Author: lbloser

Eighth Entry

September 18, 2021

Hello,

It’s been almost nine months since I’ve written here.  Some of what I’ll write today will reiterate points I’ve made in the past.  I’m O.K. with that because I think that weight loss is pretty straightforward stuff but requires a lot of reinforcement.

I weighed 185.5 on the day I wrote my Seventh Entry and this morning I weighed 174.  I’ve been as low as 171 on two other mornings over the summer.  I’ve eaten a lot today so I’ll probably be up a bit more tomorrow.  Oh, well.

Covid hasn’t had much effect on my progress.  I’m retired and I suspect that my daily routine was disrupted by the lockdowns a lot less than the routines of working people or students.  I haven’t noticed any increase in stress eating over the past year and a half or so.

I’ve probably mentioned in earlier entries that I started making this most recent effort to lose weight on New Year’s Day 2011.  I peaked at 265.5 a few days later.  I’ve meandered around on the way down but a graph of my progress would show weight loss every year from then until now with one exception.  The exception took place in 2016.  I’ve had heart problems, retired on February 1, 2016 at the age of 67, and spent most of 2016 resting and regaining my strength.  I gained eight pounds that year.

Obviously, I am a big believer in the idea of gradual loss rather than crash diets.  I suppose that my idea of a crash diet would be one which aims for losses of a pound per week or more.  My personal target is one pound per month and I’ve actually managed only about eight or nine pounds per year.  Notice, though, that in 2021, my 11th year of weigh loss, I’ve managed to lose more than 10 pounds to date without any real sacrifice.  I almost never go to bed fighting the urge to have a snack first.

The beauty of such slow loss is that it’s pretty easy to sustain.  I believe that that is more important than a lot of weight reduction in a short period of time.  I should add here that I’ve lost substantial amounts of weight on three occasions earlier in my life and regained all of it and more each time.

See you next time.

 

Seventh Entry

December 28,2020

Hello,

Well, I’m back. That’s the last line from Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and I couldn’t help stealing it.

A few things motivated me to finally come back now. First, I got some emails a while back saying that a visitor had liked some of my longer entries from last year and who doesn’t like positive reinforcement? Thank you! Second, I have even more time to write about weight loss now since I’m not getting out much during the coronavirus mess. Third, I told an old friend about the “like” emails and she encouraged me to get back at it. Thank you, too! Fourth, I’ve slowly lost another five pounds since 6/1/19; I’m now down to 185.5 and I want to talk about that a little bit. Fifth, not too long ago I ran across a 2012 article from the New York Times about long-term weight loss that I’d saved and I thought it was worth discussing as well.

In 2012 I was one year into my own weight-loss effort. Rereading the article now motivated me to visit the website of the organization. They run a long-term study of people who’ve lost a lot of weight and kept it off. Though I’m not a researcher or an academic student of weight loss, their work seemed serious and well documented. However, in one very big way my experience has been different from the typical experience of the people they follow in their study. I still eat all of the same stuff I’ve always eaten. Pizza, fries, guacamole, burgers, chocolate chip cookies: you name it and I probably still eat it. Actually, another difference is that the people studied apparently don’t watch much TV. I don’t watch a lot of TV either but I do sit in front of a computer for long periods most days and doing that seems like it should have about the same effect on your body as watching TV.

So, here’s what has been going on for the last year and a half. As I said, I weighed in at 190 on June 1, 2019 which was my lowest weight in decades. I had dropped a very fast – for me, at least – 15 pounds during the early months of 2019 and felt like I was on a roll by June. Then that month we had a birthday, a family wedding, Father’s Day, and a dinner function for my wife’s job. Four excuses to chow down big time in one month threw me off balance a bit and I drifted sideways during the summer. I got down to 187 in September 2019, took a short vacation to the West Coast where I went off what I’ll laughingly refer to as my diet, and started eating too much again. I got up to 195.5 in November 2019 and have been very slowly coming down since then to my current 185.5.

