Specifically, I will start drinking water outside of meals. For meals, I’ll still allow myself non-sugary fizzy stuff like Pepsi Zero. We’ll see how this goes. And whether my bladder cries in anticipation.
New challenge for March: Water!
Health
February 2024 weight loss report: Down 3.5 pounds
Not a typo! I am down, for real, this month. And not just by a rounding error amount, a full 3.5 pounds. How did such sorcery happen?
As it turns out, it was simple: no snacking. That was it. I stuck to my three daily meals and had no snacks on most days. I would occasionally allow myself something small on a run day, like a banana, or a chunk of cheese. But no cookies, crackers, candy or any of that.
And here we are, 3.5 pounds later.
But it’s not enough. I need to lose a lot more. I’m still 20 pounds from my target goal of 150 and losing 3.5 pounds means it would take another 5.7 months to get there (basically, September, or the tail end of summer) and I don’t want it to take almost six months.
I have not been running as frequently, so I am going to try to be more active, which will help (and just make me healthier in general, always a good thing).
For now, I can at least savour that I am down for the month and the (short) year. And to that, I offer a hearty woot.
Fake edit: Looking at the stats over the month, there’s been very little change. My body fat is slightly higher, which makes sense in that if my total weight is down, the percentage of my body that is roly-poly fat may increase a bit overall (at least in the short term). My muscle mass has gone down, which also makes sense due to the decrease in exercise.
Weight: January 1, 2024: 172.3 pounds Current: 170.5 pounds Year to date: Down 1.8 pounds February 1: 174 pounds February 29: 170.5 pounds (down 3.5 pounds) Body fat: February 1: 26.1% February 29: 26.0% (down 0.1%) Skeletal muscle mass: February 1: 30.7% February 29: 30.3% (down 0.4%) Body water: February 1: 54.0% February 29: 54.0% (unchanged) Historical: January 1, 2022: 182.8 pounds
I added something new to my to-do list today
It’s set to repeat daily, endlessly:
You might be thinking, “What kind of hippie malarkey1Malarkey is officially my Word of the Week. is this?” And I would answer, it’s the best kind!
Because what “Touch a tree” really means is go outside for a walk and do it somewhere with nature and junk, not just down the sidewalk to the local Subway. Which I can do as there are areas like that no more than 10–15 minutes walking time from where I live.
And yes, today, I did touch a tree (I kind of cheated, because it was near a sidewalk, though I was not close to a Subway at the time).
How much can a person change?
I have been thinking about this. When I apply it to myself, I think of things like:
- Weighing in at 187.5 pounds and resolving to lose weight by changing what I eat. I lost over 40 pounds over the following six months (this particular one is a war, not a battle, and it goes on forever).
- Deciding (well, being told) I need exercise, so I started running in 2009. I have now tracked over 6,140 km of running.
- I pretty much gave up on drawing something like 20 years ago, then started again and now have hundreds of sketches, comics, doodlings and art to show for it.
- I didn’t want to stay single, so I started dating again. I’m now 14 years into a relationship.
I could go on, but you get the idea–these are all self-improvement type things. I did change by getting slimmer, healthier, and all that. But as an actual person, the stuff that makes me me, have I changed? Like, if I was always horribly mean to, I don’t know, boll weevils1I am not, nor have I ever been, horribly mean to boll weevils, am I still horribly mean to them today? If I was, could I change that?
It’s one thing to say, “I will no longer consider donuts a food group”, it’s another to vow to be kinder, nicer, or even just mellower. I could achieve some of this more ephemeral stuff through certain techniques–yoga and meditation come to mind–but even those would require a change first. Meditation requires you to be still, to quiet your mind. My mind doesn’t like being quiet. It blares all the time. My brain has opinions on everything that passes through it and shares all of them with me all the time. But if I really dedicated myself, could I break through the noise and find the quiet? And if I did, would there be add-on effects? Would I become more focused? Would I feel calmer? Appear more thoughtful? Stop asking so many questions?
I don’t know.
But I do know that I want to try.
