Losing Weight In Public — Week 8

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2Week 1 weight: 305 pounds
Last week’s weight: 293 pounds
Current weight: 289 pounds
Weight lost since last week: 4 pounds
Total weight lost: 16 pounds

Yay, the weight loss has started again. As great as that is, last week held another surprise for me: I could fit into some old/new pants previously denied to me. I have several pairs of jeans from the last time I took the low carb plunge. Last time, I lost about 60 pounds, taking me to where I am now. Then I gained about 15-20 pounds and couldn’t wear the clothes I’d purchased. How pathetic. But I did keep most of the weight off (35-40 pounds), which is good.

Last Week’s Successes

I attended a meeting with pizza (my favorite) and didn’t eat any. I did gobble down the salad that was ordered with it. I’m pretty sure that salad (one of two) was supposed to be shared with everyone … as well as the dressing. But whatever, I ate it. You have to understand: I was in pizza prison. And when you’re in pizza prison, you take what you can and sometimes you gotta cut somebody.

Last Week’s Lessons

I think not eating 2x 22 oz. steaks really helped. I kept my meal sizes more sensible, and no, I wasn’t perfect. I had a small piece of pie on Friday (coconut). I had some drinks. I never felt hungry or anything, which is what you’d expect going low carb.

This Week’s Challenge

I’ve always found it very difficult to lose weight following a big loss. I also find it hard to not gain weight. So that’s the challenge: hold my ground, and cut anyone who tries to take my salad.

Losing Weight In Public — Week 4

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Me, looking at pie.

Week 1 weight: 305 pounds
Last week’s weight: 297 pounds
Current weight: 295 pounds
Weight lost since last week: 2 pounds
Total weight lost: 10 pounds

My fourth post. I am a stranger in this land of 200s. Mysterious and frightening be their ways. They eat and then they stop! Their bathroom scales, they do not break! At first, I was but a scared traveler in their midst, scurrying from shadow to shadow, nibbling as I went, afraid at any moment they would see me and shout, “That fat guy has no clothes!” What are they doing in my bathroom at 7 a.m.? I DO NOT KNOW!

Last week’s big successes:

Ok, I’ll just say it right here: last week was mostly great. We had one round of catering at the office and I didn’t eat any of it. Also, though I went out to a few restaurants, I didn’t order any dessert. Yay for me, please pass the ketchup.

Last week’s failures:

Isn’t the world more fun when you don’t blog about your mistakes? I sure think so. Ok, so last Friday at the team potluck was a total fricking bust. I tried like 4 different desserts, and then I tried them all again. I had carbs up the wazoo. How they got up my wazoo, I have no idea, but they were there when I woke from my sugar coma. Really stupid on my part, and it’s a miracle I lost any weight at all. If anything, that shows you can screw up and still succeed, but therein lies a problem. Now I know I can screw up and succeed. Pandora has left the building, and she’s carrying an open box of Twinkies.

This week’s coming challenges:

I can’t think of anything specific, except for the possibility of a meetup group of some sort. Oh yeah, we might go to a seafood place for happy hour. I can eat seafood until my head falls off. Woot.
One challenge we should go ahead and acknowledge: desserts. Every week of this whole “Losing Weight In Public” thing has shown I can’t stay away from them. So it’s safe to say that’s my biggest challenge this week: not eating desserts.

Conclusion:

I’m really looking forward to getting my eating under better control. I need to plan better. I need to figure out why I do the things I do. Am I trying to escape? If so, from what? Am I trying to fill up a hole of some kind? Or am I just a human with millions of years of evolution weighing me down, screaming, “Eat before you starve! Eat before you starve!”

I’d like to blame it all on Darwin, but you know what happened to him?

He died.

See you next week!

Losing Weight In Public — Week 3

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Sad little fat man.

Stuffing my face with carrot cake. Surprisingly skinny-looking photo. But then, I’m sitting, and I’m 6’5″.

Week 1 weight: 305 pounds
Last week’s weight: 300 pounds
Current Weight: 297 pounds
Weight lost since last week: 3 pounds
Total Weight lost: 8 pounds

Yes, I’ve renamed the series to “Losing Weight In Public.” I think it sounds nicer, and I think it’s more descriptive (inspired by Dean Wesley Smith’s “writing in public” series). Hope you agree!