Let me back up for a second. Over the summer last year, after I’d gotten off track a little in June, I decided that I was going to give myself some kind of reward when I was able to average 190 or less for an entire month as opposed to just hitting a one-day low of 190. I managed to do that in August 2019 and decided to buy my first jeans in well over 20 years. I’d stopped buying and wearing jeans at some point in my 40s because I thought that at my then current weight I looked sort of ridiculous in jeans. My employer had a policy of letting people wear jeans to the office on Fridays if you made a small donation to whatever charity management wanted to support at a given time. I’ve forgotten the details but the basic idea was that you could “purchase” the privilege of wearing jeans to work instead of dressier office clothes by making the contributions. This was the 1990s, don’t forget, and I worked in a very conservative setting. When I stopped wearing jeans myself I started giving my little wear-jeans-on-Friday stickers to my assistant so that she would always be able to wear jeans on Friday even if she’d forgotten to give a few bucks to the charity-du-jour. She and I have kept in touch since I retired and she reminded me about all of that a while back. It seems kind of funny now. Anyhow, I went out and bought three pairs of jeans in September 2019 so now I’m a jeans guy again at 71. (My daughters tease me by saying that I look “young and fab”, sorta though certainly not exactly (!) like Dennis Quaid in a great scene in “The Parent Trap.” It’s a 1998 remake of a much older movie and is very funny in its own right.) My plan now is that I will continue to try to come up with little rewards like that for hitting targets that I set for myself.

Getting back to business, my biggest point in this entry and in any entry, I guess, is that I believe that it’s necessary to find habits, patterns, disciplines, or whatever you want to call it, that you can live with forever, be patient with yourself, accept that you will have lots and lots of lapses, put your faith in tenacity, and then don’t ask more of yourself. I’ve had so many lapses that a diet professional would probably just shake their head in despair. Even so, I am holding at an 80 pound long-term loss and I’m confident that I can keep on with the eating diary which I’ve mentioned in earlier entries for the rest of my life, barring senility, and that the feedback it provides, the spreadsheet where I summarize the diary info, and the perspective which I’ve developed over the past 10 years will enable me to continue to lose weight and maintain the loss over time. Based on what you always hear and read about losing weight, I expect to plateau at some point. Maybe this past year’s results mean that I’ve already plateaued. Who knows? I have no idea whether I’ll reach a point where maintaining is all that I can manage or whether I’ll first reach a point where I’m happy with my weight and voluntarily switch to maintaining. Right now, I don’t really care.

So, despite some bobbing around, I am almost exactly where I was twelve months ago. That’s close to par for me. I’ve had months-long stretches before when all I’ve managed to do is tread water. I feel pretty decent about where I’m at now. My long-term trajectory is still down. I don’t doubt that some would say that that’s too much up and down movement but it’s what I’m able to do and it just has to be a lot better than where I was at the end of 2010. I guess that’s it for now. I hope that anyone reading this is doing well.

See you next time.

Sixth Entry

June 2, 2019

Hello,

Yesterday was a very good day for me in terms of weight loss. I hit 190; that’s a new low since I started my current push in 2011. I’m now down just a bit more than 75 pounds. I haven’t been this low since the early ’80s when my wife and I were dating. The fact that it was the first day of the month suited my sense of order: new month, new low at a number evenly divisible by ten. Pretty nice. In addition, my average daily weight during May was 1.5 pounds less than my average daily weight during April. That exceeds my baseline goal of having each month’s average daily weight come in at least one pound less than the previous month’s daily average. As I said in an earlier post, small victories like this, which are attainable over and over again, help me to stay motivated.

I’ve also said in at least one earlier post that I keep track of what I eat by writing it down each day. Here’s the story behind that. When I was in my late 20s I started seeing a new doctor. When I told him that I was unhappy about my weight, especially since my blood pressure was already starting to creep up, he suggested that I keep a diary of sorts in which I would write down everything I ate, preferably with an approximation of the number of calories, so that I could get a feel for how much I needed to reduce my consumption in order to start losing weight.

I liked that idea and bought one of those little 3″ x 5″ spiral-bound notebooks at the drugstore along with a similarly small booklet which listed the calories contained in various types and portions of food. It also contained some brand name information such as the number of calories in a 12 oz. can of Coke. I loved that little booklet and carried it for years until it fell apart and I became convinced that my ability to estimate calories was accurate enough for my purposes. I suspect that I still have it tucked away in the back of a drawer somewhere.

