Week 41 Progress Report: Giving Thanks On Thanksgiving

© 2019 Bitmoji.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m sorry I haven’t posted for three weeks. I recently went back to work as a health insurance agent, so getting my business off the ground has eaten more and more of my available time. During that period, I got seriously off-track for my 90-Day Challenge Goal; I may fall short by a pound or two. First, the week-ending numbers:

Starting Weight:	216.0
Original Target*:	228.8
Adjusted Target:	213.7
Actual Weight:	214.6
Loss/Gain:	– 1.4
Total Loss:	88.0
% of Goal:	63.5%
Avg. Loss/Wk.:	– 2.1
*Original target calculated from a starting weight of 302.6 lbs. and an average loss/wk. of 1.8 lbs.

Next, the month-ending numbers for November 11:

Starting Weight:	224.8
Target Weight:	215.3
Actual Weight:	217.6
Loss/Gain:	– 7.2
Avg. Loss/Wk.:	– 1.6

Now, as of this morning, I weigh 212.4. That’s about 1.5 lbs. over the 90-Day Challenge target line, which (all things considered) isn’t bad. The fact remains that the general trend is still downward. Even if I miss the 90-Day Challenge goal, I can still make the goal of being at or under 196 by my 56th birthday.

I’m grateful.

Closet-Diving and Memories

Tonight, I went closet-diving. “Closet-diving” is when you go through your clothes to check the fit of older items you put away for “when I lose a few pounds.” A female acquaintance described it as something women do, but I wouldn’t be surprised if other men besides me kept some skinnier clothes from bygone days.

It started this morning when I put on my white guayabera shirt, one piece of a huge selection of clothes that a former coworker had given me after her husband lost a lot of weight and, ignorant of this fact, I had complained to her about the bareness of my wardrobe. (It was an incredibly generous gift; the total donation was easily worth $1,000 even in 2007.) A 3XL, I noticed with some amusement that the guayabera is now beginning to fit like a muumuu. Nevertheless, I wore it all day because guayaberas and tropical prints are good shirts to wear on a north-central Texas summer day, especially on “casual Friday.”

About an hour ago, after my brother had come home from dinner with his not-quite-ex-wife (I’ll leave you to wonder about that because I wonder, too), I mentioned the capacious Cuban shirt to him. “I’ll have to check out Goodwill,” I told him, “because this is the best of my tropical shirts. The rest are looking pretty ratty.”

“Hold on a moment,” Ted replied. He dived into his walk-in closet and found an ivory guayabera and a light-blue tropical print that hadn’t been taken out of the cleaner bags for some time. The tropical print was 2XL; it fits loose but good and is attractive as well.

The guayabera is a large. Not extra-large … merely large. And it fits. Not even a slight bit of strain at the button over my belly. That’s what prompted the closet-dive.

Week 4 Progress Report: Learning From the Past

Weight Loss Progress, Feb. 11 – Mar. 11.

Beginning Weight:	286.6
Original Target:*	295.4
Adjusted Target:	284.8
Actual Weight:	280.2
Loss/Gain:	– 6.4
Total Loss:	– 22.4
Average Loss/Week:	5.6
* Original target calculated on a start weight of 302.6 and an average loss of 1.8 lbs./wk.

Twenty-two pounds. I try to sound positive when I write these posts, but I’m actually a bit of a pessimist and a lot of a worrywart. Losing over 5½ pounds a week when I’d only planned to lose just under 2 per week is actually kinda scary: It shouldn’t have been this easy. (What’s wrong with me? Did I subtract too much from my budget? Am I losing too much water? Have I got cancer and just don’t know it yet? Fret, fret, fret.) However, I’m comfortable with the amount I’m eating, and no other physical problem has shown up, so I’ll take the win.

The last time I weighed in at 280 was in September 2009. It was a heckuva victory — I’d lost just over 46 pounds in 7 months. Then I tried to quit smoking at the same time. I’d grown too confident in my ability to stick to the diet; I thought at the time that I’d gotten to the point where the diet was maintaining itself. In fact, I had stopped tracking my food and being accountable to others. Eventually, as I struggled to keep smoke-free, I began rationalizing deviances from the diet and began to put on the weight I’d lost.

Four months later, I was smoking again.

Add this to my list of intermediate goals: I will consider that 46-pound record broken when I weigh 255 or less. But while COPD/emphysema is a growing concern, the smoking will have to wait for a while longer. I’m trying to keep my focus on one major life change at a time;  right now, obesity presents the more immediate health risks. And this time, I won’t make the mistake of thinking that a few weeks or months of conscious calorie-counting will be enough to keep me on the path to a healthy weight. This is the way I have to live from now on.

Santayana’s maxim about people who don’t remember history comes to mind. I hope I keep and learn from my memory of past mistakes.