I’m going on the third week of the experiment. So far, I’m fairly happy. I could be making better choices, and I could prepare myself better for various challenges. I have to get out of the mindset that eating is recreation (vs. fuel, which it is).

It’s not so much that I love food, it’s that I like eating. For other people, maybe that’s healthy. For me, it’s just a minefield full of cobblers and cheesecakes and mashed potatoes.

Last week’s big successes:

1) Totally, totally, totally ignored the catering they brought in (totally!). This happened twice. Once with begals, the next with these really great sandwiches. Sigh.
2) Someone on the team brought in red velvet cake or something, super delicious looking. I didn’t even taste it.

Last week’s challenges:

As you can see from that sad photo my wife took, I ate something I shouldn’t have. Carrot cake, at the Outback. Looking back on that dessert, I barely remember it, other than that I enjoyed it. One thing I remember is it being really sugary, particularly the icing. I remember thinking, “If I could just have the cake part, that’d be better, because the rest just kind of overpowers it.”

That’s one thing folks new to low carb will discover: sweet stuff tastes too sweet, if you go without it long enough.

Despite the occasional screw-up on my part, my taste buds have adjusted. For example, I can’t drink Coke anymore (Dot can’t either). And I don’t like artificial sweeteners as much. I still like the occasional Diet Coke, though (with ice), so I’m not completely cured.

Another challenge last week was eating over at our friends’ house. Pork loin, mashed potatoes, carrots, and collard greens. I should have stuck with the pork loin and collards. I shall say no more.

The rest of the week was mostly fine (several drinks on Friday with the meetup group — had a blast).

I realize that I can’t keep screwing up as these weeks start accumulating, because my body’s going to be very miserly when it comes to giving up pounds. That said, I’m optimistic I can get fully back into the swing of things.

This week’s coming challenges:

Catering will always be a challenge, so long as I’m working for a living and not going full time as a writer…

Ok, yes, that’s BS, I’ll turn myself in right now. There are plenty of overweight people out there who don’t work under the constant threat of catering. I have to remember that no matter where I am, I need to be vigilant and always have a plan.

One challenge I need to plan for this week is: my team is having a potluck. Oh. My. God. Potluck?!?! Potlucks are like my favorite thing in the world! If I don’t pig out, that’d be insulting to everyone there, right? Talk about a permission slip to screw up!

I have two options here:

  1. Come with some low carb food I’m happy with and just stick to that (and maybe have anything else there that’s low carb, like salad or whatever, and in the right portions).
  2. Don’t go.

I’m seriously considering option 2, because I don’t trust myself to attend without messing up. I’d just get there and start lawyering with myself, making deals like, “If I pig out now, I have all week to fix it, and didn’t I mess up last week and still lose weight? See, I can do it!”  Pretty lame, huh?

Ok, that’s enough whining. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

John’s Little Problem — Week 2

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cobler

Cobbler: omg, so good…

Beginning weight: 305 pounds
Weight lost since last week: 5 pounds
Current Weight: 300 pounds

Today begins the second week of my big fat experiment. Last week had a lot of challenges, but I seem to have done all right. If I hadn’t, I would have posted anyway, because I said I would — and that looming embarrassment kept me more or less on track all week. Thanks anonymous Internet people!

Challenge 1: Catering To My Needs

Last Tuesday, my job had three meetings with an unholy amount of catering, and they stacked it all in the common area when they were through. Worst of all, they had my favorite thing in the world: cobbler, in two flavors — peach and apple. Who doesn’t love apple cobbler? Crazy people, that’s who. I avoided the cobbler and settled for a few pieces of chicken (breaded … ugh, I know).

Challenge 2: Dining And Whining

The wife and I went out a few too many times last week (see her Sunday blog post). The problem, I think, is we don’t have a lot of friends in the area. Ok, none, really. Our closest friends live about thirty miles away, and we only see them about once a month, tops. So the wife and I tend to go out. There’s background music, atmosphere, drinks-drinks-drinks (whiskey or wine, not beer), food we don’t have to make, cheerful waitstaff, etc. And way too many opportunities to over indulge.

