr. Olympia. Who knows? Since I did a lot of eating at McDonalds during my quest, maybe I'll be their version of Jerod, clownishly pimping myself for money. More likely, I'll simply enjoy my healthier lifestyle in peace, and meet some new friends on the bike trails or at the gym. That would be reward enough.

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.

Week 14

208.8/211.6

"Be bold. If you're going to make an error, make a doozy, and don't be afraid to hit the ball." - Billie Jean King

That advice served me well at this week's soccer game, where we lost again. The score was 4-2, and one of the four happened after a man on the other team Cruyff-ed me, the stopper, and ran past the sweeper for an easy goal. Later my footwork and timing improved, and I got a couple good touches and chased a couple strikers outside to prevent them from getting good position or passing opportunities. It was hard, and I'm still not considering myself in the same league as these guys, but I'm improving, in skill and wind, with every game.

The aforementioned guy who baited me out of position with fancy footwork got yellow-carded later in the game for colliding with our goalie, and his buddy got red-carded for kicking one of our team in the knee. There were a couple other hard pushes, but things settled down after the one guy (Mario, I think was his name) got booted. I lost my footing while chasing a guy down, and caught him in the shoulder with a flailing hand. After the ball got kicked away from us, I apologized to him and we slapped hands and continued. That seemed to be the turning point where the players stopped trying to be World Cup, and played more like the recreational league this is supposed to be.

My goal is to get in good health, and these sort of antics worry me, as I don't want to get crippled by a minor-league testosterone/adrenalin junkie trying to appease his inner-manchild. I'm glad I'm on defense, as I can better control the distance between me and my opponent. I'm also hoping as my wind improves that I can chase down the more aggressive players until they lose some fury. That's a few more games coming, though. This game I wasn't sucking wind at the end, and my best plays came in the fourth quarter, but I'm still not in peak physical form.

I am, however, at the point where my stomach embarrasses me less, and I signed myself up at the Westerville Rec Center, where I plan to spend a lot of time in the weight room, on the track, and in a couple more weeks I plan on overcoming my modesty and hitting the pool with my kid. This week and next she will be with mom, and I've been working the cardio, sweating, and doing sit-ups aggressively (hence the improvement in weight loss this week) in preperation.

According to some math I've done with the Navy body fat percent formulas, when I reach 200 pounds, my abdomen (not my waist, but the fattest part of my belly) will be 37 inches in circumference, down from the whopping 49 inches I started at back in March. Where I'm at now is an improvement over where I started, to be sure, but I'd like to trim up slightly more before exposing my chest to the world. If I can hit 200-ish by the time I see my kid next, then I'll take my first swim with her since she was 4.

Week 13

212.0/213.7

"It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize." - Robert Mallett

This weekend my mother came in from out of town, mainly to see Stacey on her last few days of elementary school. She seemed stunned when she saw me. The day she came, my weight was 212-ish, roughly 43 pounds lighter than the last time she saw me. It was a nice little moment, reassurance that my efforts are noticeable.

This week I got back to feeling strong, overcoming a two-week slump that involved sickness, scraped up ankles, and leg soreness. Despite feeling stronger now, I've decided that the 5k run I mentioned last post isn't looking promising. Running that distance isn't out of my reach, but I don't have the legs for it yet, and three more weeks of training won't be enough to put me there. Maybe by the end of summer I could reliably run a 5k, but if my fitness quest has taught me anything, it's that pushing too hard for an arbitrary goal is dangerous. Persistent, moderate pressure over time is the way to go. For now I'll keep to training for soccer, and after the season is over my legs should be able to take a good beating running the bike trails.

Sunday was my second full soccer game, and both my physical and game performance were improved. I had a few good touches, but my main contribution was keeping up with the forwards as they ran around unable to find many good shots. It was hard, and a couple times I was winded and lucky that my team kept control of the ball for a while. By the end of the game, I had started missing easy kicks and falling out of position, so I pulled myself from the game after, again, roughly 50 minutes of field time.

We ended up losing the game 1-0. It was still fun for me and most of the team, but I noticed a pair of the more competitive folks on the team acting like poor sports, as they spent a lot of the game flirting with getting yellow carded for losing their tempers with the referees. I wonder if part of the $1440 league fee goes towards referee stress-management counseling. I hesitate to say I'm not competitive, but I don't have the same level of emotional investment in the outcome of games as some of the players.

Watching people who I'm playing with lose their cool is an irritant, and one of the things that kept me out of organized sports in high school. "Crush ya enemy, see dem driven before you, here da lamentation of da women" ... just not my thing. I suspect most players are more like me, and the loud and angry ones are just more noticeable. I like being out there, and I'm going to give dealing with the angry folks the ol' college try, and not run away in thin-skinned abhorrence to basic human conflict.

After the game last week, I was stiff and sore getting out of bed until Thursday, and was not eager to walk for pleasure. This week, Monday morning was hell, but I felt better later in the day. Getting up Tuesday wasn't hard, and I was feeling well enough then for my standard long walk at lunchtime. I also feel I'll be able to go run the stairs at the dam again tonight, so this week's recovery is an order of magnitude faster.

I'm officially taking longer to lose weight. My average number of days it takes to lose 10 pounds hovered around 18 - 20 days since I started in March, and then in mid-May it started to drift upward. Since then, the days-per-10-pounds went up to 25 for a while, and today it is at 30 days. This must be the "second wall" that begs you to give up and go back to being fat and lazy. The first one happened about week 3, when I stopped losing 5 pounds a week, and my joints were sore from push-ups and jumping jacks. I got past that wall, and I can get past this one.

