Friday, July 25, 2008

Day 81 - Horribly close

Went out to dinner last night. Even picked a place (local diner) that I had a bad time at the last time to see if I could do any better. Didn't particularly care for the food, so it made it very easy to stay on portion. I wasn't starving like I was the last time we hit the diner, though. Small victories. Thank goodness for coffee; having one vice left makes me not miss the others so bad.

The new food from medifast is also helping; amazing how much less annoying it is when you don't have to eat the exact same soy powder every single day. (Some of the non-diabetic flavors actually seem... tasty. That can't be right, can it?)

So after a month of relatively slow loss, I've lost 6.5 pounds in the last 4 days. I'm down to 237 as of this morning, putting me two pounds away from my initial goal of 235. That's 45 pounds in 81 days.

I am pondering doing a scale switch once that happens, as my better half has a new scale that seems to agree with the scale at the gym. It's also finer grained (tenth pounds instead of half pounds), and, not that this has anything to do with my desire to switch, shows my weight as several pounds below my current. ^_^

I wanted to get to the 235 before the switch though. Soooo close.

Going out to Indian buffet today, and I blogged about the new low, and we're going into the weekend, so no doubt it'll be another 2 weeks before I get this close again.

Thanks for everyone who's posted comments so far; helpful to know that someone is slogging through these entries.

Also, go see Dr. Horrible.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Day 79 - on the road again

Had a mini plateau for the last 10 days or so; Day 69 had me at 241.5, I went back up, and down, not going below 241 until today, when I weighed in at 239!
  • Only 4 pounds to go on my initial goal!
  • Total loss is now is 43 pounds. (just over three stone.)
  • Loss is an average of 3.8 pounds/week; a slowdown, but still very nice.
Got a new batch of medifast food today, finally remembered to order something other than the default "diabetic sampler pack", so now I have some food I can actually, almost, look forward to.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Day 69 - A weekend that doesn't suck. At least for dieting

So, random weigh-in today; my “official” weekly weigh-in isn't until Tuesday, but this is a good daily low, so you get this one. =-)

Down to 241.5 pounds; that's a 40.5 pound loss in 69 days. That's a little over 4 pounds a week, which is unbelievable to me, especially given slow things have felt lately. 
  • Only 6.5 pounds remaining to my initial goal of 235. Only 2 pounds to the 230s!
  • My semi-final goal of 205 is only 36.5 pounds away - I'm already more than halfway there (since Day 1: 235 gets me about 61% of the way to 205.)
  • 40.5 pounds happens to be the weight of this printer sitting next to me: an HP 2600n laserjet. I just hefted this to see how much weight that is. I know there's some toner in there, but jeez, that's heavy.
On the one hand, this last point is one of the most disturbing parts of this process for me: It's hard not to equate good steps now with bad before. Have I really changed that much that I'm going to stick with it this time?

On the other hand, the daily weighings are going to be key, I think. Just like with my blood sugar about 2 years ago; it's way too easy to ignore if you don't have the data in front of you every day. Must take the measurements, not get discouraged or mad or frustrated. Get the numbers, analyze them, and then figure out what to do. Stupid numbers. You can beat them.

On the gripping hand, does that mean that you can't get excited about the daily numbers when they happen to fall in your favor? Hell no. Whoop it up. Enjoy your victory. Go blog about it, even. I'm going to go get a delicious cup of coffee, and will read your story when I return.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Day 64 - Week 9 weigh in

Weight

I have been feeling like I'm plateauing for the last month, which has been killing my motivation.

Of course, on this plan with the average supposedly being 5 pounds a week, anything less than that feels like you're stalled, but looking back over the official numbers the past few weeks, I'm still losing, just more slowly.

I missed the official weigh in on week six because I was in Chicago. Week five was 255, week seven was 250, week eight was 247.5, and today was 245.5; So, over 4 weeks, I'm down 9.5 pounds, an average of about 2.4 a week. So, nothing to sneeze at.

I think the thing that threw me is that partway through week six, I was already at 247, and then I went up before going back down, but the weekly weigh ins show that I'm still trending down. So, time to quit whining about the slow weight loss, especially since...

Meds

I had gotten my insulin usage down to 35 units a day before the long weekend, and then cleverly forgot my freshly packed pen as we rushed out the door on 3 hour car ride away. Realized my mistake about 2 hours into the trip.

So, I figured I'd do a trial run on the long weekend with no insulin whatsover. I figured, my mom is using a very similar type of basal insulin, if my numbers go completely out of whack, I have a fallback plan. I was only on 35 units, and was dropping 5 every few days, so how bad could it get?

As it turns out, not bad at all! My fasting sugar was 86 that morning, I discontinued the insulin that night, and through today, it's been 90, 89, 102, 113, 104; The intra-day checks don't seem to be going over 130 (just as before.)

Now, I had checked with the doctor at the last visit; She told me to keep reducing the insulin as I'd been doing, and if I discontinued it, great. So while I should have done that last 35 units over the course of about 2 weeks, this ended up working, thankfully. Kids: don't try this at home.

So now I've managed to cut my meds needed to about half, and while doing that, have better control than I did with all the meds. And I'll probably be able to drop more after my next six week eval. Now why didn't I do this earlier?

Exercise

Slowly getting back up to speed here. Biking 2-3 nights a week.

My mom just bought our family a Wii Fit, and the entire family loves it. The kids were arguing over who gets to play it last night when I got home, which is 1) typical for them when there's a TV involved, but 2) they were exercising. For fun.

After they all went to bed, I logged about 50 minutes on it myself, doing a variety of cardio, balance, flexibility, and strength training.

I just wish the thing wouldn't say "... Oh!" every time you step on it, like you've put on another 5 pounds and it's afraid to actually tell you.