As expected, weighing myself much earlier today (around the usual weekday weigh-in time of 6 a.m. vs. 10 a.m. on the weekend) meant my weight was up. By 2.2 pounds. Egad.
On a more positive and less blimp-like note, yet another box of chocolates was passed around at work today and instead of gobbling a bunch as has become my standard response when offered, I took none. I wanted a big fat serving of poutine for lunch but instead only had a Clif bar. I wanted donuts. Lots of donuts. But resisted. Hopefully I can continue this trend.
Good news: I’ve stopped my weight from ballooning out of control like some out of control balloon. I’ve dropped from a peak of 167.3 pounds and leveled off at 166.3.
Bad news: The body fat percentage continues to creep upward. It’s now at 19.3%. This wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t normally a skinny guy. But I am normally a skinny guy and the tire developing around my gut is resplendent and awful.
Fortunately (?) I’ll probably be too busy this week to do much snacking, even if I wanted to (and to be perfectly honest, I still want to because I haven’t gotten to the point where I’ve curbed my appetite yet).
A haiku in tribute to a month of nearly zero weight loss. Not that I’m bitter. I’m totally not. At all.
Maybe a little.
I confess to having nipped at a cookie or two, so I have no one but to blame but my stupid hands and their ability to pick up edible things and shove them into my willing mouth. I’ll work on this in February. In the meantime, haiku:
A desire to slim
The donuts are forbidden
But sprinkles linger
This month I decided I would try to trim away all the extra flab I acquired in the last few months of 2013. Here are the results in graphical form from myfitnesspal.com, where I have been tracking my weight on a daily basis:
As you can see, over the course of 30 days I managed to lose…zero pounds.
For the curious, the low point on that chart is 171.6 pounds on January 12.
On the one hand this is not terribly impressive because it means it would take approximately infinity for me to lose any weight at all. On the other hand I didn’t gain weight, so I’ve at least stemmed the fat-filled tide.
Successes for January
I managed to reduce my snacking/donut addiction at school (where I work) to a single donut one Friday afternoon and that single donut was provided free of charge. I resisted the candy bowl filled with chocolate that sat on the front counter until it was completely empty. As the bowl itself was not made of chocolate I was safe at that point. I reduced my incessant gorging of snacks at home.
Failures for January
I did not run or exercise as much as I planned to. This is important because I typically eat less on exercise days. My snacking at home was still higher than it should be and often consisted of the wrong sort of snacks–potato chips instead of yogurt, cookies instead of carrot sticks. There is room for much improvement here. I also need to start making my own lunch again as this will reduce my caloric intake by a few hundred each day.
Goals for February
Only healthy/low cal snacks at home or no snacks at all.
Exercise at least three times per week.
Do not eat my weight in muffins or anything muffin-like.
I was going to have a snack tonight before bed but resisted. To quote GlaDOS from Portal, this is a triumph.
I will post the results of tomorrow’s weigh-in (the last for the month) tomorrow. If I actually end up for the month I am going to force myself to pee until that changes.
UPDATE, January 31: I weighed in at 172.8 pounds, down 0.6 pounds, thus saving the need for any extra peeing. 0.6 pounds down for the entire month. Woo, I say.
In the last few months of 2013 two things happened:
I stopped running.
I started eating a lot of shortbread. Delicious, yummy shortbread.
In October at my annual physical I weighed in at 160 pounds. This was eight pounds more than the previous year. It was also ten pounds above my usual target of 150 pounds. This was bad.
On January 1st I stepped on the scale (it cried out) and saw these numbers: 174.6.
Yes, I was nearly 25 pounds over my target weight and more than 30 pounds over my low of 2012 when I tipped the scale at a mere 143 pounds during the height of my summer runs.
My size 30 jeans were no longer feeling comfy. I had to stand really straight to get a sort-of flat tummy in profile. I felt blah and listless. I kept stuffing shortbread into my face.
With the new year conveniently at hand I put myself back onto a weight loss regimen. As of this morning that horrific 174.6 number has changed to the slight-less horrific number of 172.2. It could be water, it could be a rounding error, the important thing is it’s going in the right direction and even though there is shortbread here right now, mere feet away from me in the kitchen, I AM NOT EATING IT.
I have been mostly snack-free these four days and the snacks I’ve allowed myself–a cube or two of Havarti cheese, some popcorn, a few carrot sticks–have kept me well under my daily calorie total. This is the hard part, the first week where my fat stomach says “I’m hungry, please continue to shove food into the mouth, okay?” and I must tell my stomach “No, you big stupid fat thing. You’ll have your two carrot sticks and you’ll like it!”
I’ll check in once a week or so to report whether my brain or stomach is triumphing.
This picture is from December 1999 or thereabouts, one of only a handful taken of me while I worked at the computer department of London Drugs. It was the last time I worked in retail. It will remain the last time I work in retail. I do not like retail. Don’t let the grin fool you. Pokemon just does that to you.
The two notable things here are:
1. No gray hair.
2. Fat. Do you think that shirt I’m wearing is kind of baggy? It’s not, really. I just had it mostly untucked to cover up the fact that my midsection looked like I had ingested a tire intact.
Here’s the full uncropped version of the same photo (click to enlarge). You can see the festive holiday decorations (a single red bow) and Viewsonic 17 inch monitors were going for less than $600. Such a deal. One day I’ll write about how I was forced to quit my job there and less than a week later three people in the department got fired. Good times all around!
Within days of each other I get both a sty in my eye and my most fun organ (hereafter referred to as my MFO) decides it is suddenly going to become infected again and no longer be in a pro state (see what I did there?) Every time I put my right foot forward I get a small jolt of pain in my abdomen. It’s great aversion therapy to keep one from walking about on a hot summer day. But I’m going for a 25-minute jog tomorrow no matter what so I insist my MFO co-operate fully in this matter and stop being a nuisance.
Whilst I strolled about today gnashing my teeth with every other step, I observed that pretty near every young male (let’s say 40 or under) had a distended belly, as if they were bodily trying to empathize with the malnourished children of some impoverished African nation. Having had this sort of prominent midriff myself until recently, I know that it is in fact a kind of malnutrition that causes this. I call it The Twinkie Diet but it goes by other names, too:
Ronald McDonald is My Father
The Sugar & Fat is Where It’s At Regime
Chocolate is a Food Group, Right?
Jolly Elf Fitness Plan
My Shirt Doubles as a Tent Diet
I now regard the movie WALL-E and its depiction of our future aboard the Axion as prophecy. Choose your super-reinforced hover chair today!