I'd like to improve my loss rate again, but even if I just hold steady at my current loss rate, I can hit my goal weight, 185 by my kid's birthday party, August 25. But again, pushing too hard for an arbitrary goal is dangerous, so I'm just going to keep at it patiently and persistently, and let my body do what it can. Patience is the hard part right now, when my BMI is 25.8, where losing just a few more pounds would put me under 25, and no longer technically overweight.

It's hard to stay frustrated now, however. The positives are overwhelming, far outweighing my lag in loss rate and the overweight classification I still haven't technically shed. At a mere 13 weeks into a training and diet program, I can play 50 minutes of soccer a week, run up 300 stairs, and burn 450 Calories playing a dance game with my kid. I can also survive multiple stresses on the body in one day. Yesterday, for example, I took an hour long walk at lunch, mowed my yard when I got home, and helped a man in my church group tear down a buckling cement block wall. My second new set of pants are now 4 inches smaller (38" waists, where I started out wearing 42"s), and are themselves starting to get roomy. Lastly, and this is the important part, I've noticed women noticing me again.

Week 12

213.0/215.9

"Fatigue is the best pillow." - Benjamin Franklin

Success! This last Friday, I managed, three times, to make it up all 134 stairs at the dam at a brisk jog. On the third attempt, my legs were close to buckling at the end, but I made it. My heart didn't give out, and I wasn't sucking wind for too long afterwards, but the final walk back down the steps was a little alarming as I tried to keep my legs from shaking, and myself from inadvertently reenacting a bad Jerry Lewis slapstick skit, or that last scene from The Exorcist.

On Sunday, I played in all four quarters of my team's soccer game, totaling about 50 minutes of field time of an 80 minute game. At the end, I was pretty dehydrated, and had some scrapes on my heels from the new cleats, but was otherwise unscathed, thanks to good stretching and not trying anything stupid on the field. Sunday night I slept soundly. Monday morning, my alarm rang several hours earlier than my body wanted to get up, and even though I was miserable getting out of bed, I couldn't stop smiling. It's good to be active again; a body is meant to exert itself. Yesterday's two-day-after pain was pretty bad, as my leg muscles tried to finish healing all the microtears and such I gave them from all the sprinting. Game running and even-paced jogging are different animals, apparently.

The soccer game was unusually high-scoring. We won 7-6, thanks to a fantastic last-minute leaping shot by Jim, the team's captain and the man who invited me to play. Highlight real material, unlike my own performance. I was right-side fullback for most of the game, and a couple times the other team's offense really had my number. Towards the end of the game, I got more aggressive and got some good reads on people, and found some accuracy and power in my kicks. Fun game, good camaraderie, and everyone was eager to come back next week and do it again. Including me.

I don't know how much running I'll do this week while waiting for my scrapes to heal, but I've found I can get the heart pumping pretty good at home by doing a light weight, high repetition circuit at home with freeweights and ab work. I'm not as fit as I'd like to be out there, but I think in another week or two I'll be more an asset than a liability to the gang, both in terms of endurance and field-sense.

Since I've been running more, and I'm inching my steadily towards the 200 pound mark, I've been thinking about signing up for the Independence Day 5k run. After my heals get back in shape, I'll have to try to mark out three miles on the Hoover Dam bike trail and see if I can manage jogging that far. If I can't do that yet, I'm not going to be to disappointed, and stick to the soccer and weight loss a while longer. If I can, I think I'd really enjoy running in a local event. More news next week to see if that's going to happen or not.

Week 11

215.0/218.2 - 40 pounds lost in 77 days

"Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny." - Eric Hoffer

I took most of this week off from aggressive weight loss in order to recover from a cold. I still managed to lose a little, and I fought the cold off pretty quickly. To prevent more of the same down the road, I'll be taking the extreme loss down a notch to something sane as I continue, to keep from putting myself in the hospital.

Once again, I'm pushing myself too hard, this time with different results. The first time I was eating too little and walking and doing other aerobic work too much, and I wiped myself out. I left work early one day due to fatigue, and took the next day off to recover and chow down some extra Calories. I made a fast recovery, and decided that starving myself was a bad idea.

Before I got sick, I was dabbling in interval training to boost how long I can run without stopping, a long-standing problem with me. I can sprint for short periods of time, and recover quickly, but I can't run very long without fatiguing myself, and this will be a setback during the soccer season. In the one game I've played so far, I held out for a little while, but the game was called early. I don't know if I would have made it through the entire game or not, so I'm trying to make sure that the next time I play, I'll be able to. To train for this, I've been trying to sprint up these stairs:




This is located at Hoover Dam in Ohio, and is roughly a 45 minute walk from my house. It's a nice little area, and the stairs are a popular exercise spot for us locals. Here's a different shot of the dam, the stairs being out of frame on the left:



I've made slight progress, going from the halfway mark to about 3/5, and I usually make three attempts. Three attempts after walking 45 minutes down there. Before walking another 45 minutes back. With a dog. So when I get back, I'm pretty bushed. The mistake I made this week was trying to do that on the same day I did a strength routine, the same day I increased weight on a couple exercises, and thought my arms were strong enough for my first attempt at chinups since I began strength training. So my biceps were all torn up, as were my pecs, my back, and my abdomen, and then I went out for a two hour Calorie burning ordeal.

I slept well that night, and was plenty sore the next day, with a little scratch in my throat. "Oh," says I, "must be allergies from being outside all the time, bad pollen day or something." And I decided that evening to warm up with 150 Calories of DDR, before going back to the stairs at Hoover for another round.

That was Wednesday. On Thursday, my scratchy throat was a full-blown cold, coupled with my low Calorie diet and overexertion for two days in a row, and I was a mess, and called into work sick again.

This was all avoidable, of course. I think since I'm upping my strength training significantly, I need to add more food to the diet to compensate. I'll up my daily intake a few hundred Calories for a couple of weeks, and see how that works. Also, I clearly can't run a marathon on the same day I lift. Strength one day, cardio the next, and maybe one day a week as complete recovery. Slow and steady wins the race.

