Latest official stats

These stats are from a month ago. We usually measure the first week of each month, but in February I missed the first week due to travel and the second due to illness.

We are going to officially measure next the first week in April. But I can tell you yesterday the scale said 278.

That's just the weigh it is

How often do you weigh yourself? I've gone from weekly to daily to whenever I'm at the gym. I know women who weigh themselves twice or even several times a day.

I'm at the gym a lot these days, so I may cut back and not weigh myself more than twice a week. I can do a lot of damage in a week, so weekly is out of the question. I like the scales at the gym...those balance beam things that many doctors still use. I had a digital scale in my bathroom for a while last year, but it drove me nuts. You could get on it three times in a row and get three different numbers.

The important thing for me is to not put too much weight (pun intended) into that number I see. There are a whole lot of factors in your body weight as measured on a scale. It's not likely I gained a pound of fat since yesterday, but that's how much the scale moved UP. Could be that I ate more salt than usual today, or drank less water. Who knows? It doesn't really matter.

What I'm interested is my body fat percentage, which gets measured by the trainer once a month. And however we measure, it's not just the latest number we need to consider...it's the trend. As long as I'm trending downwards most of the time, I'm making progress.

And remember - we're going for progress, not perfection.

(I need to update my stats. Gotta find my last measurement. It's on a post-it note somewhere around here.)

This is NOT why I'm fat...

...but this has got to be one of the funniest web sites I've ever seen:

This is why you're fat. Where dreams become heart attacks.

Mmmmm....Meat Cake.

Oh, and the Sandwich Cake? We actually had one of those at a bridal shower in 1980 (with plain cream cheese as the icing).

What? It was pretty good!

I'm glad I don't know how to quit this

For the past several weeks, I have intended to tell my trainer that I need to reduce our sessions to once a week. The issue is money, and a week ago I had a car repair that cost the same as 20 training sessions.

Looking at it from a purely financial perspective, spending $100 a week on an optional service seems a bad choice. There are so many more practical things I could use that money for - I could double up on my car payments (my only remaining debt); I could save for a decent vacation or maybe a down payment on a house; I could buy new clothes, which I need (ironically) because of the work I'm doing with the trainer.

But I can't quit him. I work out several times a week on my own now, but there is no way for me to reach the level that I do with him. I'm getting stronger every week, and I have never felt this good - physically or emotionally - in my entire life.

I'll do whatever I have to do to pay for it. It is the best investment I've ever made.

Worth. Every. Penny.

New stats

These are my first stats since October. What happened is that I was at an emotional and physical low point when it was time to measure in November, so my trainer suggested I skip it that month. Which was good. I think he sensed that I was near a breaking point.

Then in December we did measure, but I had gained. I was upset and I didn't write down the numbers, and I cried in the car on the way home. Not writing them down was a mistake (not that I can't get them from him now). Not facing something does not make it go away. That's an old coping trick from childhood that has no place in an adult's life...unless you are Scarlett O'Hara (look it up).

So no more skipping the measurments.

And as I have written, my low point was followed by a rally and I am on fire right now! Check out that waist measurement - 6 inches lost! There's a number anyone can love!

The sizes have question marks because I haven't bought any new clothes in a while. That will change soon.

Look what I found!

This morning I needed a three-ring binder for a project, and I'm working from home, so I pull one out of the bookshelf and lo and behold, it's the 2007 version of my "new diet" book which I started exactly one year ago today!

Here is my "before" picture from that book. I was 315 pounds:


This really made me feel good...because I weighed 285 on Monday night which means I am down 30 pounds in the last year. Wow! And that got me to thinking...I know my top weight ever was 330. So that means at this point I am 45 pounds lower than my all-time high. That is awesome!

I'm not exactly sure if this is me at my all-time high, but it would be close (it's from October 2001):


I know...the dark hair. Not my favorite look.

I get new official stats from the gym on Saturday.

Beliefs and feelings

Yesterday I spent the holiday working on my plan for overcoming my food issue. Now that I'm exercising regularly, it's time to face my food problem head-on.

One of the many books I'm reading about emotional eating is called "If I Am So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight?" by Brooke Castillo. The book's primary focus is to change the way we react to the feelings that cause us emotional eaters to overeat. In order to change your reaction, you have to understand and change your feelings. In order to do so, however, you have to explore the reasons why you have those feelings.

The author describes how to figure out the beliefs that are the source of our feelings. She says beliefs cause feelings, which cause actions, which cause results. If you change the belief, you ultimately change the result. This makes sense to me.

At work we call this a "root cause analysis". When we have a production or computer problem, the true cause of it is usually not obvious, or the problem would not have happened. We usually have to go through several rounds of questions to find the cause. If the cause of the problem was a badly-worded instruction in a manual, the problem will keep happening until we fix the wording in the manual.

So each time I feel the urge to eat when I'm not physically hungry, my first step is to stop and identify the feeling I'm having, then figure out where that feeling comes from. At the root will be a belief for me to explore and challenge and change.

I used to think that I was incapable of changing my feelings, that they were just there and I could only keep trying to change how I reacted to them. To think that I have the ability to actually change the cause of those feelings is empowering.