I now have a boxful of spiral-bound notebooks dating from August 12, 1980. I can tell you, for example, that I weighed 174.5 pounds on October 28, 1980 and that I ate – according to my very rough estimate – 2,597 calories that day. Don’t you wish you had that kind of information at your fingertips? I know, I know. That’s more than you needed to know, right? Bean counter obsessiveness and so on. It works for me, though, and I think the larger point is that the secret to losing weight is to find or develop a process that will work for you over the very long haul.

Over time, I settled on the format for recording my eating which I still follow today although since I’ve retired I no longer use the little notebooks. I’ve moved up to spiral-bound steno pads which measure about 5″ x 9″ simply for convenience. The little pads were great for carrying around with me all day when I was working but the bigger pads are easier to work with and I just leave them lying around the house between meals. Anyhow, each day gets its own page in the notebook. I list the day of the week and the date at the top of the page; I leave space at the bottom to record my weight, the total number of calories I consumed during the day, and blood pressure info if I feel like taking it. During the day, I list everything I eat and drink on the left side of the page and enter my estimate of the number of calories on the right. I also usually keep a running total during the day. That helps me know for sure whether I need to eat a light dinner, avoid snacking late in the day, etc. I record the previous day’s total calories on my spreadsheet the next morning. If you’re interested, I talked about my spreadsheet in my Second Entry dated May 14th.

I just looked and I see that I started this blog on Sunday, May 12th, so I’ve written six unevenly spaced entries in three weeks. So far, that has felt manageable so I may try to continue writing at that pace if you’re interested in checking back from time to time to see if I have posted anything new.

See you next time.

Fifth Entry

May 23, 2019

Hello,

First of all, let me deal with some housekeeping stuff. I am brand new to blogging and still having growing pains. I’ve botched some of the automated WordPress admin instructions and sometimes haven’t even been able to login successfully. Although I haven’t tried too hard, I also haven’t been able to reach their support people for help.

So, that leads me to acknowledging the individuals who have viewed and liked my previous posts. Thanks! As I get better at this I’ll visit your sites, leave comments, and so on. I noticed that a couple of the people who have come to my site post recipes. After I get used to dealing with how WordPress works I may put up some recipes, too. I’ve always cooked a tiny bit and I’ve started cooking more now that I’m retired, especially since my wife is still working full-time.

As I mentioned earlier this month, I’ve been on a long, slow weight loss journey since January 2011. As of today, I’m down 72 pounds. I’ve tried losing weight more rapidly several times in my life and have never been able to keep the weight off after I’d lost it. I’m 70 years old, by the way. Anyhow, the long and slow method has been working for me. I have generally regarded a month as being successful if my average daily weight for the entire month is at least one pound less than my average daily weight for the prior month. I got to that point for May a couple of days ago so May is a winner. That feels even better than usual because I only lost an average of .6 of a pound during April. Last October was the last time I had come in under a full pound. I’ve had a couple of 3 or 4 pound loss months along the way so it averages out. I understand that that the idea of being happy with a one pound loss for the month seems like setting your sights awfully low, but I have this eight year stretch of steady losses going for me now and I feel pretty confident that I can keep it up. I also feel somewhat confident that I’ve reduced my idea of what constitutes a normal day’s food consumption enough that I’ll be able to maintain my weight once I decide to stop trying to lose. Time will tell. In the meantime, I get to enjoy a lot of small victories.

I hope that everyone enjoys the Memorial Day long weekend! (I noticed that I’ve had a couple of views from people outside of the United States. In the U.S., the last Monday in May is a holiday the purpose of which is to remember and honor those who have died while serving in the military. It is also often looked upon as the informal beginning of summer activities and recreation.)

See you next time.

Fourth Entry

May 19, 2019

Hello,

I hit a new low today for the first time in six weeks. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I stepped on the scale this morning so it was a pleasant surprise to see the 1.5 pound drop from yesterday. My scale measures weight to the nearest half pound, by the way.

See you next time.