Take this post from February 4th, An airplane up in the sky. It seems innocuous. It’s exactly what it says on the tin–a photo of a plane I took flying overhead. What you don’t know is that the original version of this post was completely different–a short, snarky comment about how we didn’t have enough reports on Apple’s Vision Pro headset2For those reading in the far future, the Vision Pro had just been released and was getting a lot of coverage. I included the modified Apple press image I made (which, to be honest, still amuses me). I hit the ol’ Publish button in WordPress and sent it out to the world.
Then I thought, “What does this bit of snark bring to the world? Is it especially clever or cutting? Will it make people laugh? Will it make people roll their eyes? What would someone do to a boll weevil after reading this?” And I decided it was just a piece of negativity that added nothing and had no reason to be. I could have deleted the post, but felt it would be better, or more fitting, to take a recycling approach to it, and keep it, but change the title, the content and the image. So, everything. And I felt better when the plane went up in its place.
I want to be the person who posts planes before snark. Can I be that person?
I’ll try.
Efforts on this will be documented here later as either inspirational pieces or object lessons in what not to do.
January 2024 weight loss report: Up 2.6 pounds
It all happened so fast. And so fat.
The first half of the month, I was trending down–down! The right direction! Then on January 14 my weight jumped 1.7 pounds overnight, followed by another 0.4 pound gain the next night. This left me 1.6 pounds up for the month, and I never truly recovered. I came close, but on the 29th I had another 1.6 pound overnight increase that sunk me for good.
I can’t explain these sudden increases, they just happen because the body is weird. But what I can say, based on experience, is that these huge, sudden increases are never offset by huge, sudden decreases. When you mega-gain™ overnight, your body is basically putting you into Hard Mode, forcing you to put in that much more extra effort to get back on track.
And I did not. My weight loss train hit a bad switch and is now rumbling along a line through the Fatlands.
This time I am not going to make predictions, or come up with a clever plan. I’m just going to exercise regularly and eat sensibly. We’ll see what happens!
Bonus stats analysis, because I love stats:
- Body fat was up, but only by a modest 0.2%
- Muscle mass was also up slightly, which is actually impressive, considering how little I ran in January due to The Great Deep Freeze with Snow
- Body water is basically unchanged, which is normal
Conclusion: Despite the extra weight, my stats actually seem to suggest things are not as bad as they seem? Maybe?
Weight: January 1, 2024: 172.3 pounds Current: 174.9 pounds Year to date: Up 2.6 pounds January 1: 172.3 pounds January 31: 174.9 pounds (up 2.6 pounds) Body fat: January 1: 25.2% January 31: 25.4% (up 0.2%) Skeletal muscle mass: January 1: 30.5% January 31: 30.8% (up 0.3%) Body water: January 1: 54.6% January 31: 54.5% (down 0.1%) Historical: January 1, 2022: 182.8 pounds
My watch has turned against me
My Garmin Forerunner 255 gives me a morning report every day. It sums up a few stats, like my sleep score and body battery, then sends me off for my daily adventures. It’s a nice little feature.
Lately, though, it’s been giving me less welcome news. You had a lousy sleep. Too much stress. Try to relax. Get better sleep. Exercise. Then rest. Why are you so stressed?
Through all of this, I haven’t felt notably different.
Take last night. If you asked me this morning to rate my sleep score, I would have guessed around 70 or so (on a scale of 1 to 100). Average, nothing special. But my actual sleep score was 47 and the description was this:
Non-restorative You slept long enough, but not well enough to bring your stress levels down overnight. You might feel higher stress or fatigue today.
Reading this does cause me stress, so it is at least partly accurate. It also meant that my body battery (which can also go to 100) began below 50 and is currently down to 9 at 4 p.m. I’m being told I had an active day and to rest. I’m not sure how low my body battery can go, but I’ll take this as a good excuse to laze around for the rest of the day.
In the meantime, I need to figure out what is causing the phantom stress and poor sleep. While I think the watch is exaggerating things, there may be some subtle change that is actually stressing me out without me being overtly aware of it.
