Week 124 Update

I woke Mr. Scale up early this morning, and at 03:30 he said, "186.5 pounds!" That is a "no change" from last week, but I am content with that, even though it is only half a pound below my upper limit. I have been pulling back on the reins all week long, and it seems to have held things back from going over the cliff.

I only averaged eating 37.07 points per day this week. That comes to a total of 259.5 points total. On a normal week before, I would eat about 350.0 points. So, I ate 90.5 fewer points this week than what it would take to maintain my weight at 185.0 pounds normally. That should have caused 1.3 pounds loss of fat. My guess is that it did! I think that last week I probably lost about another third of a pound of fat, while showing a 1.5 pound gain in overall weight. If my guess is right, I am carrying about the same amount of fat today as I would have been carrying at about 182.5 pounds before. Since I am 4 pounds heavier than that, I must have added 4 pounds of water and muscle, but mostly water.

The water retention is due to pain medication for my back. My hope is that I am somewhere near the equilibrium point for water retention caused by the medication. If that has leveled off now, I can look forward to easing my weight back down to 185.0 by continuing to eat below my normal maintenance level. Once that happens, I can start adding points back in to stabilize at 185. As long as I feel energetic and can continue to exercise as I did at my normal level, I won't mind having a couple of pounds less of fat. The only place that the fat can come from is from my stomach, and I won't miss it from there.

All week long my back was improving. I was very happy with the results of going to the gym. Then on Friday night, on the way home from work, a city bus started to pull out in front of me and I slammed on my brakes. I was shocked at how that simple action wrenched my back. It is still hurting this morning. I was just coming around a corner, and perhaps was twisted around a bit, when I did the sudden stop, I am not sure. Anyway, the back saga continues, and probably will as long as I do.

This week I was thinking back and it struck me that not only is it 2003, but it has been 30 years since 1973, which was one of the two worst years of my life. My father died in January, both of his parents died during the summer, I joined the Navy on the labor day weekend, while I was in boot camp my son got bit by a rabid bat, and the shots didn't look like they were going to work at first to save his life, and then my first marriage essentially came to an end, with my little 18 month old son effectively being taken away from me for many years. Bad year. Putting 30 mostly happy years behind me has softened the pain but some things never completely go away. My father never knew that I joined the Navy and went into electronics. He never met my wonderful Dotti, or his namesake, LeRoy. Of course his gravestone has been told all of these things, but that is not the same thing.

Eating and Weight – Dealing with the challenge of medication induced water retention has been the story this week. I started off the week sitting right near the top of my target weight zone, at 186.5 pounds. I didn't want to see an increase at all, so I ate 27.5 points on Saturday. That is right in the range I was using to lose weight during my weight loss phase. It did have an effect, because the scale showed down at 185.5 on Sunday. I ate 42.0 points, and the scale jumped back up to 186.5. Obviously that was a water transfer transaction and had nothing to do with fat weight. I ate 41.0 points on Monday, and the scale jumped up to 188.0 pounds on Tuesday. The pain medications I took on Monday after my gym workout, were probably involved with that jump. I pulled back to 35.0 points and the scale dropped to 186.5 on Wednesday. I ate 43.5 points, and the scale held steady on Thursday at 186.5. I ate 32.5 points, not as a conscious choice, but because I was satisfied with that amount. On Friday the scale moved down to 186.0 pounds. I ate a pretty good dinner, but my points still were down at 38.0 points when I called it a day. This morning I was back up to 186.5.

I was happy that even on Tuesday when I had the bounce upwards, I was still 2 pounds below my personal goal. I originally chose 185 as my target to make sure that I never again went over 190, and so far it has worked. Even on my worst day, where water weight, slow digestion and whatever else has come along, I have remained below 190 for my morning weigh-ins. The last daily weigh-in where I weighed 190 pounds or more was on December 12, 2001. In a couple of months it will be 2 whole years since I weighed over my personal goal. For me, weight loss was exciting, and it was fun to watch the numbers drop, but maintenance is where the real satisfaction has shown its face. I look at my two maintenance graphs today far more often than I do my weight loss graph. I cannot say what the future may bring, but I am very pleased with how my journey has gone for the past 2 years, 4 months, and change. It certainly has not been perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I am overall satisfied with it. And that is all that I could have asked for when I started.

Exercise – I made it to the gym 3 times this week. That was my main goal for exercise. My back requires that I do this. In analyzing my week with the 2 hours or more of commuting that I do on most workdays, I decided that the only time of day that I could insure that I would be motivated and able to go to the gym would be in the morning before work. This week I shifted my entire day to 45 minutes earlier than before. Dotti has joined me in this change, we have both gotten up at 04:30 on the gyms days, and I have gotten up at 04:30 on the other days as well, to keep my body on an even keel. (As I have gotten older, that has become more and more important. Getting up at the same time each day keeps me from feeling tired, even when it is an early start, as long as I go to bed at a reasonable hour at night.)

