Week 167 Update

I woke up at 05:30 this morning and stepped up on Mr. Scale. He said, "183.5 pounds!"

This week I ate fairly low in points all week, and my average points-per-day was only 40.07. So, it is not surprising that I dropped 1.5 pounds. My walking was minimal, limited to two 30-minute walks with my "niece" (Jim and Tammy's daughter, who is visiting us) around the neighborhood in the evening after work. I will be seeing a doctor this upcoming week, who I hope will be able to shed some light on the pain that I have been having that has brought my intensive walking program to a halt.

Work was fairly quiet this week and that was nice. I had a very busy day on Thursday, but Friday was back to quiet again. It's a feast or famine sort of job, where you either have everything running well, and not much to do, or things are failing and you are scrambling to get them back to running well. On the busy days, time just flies by.

My water consumption has been good, averaging 58.29 ounces (7.2 cups) per day, right in the middle of my goal of 6 to 8 cups-per-day.

After revamping my Table of Contents page on my online journal, I ended up wandering over to the start of my journey, at the very beginning of the journal. On May 12, 2001 I set out on this path and haven't left it since. It has become a way of life for me now rather than a new exciting experience. In a way, I am treading on dangerous ground, because I am familiar with it, and "familiarity breeds contempt." It is now when I am probably most at risk of wandering away from the path, and I have to be extra careful to avoid that.

I have been criticized for being "too perfect" on the way I run my journey, and I have tried to understand where that criticism is coming from. First of all, I am not perfect at all. I don't always eat what I should, or even the amount that I should. I am not on top of things every day, or even all day. I have been fortunate enough to hold my weight at or below 187.0 for all my weekly weigh-ins since Christmas 2001. It has not always been easy to do that, but it is the one thing that I have tied myself to, and will not let go.

This year when things were going so badly, I came close to tossing in the towel, because a thought came upon me that it really didn't matter whether or not I was at goal in the great scheme of things. Fortunately it passed. You can say the same about anything in your life. Who cars about what someone did 100 years, 1000 years, or 10,000 years go? The same number of people who 100, 1000, or 10,000 years from today, will care what my weight was from week to week. That sort of reasoning doesn't get you anywhere. Instead...

I am back to focusing on what my thinner self feels like, compared with what I would be feeling like if I were still around 240 pounds. A waitress made my day today when we all went to a new Red Robin restaurant near our home that has been open for less than a week. When our orders showed up, the waitress was telling the girl who had brought out the tray with the food on it, who got what. When she got to mine, I had ordered the "Monster Burger" and (paraphrasing as closely as I can) she said to the girl, "The Monster Burger goes to this one, can you believe it? He is so thin!" I am 167 weeks into this journey but things like that are still very important! I can remember so clearly before standing in front of a full-length mirror quite often and saying to myself, "You are a fat man Al. You have to do something about it." I can remember my boss in Massachusetts saying, "Maybe you should lose a little weight," when the chair in my office broke a weld on it. I remember being always hungry and never satisfied, and feeling afraid when I stepped on the scale and it was reading over 240 pounds.

It is remembering the past that reminds me that I do not want to go there again. I am well into my third year of being at goal, and I like it here much better. That is why I still write down everything that I eat everyday. It is why I weigh myself daily and log it. It is why I track my water everyday. When I have to go into parts of the machine I am responsible for at work, today I move through tight places effortlessly that I had to struggle through before. My joints are not supple like they were when I was younger, but I can do things today that I couldn't before, simply because I am not lugging around that extra 55 pounds.

It is fun to go back and read how it was when I started out, probably like a veteran ballplayer would like to read about how things were his rookie year. I don't feel so much like a "kid at Christmas" as I did back then, but I am content, and I am so very glad that I decided to go on this journey. Today I do what I need to do to remain OP, mostly without having to think about it. It is still more proactive than my quit-smoking journey (which is over 6 years old now, and also continuing) because I do have eat each day, and that means I have to be involved in what I eat, but it is not any more difficult on most days than it is to not have a cigarette. Eating OP feels right today. Having a "Monster Burger" every once in a while, or even a "Monster Shake" fits into the program, and it is that comfortable fit, that give and freedom that is inherent in the system that makes this so workable.

Life is not a rigidly shaped routine that is always the same from day to day. A single human being is not even the same from day to day. Things are always changing, and that means that we have to have flexibility in our approach to life, including eating. What happens to a rigid piece of concrete when an earthquake forces it to bend? It fractures! Yet a pliable tree can often be bent over nearly double without snapping. Being able to bend, while still retaining the integrity of the program is what makes the program a plan that works for real people for life. While remembering that even a tree will break if it is abused too much, we can take confort in knowing that we have "wiggle room" where needed, while still remaining on track.

The laws of physics are brutal. If you jump off a cliff, you will accelerate at a rate of 32 feet-per-second (21.9 mph) for every second that you fall. In one second's time -- the time it takes to fall 16 feet -- you are already going nearly 22 miles per hour. One more second and you will be up to about 44 mph. In three seconds you are going freeway speeds, and there is nothing but your skin to protect you. If we should be exposed to the wrong physical conditions (such as that long fall, a raging fire, a head-on collision while going 60 mph, or a nearly infinite assortment of other things) we will cease to exist. The universe doesn't care. The "Darwin Awards," which so many find amusing, show that the laws of physics continue on whether we watch out for them or not. It is up to us to learn the laws and put them to use for us, rather than letting them destroy us.

In the same vein, if we eat the right amount of food for a long enough period of time, we will be at the right weight. If we eat a different amount of food for a long enough time, we will be at a different weight. It is not magic, any more that gravity, or gasoline powered engines are magic. It is the cold, unthinking equations of physics at work. We can work with them, allowing them to work for us, or we can ignore them at our own risk.

3 years, 74 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3" 239.5/183.5/180±2/BMI:22.94/WK-167
GRAPHS: Weight Loss/Year 1 Maint./Year 2 Maint./Year 3 Maint.
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