Week 10

216.9/220.9

There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self. - Hindu proverb

John Walker's "The Hacker's Diet" suggests a simplified version of the Royal Canadian Airforce's 5BX (5 Basic Exercises) plan to achieve some muscle tone and cardio fitness along with losing weight. The basic premise is that within 10 - 15 minutes, you do some toe-touches, pushups, situps, leg lifts (face down, to work glutes and arch your back), and some running in place. Daily. Over time, you increase your number of steps running in place (presumably by going faster, to stay in the 15 minute range), and the count of all the other exercises.

When I first started my diet plan 10 weeks ago, I embraced this very gung-ho. I started out sucking wind pretty quickly, barely able to do 10 situps or 5 pushups, and after a couple weeks I started having joint problems, my ankles hurt from the impact of running in place, and the pushups started making my left elbow pop and get inflamed the next day. But, I was starting to make progress strengthwise and my endurance was definitely picking up. I decided to keep exercising, but to scrap 5BX.

My "Plan B" was to replace running in place with lots of daily walking, and to replace the pushups with the butterfly machine in my neighbor's basement. I did both of these things, coupled with some occasional ankle exercises, and kept adding on one more little thing, slowly building up a more complete workout. The DDR Supernova game helped out a lot, as there are songs with different speeds (beats per minute range from 95 to over 200), and each has different skill levels for step complexity, so you can gradually increase Calories exerted and impact. I bought a Pilates ball and mini-bands, which let me switch to some high-rep, low weight exercises to, among other things, use my triceps without over-stressing my elbow. I used the freeweights lying around the house, and did some curls and dumbbell presses, a little of this, a little of that, until I had too many choices and couldn't formulate a good workout plan.

On top of that, I kept reading bodybuilding and weight loss websites, and looked through list of exercises on wikipedia (coming across a few I was completely unfamiliar with -- bent press? what the hell is a bent press?). Eventually I decided to choose all the subjectively "best" exercises that I could do with the equipment I have, and put them all on paper so I could track progress. Measuring has been, in my path to fitness, as important as my other focuses: will and patience. Adding a third thing to measure, in addition to daily Calories and daily weight, requires trivial effort, and results in me thinking about exercise more, and working out in a more balanced, consistent, and safe way.

So for the last 5 weeks, I've been going DDR happy, increasing my endurance and my ankle and knee strength. Seriously, my ankles and knees are stronger from methodically hopping around. A lot of direction changes and a pace that sometimes makes me stay on the balls of my feet to keep up. I'm currently at 450 Calories per session on workout mode, which requires slightly more songs each time I enter a lower weight into the game's calculations. Between that, my roughly 45 minute daily walks (at a brisk pace replacing the meandering I started with), and my 38 pound weight loss, I decided to put my new body to the test. I joined a soccer team.

The Raiders, a local co-ed adult team, is captained by a friend of mine, also a dad of a pair of girls on Stacey's U10 team last season. He had asked me to join the team last year, and I said I'd like to, but I was worried I wasn't in good enough shape to run for more than a minute or two, and that I'd most likely cripple myself in the first game. This time, I thought I could do it.

Sunday was the first game I attended, and I played the first quarter, and then the game was called due to bad weather. I didn't cripple myself. I ran and did not grow weary, and I walked and did not faint, to quote the good book. I was incredibly happy.

I played defense, and I did not get scored on. I felt a little out of position for most of my time on the field, and I went one for one against the striker on the other team, who was wearing a Green Lantern t-shirt (their team color was green). I booted the ball back up field when he was driving down once, and later he managed to get around me in the red zone, but I attacked his strong side and he went around me to his left, and our goalie got the ball before GL could get control again. I was tactically correct, but I lucked out.

My mind and legs are in the right place, but I'm not quite the Stork yet. However, there's no game next weekend because of Memorial Day, giving me two weeks to train before round 2. I plan to be ready.

Week 9

220.6/224.4

"The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us." - Robert Louis Stevenson

I think my weight is between stable balance points. This Sunday I was heavier than the last time I posted. Some of that may have had to do with experimenting with more daily Calories, but I also chalk some of it up to my increasingly frequent "epicycles" of plateaus before losses. The two issues came to a head on Sunday, bringing my daily weight and trend line closer together than at any point since I began losing weight. I was a little frustrated, but not worried, as I've seen this a few times now.

Here's what my daily weight was doing between Monday the 7th and Sunday the 13th:



But, again, in the overall picture, this isn't worrisome. To illustrate, here is the overall history, complete with trend line:



As you can see, plateaus, short-term gains, but a clear trend downward. I plan to stay on the program, and have faith in my body and the math.

Lastly, my body continues to visibly trim up, to the point where more people have felt a need to comment. This is a huge motivator, and a surprising one, as I hadn't anticipated feeling so positive about other people's views of me. Another thing I've noticed is that strangers are less rude to me now, and passersby on the street don't seem as confrontational if the sidewalks are crowded. Maybe some of that is my own perception and just feeling better about life, but I think at least some of it is a psychological queue to reject fat people that is no longer being triggered. Humans are a messed up lot, I tell ya' what.

Week 8 - The recalculation

223.2/227.4

*WARNING* This post contains math!

"So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance." - Nixon

First the bad news, I'm not 6'5" any more. I'm only 6'4", and probably have been for years, which I attribute to just growing older, despite my countermeasures of 16 oz of milk every day plus cheese in many meals. This throws off my BMI and body fat percentage calculations, and changes my ideal weight. Fortunately, this doesn't change what I need to do, just how long I need to do it. I'm still eating a set number of Calories per day, still exercising every day (even if it's just a token walk at lunch time), not snacking, taking vitamins, and monitoring my weight, blood pressure, and pulse rate frequently.