At the gym, we spent just over an hour each day that we went. I started off each session doing 10 minutes on the arm bicycle, which is a great upper body exercise, and it gets the heart going very well too. If I hadn't taken physical therapy, I never would have tried that exercise. But now I think it is great! My forearms, biceps, triceps and shoulders all feel like they have had a good workout when I am finished. I then went to the weight machines to do the exercises that the physical therapist recommended. He showed me a pulley replacement for the rotary torso machine (which my gym unfortunately doesn't have), and it gives me the same feeling that the torso machine had done before. So, it is a good workaround.

The first two sessions I did 6 of the exercises, and the on my third session I did 8 exercises, which constitutes one full routine that he recommended. There is a second routine that he said I could use that has some different exercises, and I will be trying that one out soon as well.

All of that took just over a half hour, and then I moved to the treadmill. I set the incline on the treadmill to 15% and on the first two days I set the speed to 2.4 mph. I walked for 30 minutes, which took me 1.2 miles (at least along the belt).

I really owe this exercise, at least in part to Tom Kreider. During a discussion with him on the message board, a few days after my birthday, he got me thinking about inclines and treadmills. He was doing incline work with his workout and that got me started playing with the numbers.

The percent of incline for a treadmill is figured by dividing the rise in elevation by the distance traveled forward. When a treadmill increases its incline, it also moves the measuring device for forward motion to track your actual distance traveled rather than the horizontal distance traveled. In other words, it measures the hypotenuse of the triangle rather than the bottom edge. That does introduce an error equal to the percent of incline (for one mile 15% is 792 feet), but I ignored that for now. On a trail they don't measure the horizontal distance you travel either. They put a measuring device on the trail and mark off the distance you travel ignoring the amount of grade involved. That makes my calculations "close enough for government work" as we used to say in the Navy (and in civil service where I worked before the Navy).

The Multnomah Falls trail has an increase in elevation of about 800 feet at the highest point. It is about 1.2 miles from the Multnomah Fall lodge to the top of the falls. So that is a rise of 800 feet, that if you divide it by the run of 1.2 miles, you get an incline of about 12.6% average over the 1.2 miles. (The real trail has steeper inclines, but it also has some nearly level areas and even one stretch where you go downhill for a while. But the average is the same.) So, I figured that if you set your treadmill for 13%, and walked for 1.2 miles, you would have burned the same amount of energy as you would by walking to the top of the falls.

Tom's next contribution was that he actually started doing that walk on his treadmill, and has continued to do it for some time now. He sounded like he was enjoying it, so this week I thought I would try it too. However, I forgot to check what my numbers were before I started exercising and I set my incline to 15% rather than 13%. I just now caught my error. Oh well, it should make the real falls hike that much easier after doing 15%. I merely went up 950 feet rather than 800 feet.

On Friday, during our 3rd trip to the gym this week, when I got to the treadmill, I set my speed to 2.5 mph just to see if I could handle a slight increase in speed. (I am used to walking fast, and the slow pace seemed a bit strange to me. It is something like doing a few reps with a very heavy weight after becoming accustomed to doing a lot of reps with a lighter weight.) Even at 2.4 mph my heart rate was up. (The first day I made some estimates by counting my pulse for short periods and extrapolating it out to a full minute. The rate was somewhere between 140 and 160, maybe. I did not feel really confident about the numbers' accuracy.) The first part of the walk was tough, but after a time it began to feel good. I made it all the way to 1.2 miles and on to 1.22 miles by the end of thirty minutes.

I had sweat pouring off my brow during the walk and had to wipe it off several times to keep it off my glasses. My sweatpants and tee-shirt were soaked, and I felt like I had had a very good workout. I will try 2.5 mph again next time. I won't increase the speed again until I feel like I am ready.

I counted the aerobic points this week as 10.0 per gym session. The arm bike was definitely aerobic. I moved from weigh exercise to weight exercise without any attempt at resting between. I did have to set up the machines, but I have all the settings written down, so it is pretty quick getting the seat position, and the weight level set up. Of course the "Multnomah Falls" hike is aerobic. I counted the hike as 7.0 points, which is what it would have been if I walked my normal pace for 30 minutes on the flat. (2.5 mph isn't even worth a single aerobic point on the flat for 30 minutes, but the elevation increase more than makes up for the decrease in speed I think.) Playing volleyball is good for 3 points for 30 minutes, and the arm bike and weights kept my heart going at least as well as volleyball would have. So, I think that 10 aerobic points is if anything probably a little low for what I did.

That means that I also just reached my goal of 30 aerobic points for the week. Overall, it was a good week for exercise!

Water – On Saturday (5 cups) and Sunday (3 cups) I was a little low on my water consumption. But for the rest of the week I did quite well. I averaged 69.7 ounces (8.7 cups) each day, and that is over my target of 6 to 8 cups per day.

All things considered I am very happy with how this week turned out, and consider it a success.

2 years, 138 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3" 239.5/186.5/180±2/BMI:23.31/WK-124
Weight Loss Graph/Year 1 Maint. Graph/Year 2 Maint. Graph/Success Story