Week 189 Update

At 07:45 this morning I stepped up on Mr. Scale and he said,

We are visiting with my Mom today, to share with her this Christian holiday, which has been an integral part of American culture since its earliest days. The associated European trappings of Christmas (tree, presents, the Yule log, etc.) go back for several thousand years, well before the birth of Christ. The Christmas-New Year holidays are my favorite time of year, and spending Christmas day with Mom is a real joy. My folks always made a big deal out of Christmas, with a live tree, and presents, etc. I am sure that is at least partly why I look forward to it so much now.

Here is how this week went...

Saturday 12/18/04 – After I weighed in at 184.0 pounds, Dotti and I drove up to Olympia, Washington to visit with our son LeRoy.

Dotti has a very special knack for arranging things in a house or apartment, and LeRoy had moved into a new apartment just a short time back. He had been working a lot of overtime, and didn't have time to set the apartment up like he would have liked. So, he had requested a little assistance from the folks in getting everything looking right in his new home. I helped a bit by assembling a dresser for him, but Dotti and he did the bulk of the work. At one point, I got out of their way...

I was feeling pretty tired after all the walking that I did last week, and I was actually planning to take a day off from walking, but as we pulled into LeRoy’s apartment, I noticed that there was a really nice park close by, and it had a walking trail around it. It was too much for me to resist, and I had to go try it out. The trail turned out to be 4838 feet (0.916 miles) around. Before I set out, I didn’t know that it had a measured distance posted. In fact I was about half way around the track before I reached the sign where the distance was shown. So, I used my GPS to track my walk, (which matched the sign very closely). It also allowed me to measure the distance I walked in order to get to the park. Adding that together with the 3 loops that I walked around the path came to 3.31 miles. This brought my total miles for the year to 1149.2.

As I was walking around the park, I passed an older couple a few times, as they were walking in the opposite direction. We had passed friendly helloes back and forth on the first lap. On the second lap the lady said, "You are making very good time." Then on the final lap the gentleman said with a chuckle, "We were wondering if you had a twin that was walking today also."

In the evening, after the apartment was all finished, we ate dinner at Outback Restaurant. I had a burger meal that came to about 35 points. But since I had skipped lunch due to the timing of our drive, etc. my points for the day didn't go clear out of sight. I finished the day at 56.5 points.

Sunday 12/19/04 – We had spent the night at LeRoy's apartment, and I weighed 186.5 when I awoke. With the number of hours that LeRoy had been working, he looked really tired when we first showed up on Saturday. He got a good night sleep (so did Dotti and I), which I think helped. We did some shopping at Costco and had lunch at Sharis, where I had a breakfast meal, even though it was for lunch, and consumed 27.0 points. By the end of the day, Dotti and I were back home in Vancouver, and I had eaten 57.0 points. I finally did take a day off from walking.

Monday 12/20/04 – I weighed 184.0 pounds. It was back to work today, but with a difference for this week. The customer site where I normally spend my workdays is shutdown for 2 weeks during the holidays. So, I was to spend this week in the office. This would cut me off from my normal walking trails. However, I took my GPS to the office, with the knowledge that I could always walk around on the sidewalks if I had to, in order to the get miles in.

In the morning I arrived early enough to walk a couple of miles. So, I headed off, following a couple of main roads nearby. I had only walked a short distance before I pushed a wrong button and reset my GPS. I had done that months ago one time but I had avoided it ever since, until this day. What that does is clear out the data concerning what I had walked already. Fortunately, I was just under a tenth of a mile into the walk when I made the mistake. So, I reset my stopwatch and continued on, using the new location as my official starting point. On the way back, right near the end, the battery died on the GPS. Fortunately I was looking at it when it did, and caught the mileage number that it had registered, before the screen went blank. That shortened my recorded distance once more, because I had a bit more to walk before reaching the office. C'est la vie.

Even with the problems, I still got in 2.18 miles. I walked passed a few stores along the way, like Office Depot, and CompUSA, which I had driven to in the past, but which I found to be easily within walking distance of the office.

At lunch I was determined to explore a walking path that I had noticed near the office quite some time ago. Using the GPS, with some new batteries installed , I walked to the north on the path, which followed alongside a creek. At 1.65 miles it came out at an intersection that I was familiar with. I turned around at that point, and finished up with a total walk of 3.3 miles, bringing my yearly total to 1154.6 miles.

When, I got back to the office, I brought my lunch inside to my desk, where my supervisor and one of my coworkers laughed at how big the box was that I was carrying my lunch in. The comment was made that it looked about the size of the one that Herman Munster carried to work each day. My coworker said, "That is the diet that everyone is looking for, where you get to eat more." I asked my supervisor if he remembered what I used to bring to lunch. It had always been the same, and he remembered it clearly: two peanut butter sandwiches on sourdough bread, and a snack candy bar. It easily fit into a tiny brown lunch bag. I told them that I AM eating a lot more for lunch now.

Weight Watches is an eating plan where you get to eat more and still lose (or maintain your) weight. It is the eating plan where no foods are forbidden. In my opinion, when it is done right, it is the eating plan that everyone really is looking for. There is some hard work that has to be done along the way, especially right at the beginning, in selecting and preparing the right food choices, but once that has been done, it is like magic how it works: keeping the stomach feeling full, keeping the palate satisfied, and moving the scale to where you want it to be.