Based on my corrected height, and a desire to eventually have a lean, cut body with sexy abs, I've decided to try to hit my old pizza delivery weight of 185 pounds. It seems like a hard number to hit, but I believe I can get there. The last 8 weeks has shown me that significant physical change is possible with steady, firm pressure and lots of willpower.

I've found that I can lose weight consistently, averaging a .6 pound loss per day over the last 8 weeks. I've also found that I'm getting stronger and my endurance is picking up. I've added new exercises with free-weights and my neighbor's nautilus equipment, and I haven't pulled or twisted anything for a while now. Most importantly, I'm finally at the point where the casual observer who knows me glances at me with the "didn't you used to be fat?" expression, and I've had a couple people now mention that I look like I've lost weight. Casual observers don't notice subtle changes, so this is a major morale booster.

First, here's where I'm at now with the corrected height and new goal according to the cutesy tickerfactory image:



So what will that goal do to me? Let's see what my current and goal body fat percent and BMI numbers look like.

Body fat percent estimate:
The US Navy Circumference Method for guesstimating body fat percent is a little crazy, and goes something like this (for men, the women's formula is even crazier):

Measurements are in cm.
Percent fat = 495 / [crazy divisor] - 450
crazy divisor = 1.0324 - .19077 * log(abdomen - neck) + .15456 * log(height)

My current measurements in inches are:

42" abdomen
15" neck
76" height

Converting that to cm, we get:

106.68cm abdomen
38.1cm neck
193.04cm height

Plugging those values into the crazy divisor equation:

1.0324 - .19077 * log(106.68 - 38.1) + .15456 * log(193.04)
1.0324 - .19077 * 1.8362 + .15456 * 2.28565
1.0324 - 0.35029 + 0.35327
1.03538

...and the divisor into the main equation:

495 / 1.03538 - 450 = 28.08534 percent

28% of my 223.2 pounds is 62.5 pounds, leaving me with roughly 160 pounds of... lean? A little simple math shows that my goal of 185 pounds means:

1 - (160 / 185) = .135, or 13.5% body fat, which the American Council on Exercise would put right on the border of "fitness" and "athletes" (http://www.healthchecksystems.com/bodyfat.htm), instead of the "obese" my current 28% qualifies as.

BMI:

This equation is much simpler, 703 * weight(lbs) / height^2 (in)
My current numbers:

703 * 223.2 / 76 ^ 2
156909.6 / 5776
27.17, roughly in the middle of the "pre-obese" category, according to the World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/bmi/index.jsp?introPage=intro_3.html)

And at my goal weight (and presumably the same height):
703 * 185 / 5776
22.5, square in the middle of the "normal" category.

In other words, 185 is a good weight for me to shoot for. Over the past 8 weeks, I've lost an average of .6 pounds per day (a 2100 Calorie deficit!). If I can keep that up, which should become more difficult as I continue, it will take me another 9 weeks to get there. If I eat an extra 700 Calories a day over my current diet, and aim for a .4 pound per day loss, I'm looking at 13 weeks. So sometime between July 11 and August 8 I will hopefully be able to trounce around at the beach shirtless, strutting and wooing... but not today. Today I just look like I'm not about to keel over from a heart attack. I'll take it.

[updated Aug 2, apparently I don't know the difference between a dividend and a divisor]

Week 7

225.8/231.0

"Don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines." - Satchel Paige

Progress, slow and steady, and my stomach still looks at me in the mirror with obstinate stubbornness. "I'm here for the long haul, friend," it says to me. It's getting smaller, and I feel more comfortable in some tighter T-shirts that I did 2 months ago, but I'm not quite at the point where I'd be comfortable going to the pool, or mowing my yard shirtless. Maybe next month.

I've still got problems with my left elbow, and I think I've found an exercise that will help strengthen those tendons, dumbbell presses using a Pilates ball for support. I haven't been able to bench press for about 7 years now. I seem to pinch a nerve between my right shoulder blade and my spine, and the pain stops me from being able to really put effort against the bar. With practice and gutting through the pain, I've managed to put up a measly 135 a few times lately, before the pain overwhelms me. On butterfly machines I do much better, and I found out Sunday afternoon that the extra support of the Pilates ball prevents the nerve pinch, so I've been doing dumbbell presses at home. Since I can work out with low weight/high repetition that way, I can toughen up my elbow tendons a little without the popping noise or next-day soreness I get from pushups.

I asked my roommate's mother, who taught aerobics until her 50s, about tendon and joint issues, and her immediate advice to me was simply "forgive your body the things it can't do any more." I think that's great advice, and I'm trying to resign myself to the fact that I've got a long road of rebuilding ahead of me, even after I hit my ideal weight. Swimming was her recommendation for conditioning, which brings me back to my ever-present stomach. I'll reevaluate in a few weeks, and work on swallowing my pride a little to help motivate me to do laps at the pool. I'm not young and sexy any more, and the quicker I get over what I used to look like, and the looks girls used to give me, the healthier I can make myself, mentally and physically.

On the brighter side, my latest day of lawnmowing + working out didn't kill me, and I'm able to last through 2 complete sets of DDR in workout mode, approximately 300 Calories, sans twisted ankles. I've also crossed the 2-stone mark, having lost over 28 pounds since I started.

Week 6

230.6/234.9

"I was eating bad stuff. Lots of sugar and carbs, junk food all the time. It makes you very irritated." - Avril Lavigne, when asked why her songs are so angry.

Well, there you have it. Life's most important lesson: junk food = irritation. Thanks, Avril.

