Two workouts planned this weekend – a 3 mile run yesterday (Saturday) and a swim this morning for as long as I could stand it. I look forward to the weekend run in particular, because it feels so much less time restricted. And I’ve done some research about swim technique and have been excited to get back in the pool to try some things.
And then, life happens.
My three-year old came down with a pretty intense fever on Friday. He doesn’t handle being sick all that well (he’s like his mother in this sense … hi, darlin’!), so we had to split some parental duties to make sure we had coverage on both him and the baby for both Friday and Saturday nights. My schedule is to get up at 5am to do all of this, and that has been completely blown out of the water. Yesterday’s run didn’t happen, and I hoped to make it up this morning (and get my swim in, if everything went well), and that hasn’t happened. My wife had a prior brunch commitment, so I’m on child duty this morning – and I find it very difficult to work in afternoon / evening runs, particularly in the Florida heat.
So, I may wind up getting a couple days of forced rest. And though I’m pretty disappointed, that’s OK. At some point, this kind of thing is absolutely going to happen – I’ve got two little kids, and they are extraordinarily effective at blowing plans right out of the water.
Good morning! Today is Friday, which deserves an exclamation point all by itself! And that means a weigh-in! So many exclamation points!
Today’s Weight: 313.4 pounds
Weekly Gain / (Loss): (-2.4) pounds
Total Gain / (Loss): (-9.6) pounds
If the first goal is to lose 10% of my body weight, I’ve reached 30% of that goal. While I’d love to have seen that Total Loss number get over 10 pounds, I also know that a 2.4 pound loss in a week is a big number, and I shouldn’t go crazy with it.
I’m still in the early portion of this, which means that the weight comes off easier. After awhile that is going to slow down, but for now every week brings real progress – which is very motivating. This morning, when I expected Weight Watchers to dock me a point, they actually went the other way. I was told that I don’t have a problem yet because of my weekly average, but losing more than 2 pounds a week is unhealthy and to knock it off. I am not blind to the fact that I have an enormous daily allotment of points and that they are trying to get me to eat MORE to make sure I don’t lose weight too fast.
They are right, but still. It is hard to not be excited about progress.
I’ve talked about Ben over at Ben Does Life before, and about how I’m a fan but that his methodology isn’t realistic for the vast majority of people out there. He’s at it again, and recently talked about losing 73 pounds in the first 90 days. Which is ludicrous – that’s nearly a pound a day, and is completely unsustainable. Don’t get me wrong, when you’re as big as he was you’re going to lose weight fast if you try hard. But there has to be a point at which some semblance of a sustainable reality has to be confronted.
All of that to say – I’m thrilled, both at this week’s loss and the overall trajectory I’m on.
When I started this whole journey back in 2012, one of the things I knew needed to happen was a support group or tool to help me get my eating under control. Hunger is not a reliable gauge of how much I need to eat – I’m in a constant state of hunger, after all – so what I’ve got to be able to have is a way to keep it toned down enough that I can make smart decisions. I’d tried a handful of other systems (NutriSystem’s food is awful, by the way), but my wife is a big fan of Weight Watchers so I decided to give it a shot.
Shout out to the Weight Watchers marketing department here, by the way, for advertising targeted toward men. I’d always thought of Weight Watchers as primarily for women, and in some ways I still feel that stigma. But hiring Charles Barkley as a spokesman was a stroke of genius. Even his famous “Weight Watchers is a scam” gaffe did nothing but get the word out there that this program works, and men are not excluded. Brilliant and well done.
The reason I love it is a commonly cited reason – nothing is off limits. Weight Watchers assigns a certain number of points to everything you eat or drink, and they give you a limit on the number of points you can have in any given day, with a weekly “bonus” point budget that you can use for a cheat meal or any other reason. The key here is that they don’t at all restrict how you use those points – if you want to use your points eating chocolate cake and donuts, then knock yourself out.
What you learn very, very quickly is that the trick is to use your points to manage hunger. The amount of chocolate cake I can fit into my points budget is relatively small, and the problem with using the entire budget on things like that is that you are absolutely starving three hours later. Which is a problem, since you don’t have any points left to deal with that. But over time you learn that empty calories don’t fill you up, and you only need relatively small quantities of the nutrient dense, high point items that also have a tendency to not fill you up (things like nuts, meat, even dairy). You still need those, but in moderation. The low points (even free points) items – fruits and vegetables, mostly – are really the key to managing hunger.
Today’s tracker after breakfast
Now, one of the things I didn’t realize when I first started with WW (though, in retrospect, it is obvious), is that when you start to lose weight the program takes points away from you each week. This makes for a bittersweet weigh-in day – “Yay! I lost weight! Boo! I don’t get to eat as much next week…” Last week, for instance, I went from a daily budget of 65 points down to 64 – which, by the way, is an enormous number for most people, because I’m so freaking big that I can eat an enormous amount of food and still lose weight.