Challenge 3: Revenge Of The Cobbler

On Saturday, I ended up breaking down and eating some blackberry cobbler on one of our little outings. I felt bad about that. Not the end of the world, and not in unlimited amounts (like those giant vats at the office…), but definitely the end of ketosis for about 24 hours. Sigh. Something to work on.

This Coming Week…

This week’s challenges are mostly unknown, except for Friday. The wife and I joined a meetup group that’ll be going to a bar for happy hour. “Are you out of your mind?!” you say. Not entirely. We’d probably go out anyway at some point. At least this way we can meet a few folks, make new friends. Also, it’s scheduled fun — for Friday. Not “I’m bored, let’s go mess up” fun three days in a row. And we do need more friends in the area. We’ve joined a few other meetup groups as well. Each will have its food challenges. One’s a bowling group. The other’s an eclectic group that does all kinds of odd things, from board games to happy hours to going to museums.

I’m feeling pretty good about where I am. Five pounds is an awful lot to lose in a week, and I’m sure next week will be more realistic. We always lose the most weight in the first week of a “diet,” whereas “lifestyles” produce less spectacular (though longer lasting) results.

See you next week!

John’s Little Problem – Day One

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2Since my last weigh-in, I’ve gained 3 pounds, and now weigh 305.

At the urging of my overworked plumber, I’ve decided it’s time to take my weight loss seriously. Ok, that was a joke. The first part, not number two.

*cheers, laughs, and cries of encore, encore*

Everyone likes a jolly fat man.  Especially coroners and morticians. Which is why I’m writing this post, quite frankly. I just turned forty-five, I’ve had a small scare recently with some very odd heartburn that’s lasted way too long, and I’m worried about my health. The doctor says the heartburn is probably some damage at the bottom of my esophagus, so any amount of acid (even normal) is probably the cause of it, and I just need to heal. But here’s the scary part: if it doesn’t heal, he’s asked that I come back to find “other causes.”

Yeah. Scary.

How I Got Here

A few years ago, after my wife, Dot, quit her job and got serious about her weight loss, I got serious too and did the low-carb thing with her. We both lost a lot of weight right off. She lost like fifty pounds and I lost about the same.  Then she kept losing, and for two years I stayed right around three hundred pounds.

There are a few reasons for this. One, I work in an office, and however well I ate at home, when nobody was around to tell me “no!” and swat me with a rolled-up newspaper, I’d go to town on pizza, cakes, catered sandwiches, cookies, chips, and doughnuts. Sometimes I’d resist and eat what I’d packed for lunch that day. Other times I’d eat what I packed that day and go to town anyway. Still other times I’d go out and pay for lunch.

“But isn’t going out to eat super expensive?” you hypothetically ask.

“Not usually,” I reply to the suppositional you.

At the office I work at, there are always vendors or staffing reps to take me out for free, or team-building outings to all-you-can-eat places, or vendor-paid happy hours with both drinks and appetizers. And yeah, sometimes I’d just go out on my own, rather than stick to the lifestyle I’d turned into a diet.

So basically, what I’m saying is: I can’t be trusted.  And that’s where you, gentle Dot-2-Trot blog reader, come in.

Confessing My Three-chin Sins

For the next however-many months, years, whatever, I plan to show up here every Monday and confess my eating sins (if any) and successes (if any). I don’t plan on going into a lot of sciency stuff, like Dot, but I may post something I find once in a while. I like the science too, but before I start with the talking, I’d like to pack a little success under this overstrained belt of mine … kind of thing.

Each week, I’ll post my current weight and maybe talk a little about the challenges I overcame, or the positive things I’m doing. For example, I plan to join the free gym at my job—not to lose weight, but to gain health. I’ve noticed in the past that when I work out, I’m more likely to pay attention to my eating, and that results in positive change.

By confessing on my wife’s blog like this, I hope to keep myself honest and add a little public pressure/shame to my daily grind. Dot can’t watch me all the time, but I know you guys will be there the following Monday to give me grief if I screw up, because that’s what anonymous friends on the internet are for.

I’m really looking forward to it…