Goals, goals, goals

The experts say that in order to be successful at making a change, it is important to set goals. A well known mnemonic device for remembering how to make effective goals is SMART. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. I’ve been using WebMD.com to gather some of the information I’m basing my weight loss/healthy life style plans on. Although these things are always subject to interpretation; it suggested my ideal weight is 180. When I started this process, I weighed 242 pounds. So, to get to 180 pounds, I need to lose 62 pounds. Another guideline they have is losing 2 pounds/week. So 62 pounds losing 2 pounds/week means 31 weeks. That would put my goal date at August 29th; which through the magic of fate is the week of my 43rd birthday. 2 pounds a week is probably a pretty aggressive goal and may not meet the attainable and realistic threshold to be a SMART goal, but I won’t know that until I’ve got some time with the program.

This morning’s workout was a little bit tough. I’m doing 30 minutes on the treadmill and then some strength exercises. I am starting the workout slowly so I don’t get too sore which might lead to stopping. I upped the speed on the treadmill today just a bit and for the last few minutes was pumping my arms. Still not too much of a struggle but got my heart going a bit more. But the strength part was a different story. The last couple of squats I was feeling the burn ] and the leg lifts and crunches both were tough. I’m only doing 1 set of 10 reps of everything, but doing them very slowly and deliberately to get the most out of each rep. I was a little sore when I was done and then felt drained afterward. I complained to Mindy that I thought exercise was supposed to make me feel like I have more energy, not less, but I know that will happen with time. For the arm and shoulder exercises, I’m using 3 pound dumbbells which sounds lame, but again, I’m not letting ego get in the way of doing what I think is best for my long term maintenance of the program.

What’s in a name?

It just came to me, I hadn’t really given it much thought and when I decided to keep a blog of my experience, it just popped in to my mind and I liked it. I have wanted to try and lose weight for YEARS and I was never able to do it. I started exercising a few times and after I got ‘the diagnoses’, I made an effort to change my diet. We stopped buying Coke and we’d pretty much already given up McDonalds already except for the occasional lapse (the move Fast Food Nation was a turning point for me). But none of it ever lasted and the end result was that I have gained weight, not lost it.

Anyway, as I thought about all that time I spent knowing that I SHOULD lose weight but didn’t; and as my concerns about dying early as a result of this decision started to really bug me, it seemed obvious that in a sense I WAS dying to be fat. My choice was to continue to be unhealthy and that it was very likely a decision that would lead to my early death.

Yea, I’m not too complicated.

In the beginning

I’ve decided, again, to lose weight and to generally live a more healthy life style. I’ve also decided to blog about it for a couple reasons. The weight loss experts say that if you tell someone about your goal to lose weight, you increase the odds that you will be successful. I also enjoy writing and have been looking for an excuse to start a blog and these seem as good of reasons as any. In a way, blogging about this is a little counter intuitive for me. I am pretty big on privacy, as well as in body size and talking about this is likely to be pretty personal at times. So, I’ve not decided if I’ll identify myself and if the pictures I will post showing my (hopefully) progress will include my face or not. I’m also relatively safe since few people are likely to read it. And now, the obligatory background…

I’m 42 years old and have been fat the vast majority of my life. It started about 4th grade which I can tell from my school pictures. I was ‘chunky’ from that point until my junior year in high school where I started a brief respite from being fat. My first unpleasant memories of being fat are a little hard to identify in terms of time, though it was probably almost immediately. But the place, I remember well. I grew up in a small town in central Illinois. My mom used to take my brother and I shopping at a clothing store called Applebaum’s in Decatur, IL. This was the late 70’s and Applebaum’s was one of the old school clothing/department stores in downtown Decatur that wouldn’t survive the advent of malls and the departure of many of the factory jobs in Decatur. The store was 2-3 floors of (as I remember) clothes and shoes. I remember the first time that we had to go into the basement to shop in the ‘husky’ department, as they called it then; and how I felt embarrassed and that I didn’t like any of the clothes. Mind you, there wasn’t much to like about clothes in the 70’s, even (and maybe especially) for the most fashionable of dressers. But it was about being labeled ‘husky’, not the clothes itself, but that was the first time I can remember feeling shame. To this day, I hate shopping for clothes; it literally drains me of energy in about 10 minutes and I wonder if there is a connection between this experience in Applebaum’s husky department and my current dislike for the clothes buying process.