Last time, I started with 65 points, and by the time I was done I was down to 54. Now – lets do some math. 11 points a day times 7 days is 77 points per week. On an original budget of 65 points, I was eating the equivalent of a whole day’s worth of food LESS than I was when I started. It is as though I said “Lets just skip food on Wednesdays,” but done in a much more sustainable way.
Going from nothing to Weight Watchers removed a considerable number of calories from my diet. Weight Watchers slowly but surely removed an awful lot more. And I still had 50 pounds (at least) to lose. And I was still living in a constant state of hunger.
No wonder I’m fat.
But, this is a process, not a goal. A journey, as it were, not a destination. And so, I’ll enjoy the 14 point breakfast you see up there and the 15-or-so point lunch that I’ve got planned for today, and I’ll lose this weight.
Somehow I got it in my head that I want to try doing triathlons. Not sure how this crazy idea got in there, but it is most definitely there. Of course, if that is ever going to go anywhere I can’t just keep running and running – there are two other disciplines in there, you know?
So this morning, for the first time in my life, I went to the pool with the express intention of swimming laps. I even bought goggles. And I have two impressions:
That shit is hard. Holy moly.
I think I am going to like it. Because of the pool’s hours I’ll be starting out only going one or two days a week – but I think I will like it. I will definitely go back tomorrow.
Two milestones crept up on me this week. I wasn’t paying attention, I guess, and both came as a surprise.
On Monday morning, I crossed over the 1,000 mile threshold in total miles run. That’s since I started in November of 2012, with the vast majority of those miles in 2013. I got to about 960 miles by July of 2014, and that’s where it sat for a full year. I’d had designs on trying to get 1,000 miles in 2014 alone, and a lot of reasons excuses happened – a horrible winter, an injury, laziness, etc. I crossed that milestone in a little 3 mile run that, at the time, was the most mileage I’d done in a run in over a year. Not how I drew it up, but we got there. Here’s to many more.
Another interesting thing came and went – this post was my 100th post to this blog. Blogging, I’ve learned, is hard work. I love to write, and I hope I have a bit of a talent for it, but I now understand the challenge that professional writers have about producing regularly. If my paycheck depended on it, I’d struggle, and this blog has taught me that. I’ve tried to do better, year long hiatus notwithstanding, and will try to do better still.
I’m making plans, and I’ve got a lot more milestones to go. There is a hell of a journey here, and I’m finding it fun to share it. Thanks for coming along.
Good morning, all three of you feigning interest! I had a good week this week, and these weigh in posts are one hell of a lot easier to do if you have a good week, you know?
Current Weight: 315.8 lbs
Weekly Loss: (-3.6) lbs
Total Loss: (-7.2) lbs
I read an article this week talking about the optimum speeds at which to lose weight. In general, we want it to happen as fast as possible, and we get discouraged when that doesn’t happen. However, recent longitudinal studies have shown that the people who lose between 0.5 and 1.0 pound per week are more likely to keep that weight off in the long run than those that lose weight significantly faster. The bigger you are, the more that number can go up (a 400 pound guy can lose 3 – 5 pounds a week no sweat without any issues – it takes a lot of metabolism to keep all of this fat tissue alive, you know), but at the end of the day you’re looking for half a pound to one pound per week.
This is the end of my 5th week weighing in, and I’ve lost an average of 1.44 pounds per week. That hasn’t been a steady decline, but that’s the average, and that’s about right. I really believe that my number can be more like 2 pounds per week until I get back to the weight I was at 15 months ago (around 275). At that point, my expectations will have to align with reality.
In the meantime, this is working, as I knew it would. Exercising 3-5 days per week and staying within a reasonable amount of daily calorie intake causes people to lose weight. Funny how that works.
I’ve been looking for a jumping off point for this post, and today’s Daily Prompt provided just that starting line.
As I’ve now said multiple times, I was in Washington DC last week, and was reminded every day why DC is one of my favorite cities. There are the obvious things, of course – the monuments, the buildings, the museums. And then there are the more subtle things – the energy, which is rivaled only by New York City for me; the men and women in suits that look like they’re on a mission to save the world; the guys in black that are patrolling the roof of the White House and that you can see if you look really closely.
I share my birthday with Abraham Lincoln (Charles Darwin, too, though that doesn’t get us anywhere in this post). Since I was small I have had a fascination with Mr. Lincoln, almost an obsession. One of the manifestations of that interest involves visiting the Lincoln Memorial any time I am in DC, and preferably at night. The walk this time took me through the WWII Memorial;
Three states I happen to be very familiar with…
The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (which really is stunning at night);
No picture can do this scene justice, particularly a crappy iPhone shot…
And then finally to see Mr. Lincoln:
The juxtaposition of how big he is up close to how big he is compared to the temple is … striking
My time spent at the Memorial always leaves me feeling both invigorated and melancholic, if that is even possible. I am inspired by his life and his work ethic, and being there makes me feel that I am a part of something much larger than myself, something grand and glorious. But I get melancholic both at the sense that my life is passing and with each day it becomes less likely I’ll ever change the world, and also in that way melancholia always creeps up when you’re in a temple to remember the dead.