It's mowin' season, and I've got the pulled quad and sore back to prove it. Good thing I was already on the road to being fit with daily exercise, otherwise I may have had to take a day or two off of work. The good news of my overexertion is that my ankles are strong. I found that out when I stepped on an exposed tree root the wrong way, buckling my foot off to the side and putting a great deal of my weight on my ankle at an unnatural angle. No pulled ankle, and I was walking fine shortly thereafter. I guess the standing on one foot exercises I mentioned earlier are actually productive.

This week had its ups and downs, both in my weight and my struggle with hunger. John Walker warns of bad days in The Hacker's Diet, giving mental suggestions and how to cope, low-cal filler foods like unbuttered air-popped popcorn, or the cup of hot bouillon, and reassurance that as long as your daily weight is below the trend line, you're still on the right track. Yesterday, for example, I hit 230.0 pounds when I weighed myself in the morning. I ate 1800 Calories that day, drank lots of liquid, worked out in the evening, and went to bed exhausted and hungry. When I weighed myself this morning, I had gained .6 pounds.

Is that possible? Sure, and it's happened before during my diet. I'm still on the right track, and even though I'm .6 pounds heavier today than yesterday, I'm 24.4 pounds lighter than March 14, when I started. Maybe I have a digestive track full of heavy food, or maybe my body is pausing its fat-burning cycle for a moment, trying to regain a balance after having lost so much weight so quickly.

On the exercise front, I'm doing better physically after playing DDR, and my scores are getting better. I've managed to make it all the way through "Workout Mode" to 150 Calories a couple times now. Each song has about a 7-15 Calorie output, according to the in-game math, which has to be a wild estimation -- your familiarity with the steps in a given song has a lot to do with your energy output for each step, since the better you can predict where you need to be, the easier it is to stay on balance and not have to use your leg muscles to make quick balance shifts and recoveries. The song I'm on now that is the most productive for me is the Ceasers' "Jerk it Out" on Basic level (I'm off of Beginner level for most songs now -- yeah!), which gives me from 13-15 Calories, and has steps that are continuous and only difficult in a few places.

I'm still feeling good about the plan, even though this week has humbled me a little with more realistic results. Why am I still feeling good after only average loss in a week? I can't wear my old pants up any more, they're officially too big! I had to buy smaller jeans and a new belt, and pull some old work pants that are smaller out of the closet.

Week 5

233.2/238.8



From tickerfactory.com. Cute. I found images similar to this on a message board for people using dance video games for weight loss. Why should I be looking around in such a place? Because my kid and I recently stopped by GameStop and bought this:



Yes, I've finally gone mad from lack of refined sugar, I guess. A couple days of playing hasn't injured me, my knees and ankles holding strong at the beatings I've given them with "Funkytown" on beginner level. I've managed to work up a decent sweat playing the game, so I can see it's appeal as a weight-loss tool.

I've been thinking about DDR since the last time Stacey and I went to Magic Mountain. The rollercoaster simulator is right beside a DDR clone, and as Stacey and I waited in line for the simulator, I watched a few people play the dance game. A pair of players not that much younger than me put in their $2, and seemed to have a great time playing, the lady in particular was actually dancing around rather than just stepping on the buttons. I've seen people of varying skill play before, but for the first time I thought it might be fun, and that I could learn the game. So I bought one.

The dog doesn't want to wrestle when Stacey and I are playing, which is good. It's something fun we can both do together at home, which is good. There is a wealth of subculture devoted to this, and I am a fledgling newbie with lots to explore, which is good. All good. I'm happy to have spent some cheddar on the game and two dance pads.

Another item of interest is the large amount of showoff DDR videos out there. Some players have obviously been practicing for years, doing backflips off of the bar and other breakdance-esque moves, and are clearly enjoying the game while they showboat. Search youtube for "Smidget" or "Phrekwenci" for a few examples.


Monday marked the day I crossed the 20 pound mark, making my loss rate since I started over .5 pounds per day. This seems impossible, and means that my diet change and increased exercise total close to a 2000 Calorie per day deficit. The numbers seem unhealthy, or wrong, so I've been keeping track of my pulse rate and blood pressure at work (averaging about 70bpm and 110/65, respectively), and comparing with different scales. I found my old digital scale at home in a closet, and it approximately matches the new scale, which approximately matches the scale at the nurse's office at work.

I haven't had any bouts of dizziness or other malnutrition-related symptoms (other than losing weight and being occasionally cranky), and I take a daily multivitamin (GNC's "Mega Men's"), which I suspect plays a big part in keeping me going. It's possible that the crushing setbacks are right around the corner, but a commitment to daily exercise, avoiding candy, and meal planning have done right by me so far. I'm still feeling positive about the plan.

Week 4

238.4/242.7

"The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Perfectionism is inefficient." - Uncle Bill

Managing Calories has been the most useful tool in my quest for stork-dom. I got caught up early on in micromanaging them, which turned out to not be necessary. I settled on 2000 Calories per day as my goal, and tried to get as close as possible to that as I could. This included things such as pouring a half glass of apple juice with dinner instead of water, eating 5 Thin Mints instead of 4 when that made the numbers look better, and a lengthy quest to figure out exactly how many Calories are in each ingredient added to a Chipotles Burrito Bol. And if you're curious...

13" Tortilla shell    330 
1 cup rice            240 
1/2 cup Black beans   130 
2 oz Cheese           200 
1/4 cup Sour cream    120 
1/2 cup Lettuce         5
4oz Chicken           219 
4oz Carnitas          227

The tortilla shell was a little surprising, but my standard chicken bol (no tortilla) with rice, beans, cheese and lettuce is sizeable, yet not prohibitive, 794 Calories. I can do that for lunch if I have a light breakfast and forgo my mid-morning granola bar. Anyway, after micromanaging for a couple weeks, I got a better feel for the Calorie content of different foods, and started to adopt a sort of Deal A Meal strategy for the day's food... yeah much protein and fat for breakfast, a small lunch, and a TV dinner for dinner. At the end of the day my hunger level stays about the same, and weight seems to be coming off at the same rate. And If I have any cravings, I can always pull up the spreadsheet and calculate exactly what my caloric intake for the day has been, and see if I can afford a snack.

