So, one of the bigger things going on in my life this year is that I’ve finally had enough of being fat. I mean, I still am, objectively speaking, but I had gone way beyond what the doctors call “morbidly obese”. I had become accustomed to weight in the mid-270’s for years, and suddenly I was climbing higher. I breached 300 pounds, and it made me extremely unhappy, and I fought back down to 275 and promised myself “never again”, naively thinking that I could continue being… not happy, but not-miserable at that 270-280 range.
Except whatever caused me to get over 300 in the first place was apparently not a fluke but a new “normal”, and my weight slowly crept back up again. About a year ago I started tracking my weight every week or so, and generally trying to “do better”. More steps, fewer seconds at dinnertime… the weight kept going up: one pound here, two pounds there. In February of this year, I stepped on the scale at 293, and had the awakening that I wish I’d had many years ago. The “never again” promise I made myself echoed throughout my brain. “Doing better” obviously wasn’t good enough. As I’ve often said, “better is good, but good is better”.
I’ve dieted before. I lost a lot of weight with the Atkins diet, and kept it off until a car accident left me in a lot of pain and I turned to comfort food to ease that pain. Since I’ve gotten heavily into brewing, and made beer a major part of my life, low-carb is really not an option for me anymore. I’ve also lost weight through calorie counting twice before. The first time I simply got lazy about it (counting calories is a bit of effort, and downright complicated at times), and the second time I used it to get from 300+ back down to 275 and then stopped because that was my goal. So I found that some of my new friends were also calorie counters, and found their tool of choice: MFP. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for MFP, because it makes the chore of counting calories much easier, and the social aspect of it also provides a nice moral support group.
So here we are today, 81 pounds down from that 293 mark in February. I no longer check in “every week or so”, I check that damned scale *every*single*day* (aside from when I’m camping, or on the road for work), which gives me a really good chart of my progress, and what weight loss looks like (spoiler alert: not a straight line). I’ve also put together a NSFW progress pic. The “before” side was taken about a month into the weight loss, so… I was even worse than that when I started. The “after” side was taken 2-3 weeks ago, and I’m better than that now, with at least 17 pounds left to go, assuming I don’t move the goalposts again (I already blew past my original goal of 225, now heading for 195).
I’m also about to run a 5k race in 3 weeks. I’ve never even run a mile before in my entire life, but I can do so fairly effortlessly now. On a treadmill I can run 3 miles with a little effort. Outdoors is a bit rougher, but I’ve still got that mile in the bag, and I did 2 miles on Tuesday with just a bit of walking thrown in. My natural pace is a bit faster than what I’ve been doing on the treadmill, so I wind up running too fast to maintain it for the entire distance. I’ve got 3 weeks to work on that.