So, from the time I was about 9 years old on, I got to endure the comments and tauntings of my fellow youth that almost everyone does at one time or another. Surprisingly, I don’t remember that much specifically about it except one of my brother’s favorite clever turns of phrase, ‘fat pat the water rat’. I heard that one a lot. I should also say that I wasn’t morbidly obese or anything, just overweight; something a mom would probably call baby fat as long as she could, until it was pretty plain that it wasn’t going away once I was taken off of whole milk. Not that my mom ever said anything about me being overweight. My dad and brother, yes, but not my mom. My brother would taunt and my dad would just say matter-of-factly, ‘son, you need to lose weight’; but mom would never have said anything that would bruise a little ego. Even within the last year when they were visiting their grandchild and I walked out of the bathroom without a shirt, dad said something sensitive like the above advice and my mom chastised him for the comment.

The first time I tried to lose weight was in my junior year when a knee injury playing football put me in the hospital. I was about 5’ 10” tall and weighed about 190 pounds. I was round faced and very soft in the middle. As I lay in that hospital bed, I came to a decision. I was going to be very inactive for a while and that meant that I probably was going to get even fatter. The idea was more than I could take and I decided right then that I would go on a diet so as to not gain any more weight. The diet plan was very simple. I would skip breakfast and lunch and only eat dinner. And if the goal was to lose weight, it worked. Over the course of the next few months, the pounds dropped off. Especially after I got off the crutches, I suppose and what’s more, I grew about 2 inches during this time. And then another not so strange thing happened; I started feeling really good about myself, discovered a new bunch of friends and started having fun again. I even got the nerve, sort of, to ask a couple girls out and they “went with” me. It was an amazing turn around and it was, I knew, all because I’d lost weight. And then I got maybe a little over attached to the idea of losing weight. When I got down to 145 pounds (and now 6 feet tall) and was still thinking 5 fewer pounds would be just about right, friends started to express concern that I was getting to thin. That was a pretty cool feeling. I eventually stabilized around 155 pounds. And so it went until college. I added on the freshman 15 plus 5 and from there it has been a slow but steady incline until now. Most recently, my family and I moved back to the Midwest from the west coast and since that time four years ago, I’ve added another 20 pounds; the fastest gain in a long time. The highest weight I know of that I have reached is 263 pounds.

Which brings us to today. No late growth spurts, so I’m still about 6 feet tall, but now 242 pounds. It’s hard to believe I’ve gained nearly 100 pounds since my low weight in adulthood. I saw some pictures of myself from early in my freshman year in college recently and I couldn’t believe how skinny I was; I’d forgotten what I looked like. What’s more, I was diagnosed with diabetes about a year ago and I had a high cholesterol reading six months ago. The diabetes is pretty ‘light’. My daily blood sugars are actually good and the A1C (3 month blood sugar average) is just over the line to be considered diabetic. No medication, but doctor has advised I lose weight. The big concern is that it will just continue to get worse as I get older if something doesn’t change now. Worse, over the last year or two I have really started to feel my age and the additional weight. I get winded going up stairs, I can’t run around with my 6 year old daughter and I just don’t feel that good. And lately, I’ve started to worry. Worry that something really bad is going to happen. Like a heart attack or some serious diabetes symptoms. Or worse. So I have been thinking a lot more lately about finally trying to lose weight again. I’ve only really done it once, but I’ve been thinking that it is now or never. I’d planned to start as a new year’s resolution, but it didn’t happen. Finally a couple days ago, I talked to my wife about how worried I’ve been, and that seemed to be enough to start. The next day (a Saturday), I got up with the alarm clock and did time on the treadmill and some light strength training. Just a few exercises to go along with the cardio. I also am tracking what I eat and along with that, be more conscious of what I’m eating. Cutting out the snacks between and after meals (biggest challenge will be at night after the kids are in bed) and as important, working on portion control. I’m also going to weigh in frequently, though I’m not sure daily is the right amount. So I’m two days in and so far so good. First day was about 1500 calories and today, even with daddy/daughter breakfast at my favorite breakfast joint (two eggs, hash browns, 2 sausage patties and two pieces of toast-1200 calories) and pizza for dinner, only 2100 calories. I never tracked it before I started trying to control it, but I’m guessing that I was doing 2500 calories or more before. So there is the boring back ground. I’m going to have a separate document tracking my weight and any other interesting statistics and post pictures once I figure out the face thing. Though I’m doing this for myself, I hope that by talking about the challenges and rewards of this process, I can help someone else who is in a similar position.