I hit a plateau at the beginning of April when I fell below 245 pounds. My weight stayed in a .2 pound range for 5 days. I decided to drop to 1800 Calories a day instead of 2000, and then I started losing again. Coincidentally, I found a Calorie chart on a website that indicates Calorie intake for men at different weights that will trigger weight loss. It goes roughly like this:

  < 150 pounds  -  1400
150-199 pounds  -  1600
200-249 pounds  -  1800
250-299 pounds  -  2000

I don't know how scientifically those numbers were determined, but they seem sensible, and I concur with the findings at the 250 pound crossover point.

My ankle healed, and my knee stopped bothering me when the weather started getting warm and dry (arthritis? at 35?), so I started doing ankle strengthening exercises at the end of my workout, using a plan from Bodybuilding.com. I'm not so sure about the claim that this will let me twist my ankle bone to the ground and not strain it, but the exercises seem appropriate and scaled, like the Hacker's Diet exercise plan. The basic idea is standing on one foot, and over time adding weight and motion.

My left elbow, though, still a problem. If I put more weight on my right arm during pushups, the popping stops, but obviously this isn't optimal for strength building. I need more research on this, and maybe a consultation with a doctor of sports medicine.

Other than the elbow, things are overall looking up. I've lost over 1 stone since I started, my endurance is up, I'm doing something active every day, and saving a nice chunk of cash that I used to spend on candy bars and pastries. If I lose a little bit more, I'm going to need to get a new belt, since I'm on the last loop. I already need new jeans, and the last work pants I bought, which were snug when I bought them, are now on the roomy side, but should last me another 10-15 pounds before they start to look funny on me.

Lastly, my confidence level is going up. I was afraid to bring up the idea of my dieting to anyone for a few weeks, but since I've lost consistently, and I still have a noticeable stomach, I've found it a nice conversation piece with some of the women I know. The men I know seem less interested, for whatever reason.

Week 3

241.8/246.3

My ankles and knees have been taking a beating with the high-impact cardio exercises recommended by the Hacker's Diet plan. I'm a fan of the concept, but until my joints and tendons get stronger (and some of the weight comes off), I need to adjust to low impact exercises for cardio work.

Fortunately, I've got a treadmill in the basement. It's a nice one, complete with incline control, Calorie estimator, and a safety key you clip to yourself so the machine shuts off after you pass out and fall off. I spent about a grand on it last year, used it sparingly, and when I upgraded TVs and moved the old entertainment center to the basement, the treadmill went with it to give me more space to set everything up. And there it sat, unused.

Now that I'm putting aside time daily to exercise (which has been a great boon, despite my current aches and pains), I'll get much more use of the treadmill, rather than having simply blown my money on it. I intended to use it regularly (out of guilt for how much money I spent on it), but somehow didn't find a lot of time for it. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.

Since I've lost some weight and gotten desperately needed workouts, my mood has improved, despite the recent bumps and bruises that I am just now recovering from. The hunger and early body chemistry changes initially caused me to be cranky and forgetful, but those symptoms have passed now, and I've found myself smiling a lot more. I'm more productive at work, and it's been easier to get myself out of bed in the morning -- breakfast being my big Calorie meal of the day, and ample inspiration to forgo hitting snooze.

It's nice right now. I'm a little sore, a little hungry, sometimes low on energy, but I see the changes starting. My clothes fit better than they did three weeks ago, the spreadsheet numbers have taken on a noticeable downward trend, and I'm gleefully looking forward to the rest of the journey at the very point that sapped my motivation in the past. I have deduced that attitude plays a big role here.

Week 2

245.2/249.5
"Don't it always seem to go, that you dont know what you've got 'til its gone?" -Joni Mitchell

I've been losing weight at an oddly consistent rate of .4 pounds a day. This either means that I'm starving myself of 1400 Calories per day, my scales are on the blink, or that I will soon hit a frustrating plateau because I've mainly been flushing water and glycogen out of my body. Whatever the reason, the initial numbers are pleasing and motivating.

Here's another blurb from The Hacker's Diet I found sobering the first time I read it:

Do you want to eat, or to stop the hunger? There is an important distinction between these desires. Most of the times we eat, we’re not actually hungry. We eat because it’s our regular meal time or because we associate eating with a given activity...

...True hunger, although part of the daily life of billions of people on this planet, is rare in Western industrialised countries except among the very poor and those engaged in dieting. One thing you learn from the worst moments in a diet is what hunger really is...

...After you’ve truly experienced hunger once or twice in the course of a diet, you realise that most of the times people say, “I’m really hungry” they’re nothing of the sort. In all likelihood they’re motivated to eat by something entirely distinct from hunger. Getting to know hunger first hand teaches you how unrelated the motivation to eat is from your need for calories and how important it is, therefore, to control what you eat by some means other than instinct.

I have never been hungry before now. Growing up in a minimum-wage home, and at times living on my own struggling paycheck to paycheck, I nevertheless managed to eat like a king. Those years that I couldn't on a whim opt for the $9 a pound nitrite-free deli meat or the $5 a pound organic apples, I still quelled the first rumblings of hunger quickly with a stop into the local fast food joint, or by whipping up some pasta. Even now, restricing myself to a mere 2000 Calories per day, I only have a vague idea of real hunger, confident my fat stores, multivitamins, and health insurance are keeping me safe.