So maybe my watch is just, uh, watching out for me1Really, it’s the natural thing to say. It’s technically not a pun.. I’ll report back if things improve, get worse, or get weird. Basically, I’ll follow-up.
I have proven I can stick to at least one thing for 4,000 days
I mean, apart from stuff like existing, breathing and such.
And that thing is logging into MyFitnessPal on a daily basis. Behold today’s login:
Not accounting for leap years, this works out to logging in every day for 10.95 years. And in that time, my weight has gone up (to a high of 187 pounds in 2008) and down (to a low of 143 pounds in 2012) to various levels in-between (I am currently struggling with getting my weight down again, though I’m well clear of hitting 187, at least. For now, anyway. Check back with me in a few cookies months).
All of me
I stepped on the scale today and remember when we used modems to connect to BBSes and the early internet in the 80s and 90s and the modem would make this weird, screeching sound while connecting?
That’s what I did when I stepped on the scale.
I was up 1.2 pounds, another one of those big, fat overnight weight gains.
But in the spirit of a new year and new possibilities, I choose to take this as a chance to demonstrate how I can easily come down from my new, fatty height. Let us observe where I was in years past on January 1:
2022: 182.8 pounds
2023: 164.2 pounds
2024: 172.3 pounds
OK, I clearly fudged (hehe) up over the course of 2023, but I am still down 10.5 pounds from my portly state of 2022, so that remains a good thing. And this year I will continue to mind my snacking, stay active and do things that aren’t eating donuts, so I am confident the number a year from now will be…lower.
And I’ll burn more calories by blogging more. Let’s see if I can keep up a pace of at least two posts per day. I’m 1 for 1 so far!
Here is a New Year’s cat for reading to the end:
December 2023 weight loss report: Up 1.6 pounds
Let’s start with the bad news: I am up again, and the rate increased, going from 0.9 pounds in November to 1.6 pounds in December. This is clearly not the way a weight loss trend should progress.
But when I look at the overall month, I do notice something that suggests it’s not as bad as it looks. On December 26, my weight suddenly jumped 1.1 pounds to a monthly high of 172.9 pounds, which was anomalous for the month. I dropped 1.8 pounds after this and if I had started that drop at the day-before weight of 171.8 pounds, I would have ended up with a monthly weight gain of 0.5 pounds, an increase small enough to be a rounding error.
Is this a bunch of rationalization? Yes! But it’s also accurate. And even 1.6 pounds is small enough that I could lose it in a few days.
What I’m saying is that I think I may finally have my weight loss more under control, and just in time for the new year.
First a couple of monthly stats:
| Date | Weight | Body fat | Body water | Muscle mass |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec. 1 | 169.5 pounds | 24.7% | 54.9% | 30.2 kg |
| Dec. 31 | 171.1 pounds | 25.4% | 54.5% | 30.3 kg |
I gained a tiny bit of muscle, but also 0.7% of body fat, like I thought I was a bear getting ready to hibernate. Still, nothing too horrible.
Toward the end of the month, I really did improve on snacking and so for 2024 my goal will remain the same, to get to 150 pounds. At my current weight, that would mean losing 1.75 pounds per month (about 0.43 pounds per week), which seems reasonable and possible. And yet!
I started the year at 164.2 pounds and ended it at 171.1 pounds, so I gained 6.9 pounds, an average gain of about half a pound per month. From that perspective, it doesn’t look too bad. And in fact, here’s a fun change: My muscle mass went from 29.7 kg to 30.3 kg, so I did actually put on a little muscle. Woo.
We’ll see what 2024 brings. Hopefully not donuts.
Weight: January 1, 2023: 164.2 pounds Current: 171.1 pounds Year to date: Up 6.9 pounds December 1: 168.3 pounds December 31: 169.2 pounds (up 0.9 pounds) Body fat: December 1: 24.7% December 31: 25.4% (up 0.7%) Skeletal muscle mass: December 1: 30.2% December 31: 30.3% (up 0.1%) Body water: December 1: 54.9% December 31: 54.5% (down 0.4%) Historical: January 1, 2022: 182.8 pounds
November 2023 weight loss report: Up 0.9 pounds
Yes, I am up again (though not as much as last month, which is semi-good).