This trip, though, introduced a new introspection and thought process centered on the idea that Mr. Lincoln would disapprove of us today. That he’d look at all of the fighting and bickering and gridlock and lack of progress and he’d get his hackles up and tell us all, in that high nasal voice of his, to knock it off. Knock it the hell off.
What does this have to do with the Daily Post prompt about coins in a fountain? I did not take the below picture, which is almost certainly from the FDR Memorial (which I visited but didn’t photograph), but I saw these signs everywhere, as well as the clear evidence that they were being ignored:
Coins Damage Fountain
This illustrates my point better than I ever could with words. This thing we have – the United States of America – is a precious thing, and a startlingly young thing in the grand scheme, and no guarantee exists that what we have must endure for ages. Instead what we have is an experiment that will only ever be as good and as successful as we make it, each of us. Sure there are big decisions every day that we don’t understand – things like the budget, and health care, and military involvement around the world – and that we can’t influence.
But there are millions of small choices made every single day, the sum of which decides whether we have, for example, a clean and poignant fountain or a broken puddle full of loose change. I want to live in a country that has the former, and the only way I know to do that is to learn, and care, and teach. I’ll be bringing my sons to these places, and I’ll be teaching them that these are THEIR places, and that those places deserve our respect. That’s the least we can do to pitch in and make this whole thing work.
To make it a place I’d be proud to show Abraham Lincoln around.
As mentioned, I was on a work trip to Washington DC last week, and the week prior to that I was on vacation in Delaware. There has been a fair amount of traveling this year, with several trips down to Florida before we moved, and some of the ins and outs of taking a new job that lives in a sales department. On each and every one of these trips – including the last two weeks – I brought running gear. Shoes, clothes, Road ID, hat, headphones, the whole getup. I was ready for it.
And I can count on one finger how many times I actually went for a run. In the last two weeks, that number was zero.
These last two weeks have been strange, because in both cases I was in a place that I ordinarily would have been excited to go running in. In Delaware we were less than a mile from the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk (and beach), and in Washington DC I was about a mile from the Washington Monument. So the beach and the National Mall – two spectacular places to run, particularly in the early morning hours that I typically go. Instead of rocking it, though, I stayed up too late and ignored my alarm in the morning. I just didn’t go.
The failure was so real that I was forced to do some reflecting on it, to try and pin down what is going on inside that causes me to sabotage and outright ignore these efforts. And I think I figured it out.
I’m afraid somebody might see me.
You see, I’m a fat guy. Especially now. And what I think about when people see me running is that they are seeing this guy:
2013 JFK Runway Run
or maybe this guy:
2013 Rock & Roll Virginia Beach Half Marathon
Or definitely this guy:
2014 Branford Road Race
When I’m at home, I leave to go running at 5am. And at that hour, I generally see no people. Maybe one or two. There is nobody at home awake, there is nobody on the road, there is just not much going on. In a hotel, though, at 5am I’m going to run into somebody. I’m going to see a night clerk, or another guest at the little gym, or the doorman on my way out to the streets for a run. And I’m going to be totally self conscious that they are judging me. Or, worse, laughing at me.
Now, I know from experience that my instinct on this one is incorrect. 95 times out of 100, people don’t even notice. We are so wrapped up in our own little worlds – we don’t care. And the other 5 times out of 100, when people do notice, they’re almost always doing the “good for him” in their heads. That’s what I’m doing if I ever notice somebody running that is not what you’d expect from a traditional runner.
But, for all of that, I still really struggle to go. My mechanism, by the way, is to sabotage the morning by staying up entirely too late the night before. This is another place where home is better, because my wife won’t let that go on for too long without shaming me. Or at least making me feel awkward because I have to answer the question “what the hell were you DOING up that late, anyway?”
This wasn’t really a problem when I was at the peak of my running “career” (HA!). I felt good enough that it didn’t matter so much. I’m not there now, and I need to get over it.
Also, for the record, I’m incredibly torn about posting that picture from the Virginia Beach Half up there. The one with my belly hanging out. I really hate that picture.
Following last week’s vacation-delayed weigh in, I had a travel week for work that had me worried about this one. Travel is killer for me, and this week was not all that different. I took my stuff but didn’t go for a single run (<sigh>), though I did walk nearly 5 miles on Wednesday afternoon seeing a bunch of National Mall Memorials that I somehow hadn’t hit in the past. And I was very conscious of my food choices, though sometimes those were more “I’m conscious that this wasn’t a very good choice” kind of moments.
Given all of that, I’m very pleased with this morning’s weigh in. The scale said 319.4, which is a loss of 1.2 pounds from last week and a total loss of 3.6 pounds.
1.2 pounds a week will get me to a very good place, so given that this wasn’t exactly a focused week for me, I’m ecstatic. That also tells me that I’ll lose weight much more quickly when things are on the correct routine. That’s not exactly a goal, but I know it is reality.
I know the posting has slowed down with the travel, but expect more this weekend / next week. Several things to talk about.
A Constant State of Hunger 