What must life be like for those who suffer my late-night hunger pangs constantly, without the security blankets of a stocked pantry, money in the bank, or competent, affordable doctors? This must be what mom was getting at with the whole "kids starving in China" bit. I feel guilty for all the times in life I declared loudly how hungry I was, feigning weakness and sloth, as a smart-ass teenager. How insulting that would have been to anyone who experienced real poverty and hunger.

While I'm on a down note, I found out last week that I've been doing pushups wrong since I was a kid, compensating for my long arms. I had been spreading my arms too wide, creating a shorter range of motion and more reliance on pecs than triceps. I've also been touching my nose to the ground instead of my chest, again creating a shorter range of motion. For my exercise plan, I've been trying to use correct form, and trying to adapt to the extra strain.

My muscles have been handling correct form pushups just fine, but over the last few days I've been getting a popping sound out of my left elbow, and a little soreness out of it in the mornings. In addition to that, my nightly jogs have started to leave my ankles sore the next day. I suspect that if I don't overdo it now and injure myself, the soreness will take care of itself as my tendons get stronger and my weight goes down. It's frustrating to remember what your body was capable of, (hence the Big Yellow Taxi quote above) and know that trying to get there too fast will put you in traction.

On the plus side, eating right isn't much of a problem, thankfully. I've had a couple days where I wanted more food than I was giving myself, and some nights my stomach is noticeably grumbling when I go to bed, but I've been fortunately able to dissociate my (mild) hunger from desperation to eat.

My eating strategy has been to load up at breakfast, country style. Bacon, eggs, milk, and cheese, and a morning snack that constitutes most of the refined sugar I'll have that day: 4 Thin Mints. That's it, just 4. 150 Calories, bringing my Calorie load up to about 850 - 900 by the time I get to work. The rest of the day is a modest lunch and dinner, all pre-planned, and no snacking.

I'm finding meal planning to be a great asset, much the same way I found managing my money with a budget spreadsheet. Knowing with certainty what you can afford lets you plan well. In money matters, seeing the numbers in a spreadsheet shows me how aggressively I need to save for special occasions, and whether or not I'll have $50 to blow over the weekend. For meal planning, having a sense of Calories in various foods lets me plan to do things like eat at McDonald's and Chipotles without going over budget on Calories for the day. The equation is something like "Fast food for lunch = soup and water for dinner", but at least I know what I need to do if I get a craving for excessive carbs.

Finding the stork

249.8/252.8

"Death disqualifies you from every activity." -- John Walker

It happened one night about 6 months ago. I woke up with a pain in my chest. I had been sleeping on my left side, putting a lot of me on top of my heart. This was not, thankfully, unstable angina and a predictor of my pending heart attack; it was a muscle injury near my rib cage that I got earlier in the day helping someone move. It had me worried for a minute, though.

Back in the day, I wouldn't have woken up in pain after doing some moderate lifting the day before. I had endurance then, and quick recovery from injuries. But a lot has changed over the years, and besides being forced to sleep on my right side temporarily, I have also suffered under the ill dealings of revealed preference, being ignored and spurned by classes of people who treated me better when I was thin. Thin and young. Thin, young, energetic, and handsome. My own opinion of how I look now adds to the problem, so it's no wonder that the reactions of my fellow man are sometimes less than I'd like them to be. I'd been living in the "loving yourself is enough" world of self-pity and frustration for a few years, and now I had post-exertion pain to look forward to. Nightmare.

Let's go back in time a bit.

In 1988, I was 17 years old, and 175 pounds, 5 of them hair. I was in peak physical shape, riding my bike everywhere instead of driving, playing after-school soccer 3 or 4 days a week, and playing racquetball on the weekends, or lifting weights with a couple of my health-nut friends. At 6'5" and 175 pounds, I was pretty thin, and earned the nickname "Stork" in pickup soccer due to a stance I commonly took just before kicking the ball. I embraced the nickname. At school and home, or hanging out with friends, I was Curtis. On the field, I was Stork, the name the captains would call when pointing to me when we picked teams, the name that was hooted by my peers when I made a good play.

In 1991, I was 20, and had filled out into a little more adult shape. I weighed 185 pounds, and it suited me. I worked in a pizza store as an assistant manager, and was on my feet in a hot kitchen for hours at a time. After work a driver and I would sometimes go to a 24 hour gym and lift, and I would get together with some guys and play volleyball on the weekends. Before going to bed, I would do deep pushups with my feet on a chair or a bed and my hands on the floor, and over time developed a "cut" chest that my lady friends seemed to appreciate.

In 1995 I was 24, and left the food industry for more promising employment. And then things started to go bad.

When Windows 95 came out, and everyone and his mom wanted to get email on the computer, the Columbus Ohio based CompuServe online service was being bombarded with calls from new customers struggling with the online world. They were desperate to hire anyone who could tell a mouse from a modem. I had used computers since I was 10, ran a local BBS at 15, and had recently tackled modem init strings so that my buddies and I could connect to each other's computers to play Doom II in deathmatch mode. Considering CompuServe's current plight, I was a shoo-in for a tech support job, so a friend of mine who worked there suggested I apply. So I dropped off a resume, and the turnaround time between the first brief interview and day 1 of training was about 2 weeks. At that time, they apparently had a 90% customer service call loss rate (i.e., 90% of the people calling in for help were dropping off because they were waiting on hold too long).

So thus began my career in IT, sitting in a chair instead of being on my feet all day. In about a month, I was up to 190 pounds. A couple months after that I was at around 200, and stabilized there for a while. My usual diet of Hamburger Helper, Mac-n-Cheese with ground beef, and take-out Chinese and pizza was still what I craved, but my activity level had dropped substantially, and I was quickly ballooning up. A small adjustment to how much I scarfed down, and learning to cook a few healthier meals helped before things got ugly.

