Week 42 Progress Update: The Unexpected Milestone

Photos © 2019 Anthony S. Layne.
All rights reserved.

For once, I may be on time! Woo-hoo! So let’s start off as usual with the week-ending numbers:

Starting Weight:	214.6
Original Target*:	227.0
Adjusted Target:	212.3
Actual Weight:	211.8
Loss/Gain:	– 2.8
Total Loss:	90.8
% of Goal:	65.5%
Avg. Loss/Wk.:	– 2.2
*Original target calculated from a starting weight of 302.6 lbs. and an average loss/wk. of 1.8 lbs.

Considering that this last week included Thanksgiving (and the thickest, densest, and most sugary slice of pumpkin pie I’ve ever had in my life), a 2.8-pound drop is fantastic. It also included a four-hour stint collecting for my Knights of Columbus Council’s charity fund, which according to my Samsung Health app meant about 9 miles’ worth of walking back and forth along a highway island. (Nevertheless, I still managed to get a slight uptick on the scale the next day, possibly due to finishing off that slice of pie.)

I started off the day a little depressed. I’d made the difficult decision to send an email to my lead agent resigning my appointment as an insurance agent and start looking for another job. It was at about 8:45 a.m. when I finally got around to logging my weight. After I’d posted it to the ticker (to your right, if you haven’t noticed it before), I looked at it and realized something I hadn’t thought of:

I have 47.8 pounds to go to reach my primary goal of 164. Less than 50 pounds.

Week 27 Progress Report: We Now Return You to Your Regularly Scheduled Weight Loss

Here are the numbers from Monday:

Starting Weight:	239.0
Original Target*:	254.0
Adjusted Target:	237.2
Actual Weight:	240.4
Loss/Gain:	+ 1.4
Total Loss:	62.2
% of Goal:	44.9%
Avg. Loss/Wk.:	– 2.3
*Original target calculated from a starting weight of 302.6 lbs. and an average loss/wk. of 1.8 lbs.

Last week, I wrote on Monday as my mother lay dying in her bed. She passed the next morning, surrounded by her family. My sister had come in on Sunday; two uncles and an aunt arrived in the wee hours of Tuesday, just in time. More family arrived in the next three days. And the eating and drinking commenced.

Despite my good intentions, calorie tracking went out the window for a week. Thank God I stopped drinking to excess in my twenties; otherwise, my weight gain would have been much more. Moreover, I still managed to keep a limit on my intake — except for the first night, when we had fried chicken from Babe’s Chicken Dinner House (which, if you ever visit the DFW area, you have to try). Still, by Sunday morning, my siblings and I were “fooded out”; we were all ready to go back to our weight-loss regimens.

And the food just would not stop coming.

Week 26 Progress Report: Life Changes Ahead

So here are today’s numbers:

Starting Weight:	238.6
Original Target*:	255.8
Adjusted Target:	236.8
Actual Weight:	239.0
Loss/Gain:	+ 0.4
Total Loss:	63.6
% of Goal:	45.9%
Avg. Loss/Wk.:	– 2.4
*Original target calculated from a starting weight of 302.6 lbs. and an average loss/wk. of 1.8 lbs.

And yesterday was the end of the plan month, so here are those numbers:

Starting Weight:	247.0
Target Weight:	239.0
Actual Weight:	239.2
Loss/Gain:	– 7.8
Avg. Loss/Wk.:	– 1.8

In six months, 26 weeks, I’ve lost 63.6 pounds, a little under 46% of my surplus weight. It’s quite an accomplishment. I should be happy.

In the next room, as I write this, my mother is dying.