In fact, for the month, I was only down from the initial weight of 168.3 pounds once–three days in when I hit 168.1 pounds. It was all up (and down and up and down) from there.
But let’s look at the full set of stats from the beginning of the month to the end and compare. This calls for a table, which I hate doing in WordPress, but here we go!
| Date | Weight | Body fat | Body water | Muscle mass |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov. 1 | 168.1 pounds | 24.5% | 55.1% | 30.0 kg |
| Nov. 30 | 169.2 pounds | 25.4% | 54.5% | 30.1 kg |
As you can see, the news is…not good. While my muscle mass is up marginally for the month (muscle is denser than fat, so adds more equivalent weight), my body water is currently lower and my body fat percentage is higher. Meaning I have, in fact, gotten a bit fatter.
Sigh.
But! I swore to go snack-free in November, and I didn’t. In fact, I snacked regularly like some dirty little snacker. For December, I am again vowing to go snack-free. I will allow a few exceptions as follows:
- Fruit, like bananas or apples
- Vegetables, in case I develop a sudden carrot addiction
- 30g of cheese or less after a run
- A small glass of chocolate milk after a run
- That’s it!
We’ll see what happens. I mean, in theory I should be able to stay below 169.2 pounds for the month, but I’ve been saying this for multiple months as my weight has gone up, so maybe I’ve been secretly cursing myself. I make no predictions for December, except that my weight will be a set of numbers.
Weight: January 1, 2023: 164.2 pounds Current: 169.2 pounds Year to date: Up 5 pounds November 1: 168.3 pounds November 30: 169.2 pounds (up 0.9 pounds) Body fat: November 1: 24.5% November 30: 25.4% (up 0.9%) Skeletal muscle mass: November 1: 30.0% November 30: 30.1% (up 0.1%) Body water: November 1: 55.1% November 30: 54.5% (down 0.6%) Historical: January 1, 2022: 182.8 pounds
My left knee
Not an inspirational drama featuring Daniel Day-Lewis.
After my 10K run on Monday, I waited to see how my troublesome knees would respond, especially the right one, which has been the worst of the two.
Yesterday, things actually seemed to be…okay! Both knees were feeling pretty normal. But then I did something and my left knee became Very Sore.
What horrible thing did I do to my left knee?
I sat down.
Yes.
Specifically, most of the time when I’m working at the computer or drawing on the iPad, I am sitting in my high-backed IKEA Markus chair, which has served me well enough, especially for the price. I sit with both feet on the floor, as most humans do. But sometimes I will get all contemplative and when that happens, I will pull up my left leg and rest it on top of my right leg.
This apparently creates pressure and strain on the left knee that I normally would not notice, but because of the 10K run on Monday, I did notice. A lot.
But by the time I noticed, the left knee was stiff and achy. I stopped sitting all fancy-like. I had a good night’s sleep and this morning as I type this (both feet down) the left knee is still sore, but the soreness is down considerably. All the same, I will not be running today, which will allow me extra time to buy toilet paper, which is a super fun thing to do.
And that’s the story of my left knee for today. Exciting additional chapters will be added as needed.
Trying the snack-free thing again
In my everquest1I still sometimes miss EverQuest 2. You could do a lot of stuff in that game. to get back to my fighting1 weight of 150 pounds, I’ve decided to use an approach that has seen success in the past: going cold turkey. Mmm, turkey.
Specifically, I am going to try reducing my snack intake like so:
Current snack intake: Snacks
Proposed snack intake: No snacks
The beauty is in its simplicity! Will it work? Let’s find out. As of typing this post, I am 100% on track.
- What’s a better term for “fighting” in this context? Maybe “preferred” would be better. Let’s just say a weight where my hand can slide over my belly and not undulate. Not that I make a habit of sliding my hands over my belly, mind you. What I’m saying is lose the belly fat, which would presumably happen if I was 150 pounds again. ↩︎