In January of 1996, my wife to be found out she was pregnant. Despite still getting together with the gang to play volleyball or go camping once in a while, and eating a little better, I found myself gaining sympathetic weight as my wife to be started to show. On top of that, I had lost the "jitters" at work and could sit still for long periods without going crazy. My metabolism slowed a little more, and the weight kept getting higher. I didn't weigh myself during that time, but I think I'd put myself at about 210 when Stacey was born.

After she was born, I was still within "striking distance" of getting back in shape if I hit the gym and ate less junk food, but I did neither of those. I struggled instead over the next few years with saving a marriage that had failure written all over it. I put on more weight, which caused my wife to look at me less amorously, which fed my self-pity, which led to me putting on more weight.

When my wife and I split up in 2000, I weighed 230 pounds. From my new apartment, I tried desperately to regain a good-looking body, and worked out incessantly at the company gym. In a few months I was back down to 215 pounds, and pleased as punch about it. Unfortunately, tragedy struck. I was plagued for the next 3 years with headaches, nausea, and insomnia. I was finally diagnosed correctly and treated in 2003, but by then the constant pain had kept me away from the gym for the most part, and I had climbed back up to 230.

I swore, like I have dozens of times since I left the food industry, that I wouldn't put on another pound. I swore I wouldn't ever go up in pant size again, that I'd be happy looking at myself in the mirror, that I'd go swimming with my daughter and not be embarrassed. Swearing without taking any action, though, doesn't change anything. In 2006, I topped the scales at 260 pounds.

260 pounds is less about being embarrassed and more about being worried about your long-term health. When Stacey was 4, and just learning about death, we had a conversation that went something like this.

"People live for a long time, and then their bodies start to wear down, and eventually they die."

"When?"

"Different times for different people. Dieing at 70 is normal, healthier people can live longer, like 80 or 90."

"When will you die?"

"I don't know, honey."

"But you'll die before me?"

"Yes, but I won't die until I'm sure you don't need me any more."

After a long pause where concern passed her face, she said, "But, I'll still need you."

Right now I'm 35 and she's 10. She still needs me. The scary chest pain was a nice wake-up call to the infarction it could have been, my eating and exercise habits being what they were. I began to really comprehend that I was in trouble. Even though I'm not obese, I found that climbing a couple flights of stairs winded me, and running a short distance made it difficult for me to speak for a couple minutes. And then there were the knees. 6'5" is no picnic on your legs under normal load, and the extra weight was causing me more problems. Recently after doing some heavy lifting, I found that walking down a flight of stairs caused a sharp pain in my left knee. This lasted for about 2 weeks. Enough. Instead of hoping and feeling the problem away, I took some action, using my brain to approach the problem, instead of my emotions.

During the worst cold of the winter, I began by simply taking my dog (a husky who loves the cold) for walks in the evening. When it's 7 degrees outside (-13 and 8/9 for you Celsius fans), you burn energy staying warm. I walked a little over a mile every night for a few weeks in the bitter cold, and got my heart used to moderate exertion again. The first couple of times had me exhausted and collapsing when I got back home. The next few times had me fatigued. By the time the bitter cold left, I was whistling when I got back, with enough energy to do some chores around the house before going to bed.

Next, by complete chance, I happened upon a Slashdot post referring to The Hacker's Diet, so I looked it up. John Walker, the author, had this to say:

I studied the human body the way I’d tackle a misbehaving electronic circuit or computer program: develop a model of how it works, identify the controls that affect it, and finally adjust those controls to set things aright.

It worked. In less than a year, totally under my own direction and without any drugs or gimmicks, I went from 215 pounds to 145 and achieved physical fitness.

"No kidding?", I said to myself, and read through the plan in detail. A rough outline is as follows:

1. 3500 Calories are in a pound of fat.

3500 Calories, or thereabouts, are in a pound of butter, a pound of olive oil, a pound of mayonnaise, and a pound of what's hanging over your belt, human fat.

2. Find out how many Calories you use.
3. Find out how many Calories are in the foods you eat.
4. Eat (3500 * pounds to lose) / (days to lose it) less Calories than you need a day until you reach your goal.
5. When you've achieved your goal weight, match your Calorie intake to your Calorie needs.
6. Excercise moderately every day
7. Examine all the numbers along the way with fancy spreadsheets and daily measurements.
8. Buy air freshener and breath mints when the ketosis kicks in.

It all seemed so straightforward, so I gave it a try. When I jumped on the scales for the first time since my winter dog-walking, I found that I had lost 5 pounds. I was down to 255 before I started the new plan, a nice way to start off. It took some time to gather intel on my favorite foods for their Calorie content. It took some willpower to give up habitual snacking. It took some effort to do the first few pushups and running in place (part of the plan's recommended daily exercise).

After week 1, I'm thrilled. I decided on a roughly 800 Calorie/day deficit. I measured and calculated daily. I planned my meals. I learned to love salad again (I make a great low-cal salad with Romaine, cucumbers, tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts, with no croutons or cheese, and just a taste of Ranch dressing -- good eats). And I lost weight.

Today I'm at 249.8/252.8. The 249.8 is my actual scale reading this morning. The 252.8 is the "trend" number, obtained by a data smoothing algorithm in the spreadsheet so people don't get upset with wild daily fluctuations.

For years my inner-stork has been away. It left gradually, a little every day while I wasn't looking. Every day I ate a bunch of donuts before going to bed, every day I stayed inside and played on the computer while the sun was shining, every day I sat on a bench and watched my kid play, the stork wandered a little further away. I want him back. This blog will chronical my quest to find the stork again. My goal weight is 194, and according to the forecast, I can hit that sometime between Halloween and Christmas. Time will tell if I can lose weight and get fit, and keep my promise to my daughter.