Second Entry

May 14, 2019

Hello,

As I said in my first post, I keep eating diaries which include estimates of the number of calories in everything I eat or drink. At the end of the day or the following morning, I add the day’s calorie consumption figure to a spreadsheet. Each row of the spreadsheet includes the date, my weight that day, the total number of calories consumed, the amount of time I spent doing cardio exercise, and the amount of time I spent doing strength training. I’m one of those people who find it helpful to know whether and how much they are up or down each day so I do weigh myself every day.

I set up the outline of the spreadsheet for the coming year in January so that afterwards all I have to do is fill in each day’s figures. It’s easier than it sounds if you are familiar with using spreadsheets such as Excel. You could create the same records by hand, of course; it would just take more time. I also have calculations built in at the end of each month which compute my average daily weight for the month, my average daily calorie consumption for the month, as well as some exercise statistics. Again, these are set up at the first of the year so that the calculations are done automatically as I fill in the daily data. I like to focus on monthly averages rather than the highly variable daily figures. I still obsess somewhat over daily amounts but having the running monthly average helps me keep it all in perspective.

As you can see, I’m the type of person who finds fairly detailed written records to be helpful. However, there’s more to it than that. Unfortunately, I am very good at deluding myself into thinking that I haven’t eaten too much or that I haven’t gained any weight if I don’t have a record of what happened. Having the written record also helps to keep me from getting overly discouraged. For example, if I’m feeling badly about not making good progress I can look back over the figures for recent weeks or months to remind myself that I’m doing pretty well.

At this point you might not be stunned to learn that I am a Certified Public Accountant and that I spent all but three of my 42 working years doing mostly tax, accounting, and other financial work while working as a paralegal at a large law firm.

See you next time.

First Entry

May 12, 2019

Hello,

This is my first post on my first blog so please bear with me.

I plan to write about weight loss. I’m not a medical professional.

I have gradually lost 70 pounds at an irregular pace over the past eight years and four months. I’m a 70 year old man and I weigh 195 pounds today. I’d like to lose additional weight but I don’t have a particular goal in mind .

I hope that writing here will help me to clarify my thinking and to remain focused on losing more weight. I also hope that others may feel that I’ve provided them with some useful perspective as I try to describe my experiences and state of mind along the way. I don’t plan to offer advice as such since I am speaking entirely from the point of view of my own weight loss history and I simply don’t consider myself qualified to offer specific suggestions.

The main reason I feel that doing this could be worthwhile is the fact that I’ve tried to get and keep my weight down since I was a teenager but have always failed until now. I’ve managed the getting it down part a few times over the years but the keeping it off part has always defeated me. This time, though, I’ve gone for years without quitting for longer than several months at a time or regaining more than a small fraction of what I’d already lost.

The one exception was a period during which I regained half of my previous loss in the form of water weight over a few weeks just prior to landing in the hospital with heart failure. I had lost 40 pounds by then but regained 20. With diuretic drugs I lost that 20 pounds of water weight during the week I was in the hospital and I’ve lost another 30 pounds over the last three years and eight months, getting me to my 70 pound net loss over the entire period of eight years and four months.

I am still on two diuretics and I have no idea how large a role they have played in my more recent weight loss.

I keep eating diaries with calorie counts which show that my daily calorie intake is down 25% relative to what it was when I started losing weight in early 2011. I also have no idea how accurate that 25% figure is since my calorie counts are estimates. I am very confident, however, that I eat a lot less now than I did then.

My appetite has slowly diminished and I don’t understand why. Perhaps my body has slowly adapted to my reduced intake. I’ve particularly noticed the reduced appetite during the last 10 or 11 months and my weight loss has been somewhat more rapid during that time.

I try to limit my eating to a 10 or 12 hour period each day.

I haven’t changed what I eat. My diet can probably be fairly described as a typical American diet with high fat, salt, and sugar intake and low fruit and veggie intake. I did quit drinking alcohol at my heart doctor’s suggestion.

I don’t smoke.

I exercise four to six times a week. I do two to four hours of cardio exercise on a stationary recumbent bike and 1.5 hours of strength training along with an hour of stretching during a typical week.

I didn’t intend to go on this long my first time out but I think that this gives you a pretty good first look at my basic picture.

See you next time.