Perhaps the thing that they understood least was that this really is not a diet. The one who made the comment had been on the Adkins Diet earlier, and he had dropped quite a few pounds, but it was only temporary, as all diets are. The weight came back. The only reason that my weight has not come back is that I have continued the changes that I made in 2001, and made them part of my lifestyle. They were never intended to be temporary, because I wanted permanent results. My rule was, "Never do anything to lose weight that you are not willing to do to maintain your weight."

Everyone is looking for a magic diet where he can continue to eat like he has been eating all along, and still lose weight, while the nearly magical eating plan awaits him, where he can eat even more than before, and can do so for the rest of his life, while losing and maintaining his weight.

The holidays are great, and since I am not walking around hungry like I was before I lost my weight, they are not a big temptation to stuff high point desserts down my throat. I can have a treat here and there, and when I do, I enjoy it so much more than I did then. All the while I can still remain OP. This plan forces moderation on me, and that is the key. Deprivation can take weight off, but it will never maintain the loss. It is like trying to hold a book out in front of you at arm's length. You can do it for a while, but sooner or later the arm sags from weariness. The book will fall to your side sooner or later. Moderation is like resting your hand, that is holding a book, upon a countertop. You can hold it there indefinitely because there is no strain.

At the end of Monday I had eaten 47.0 points.

Tuesday 12/21/04 – I weighed 184.0 pounds. This was the first day of winter. I went to the dentist the very first thing in the morning. (I thought that this week would be a good time to catch up on things like that, where it would not impact on my customer.) They took the x-rays and identified some work that needed to be done the next day.

I didn't have time to walk in the morning, but at lunch I went over to the same trail that I had walked on Monday, and this time I headed south. The temperature was 42º, and it was raining. So, I put on my rain gear for the walk. I followed the trail until it came out on a road beside a park. I turned around there and headed back. I reached the office after walking 3.23 miles.

I found out on Tuesday that a customer of ours in Eugene was having some problems with one of our machines producing too many particles. One of my coworkers headed down to Eugene to give a hand. He was going to cover Tuesday, and Wednesday as well, and then on Thursday, if the problem were not solved, I would go down to help.

That evening I walked our 3.05-mile loop at home. That brought my total miles for the year up to 1160.9, leaving me just under 40 miles to go to reach my goal of 1200 miles, with 10 days left.

I ended the day after eating 54.5 points.

Wednesday 12/22/04 – I weighed 185.0 pounds. I arrived at work early and set off on a walk. I had discovered a loop possibility on the previous day's walk, and I decided to try and make it work. I walked out on the main roads that I had used on Monday morning, but instead of turning around, I kept going until I reached a point where the road crossed the walking trail, and there I turned to follow the trail back to the office. The loop was 2.62 miles in length.

The dental exam I had on Tuesday showed the need for a cleaning and some fillings. These items were originally scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, with the fun to commence at 2 PM. As the morning slowly wore on, I was thinking about my afternoon dental appointment. Finally lunchtime rolled around, and it looked like after lunch I would have just a short wait, and then I would be off for the dentist.

I went out on the trail that runs by our office for my lunchtime walk. I was glad that I was using my GPS, and that I had walked out that same general direction earlier, because there was some construction going on in the park where the trail ran, and I was forced onto another path. I thought it would join up with my previous route but it didn't. I ended up on a road and I use the tracking function on the GPS to show me which way to go on the road, and how to return to my correct course. In the end, I walked 3.28 miles, to bring my total for the year to 1166.8.

As I was getting close to the office on my return, I met my supervisor, who was heading out the office door. He gave me some unwelcome news. Rather than shortly heading to the dentist as I had planned, I first had to drive some parts out to a customer site, and then bring some paperwork back to the office. It was going to be close. The drive out to the site was fine. It looked like I would have some time to spare to make it to my appointment. However, on the drive back, traffic came to a complete halt. It took a lot longer to get back to the office than it did to get to the customer site. If at the last minute my appointment had not been changed to an hour later than originally planned, I would have been very late.

After hurrying across town as quickly as I could, I finally arrived at the House of Pain (yes I love the dentist's office ) 10 minutes before my appointment. The cleaning went well, and the three cavities were filled (sans Novocain), and I was off towards home.

For some time, we had been planning to have a little get-together, on Thursday night this week, with Dotti’s twin sister, her husband, and also their younger brother. Alas, as is often the case with a field service job, personal plans are made to be overturned. Wednesday morning, it was determined that I would for sure be going to Eugene on Thursday, and that I would be staying on for Friday as well. Since I would be spending Thursday night in a motel in Eugene, Eugene is just about half way to my mom's house, and we were going to be driving to Mom's place on Friday, it would make things a lot easier if Dotti was with me. (Otherwise, it would add at least 4 hours of driving to my trip on Friday.)

Dotti called everyone, and rescheduled the party for Wednesday night. That was okay for everyone but her twin sister’s husband. He had to work early the next morning and couldn’t stay late for the get-together. Still Dotti’s twin and their younger brother said they would be there. So, at least we didn’t lose the entire party.

When I got home after the dentist appointment, Dotti and I spent a couple of hours getting everything packed and loaded into the car before our guests arrived. We were going to have to leave early in the morning and didn’t want to have to deal with packing and loading the car then.

The party was a lot of fun, and I ended up staying up visiting until after midnight. (Dotti was up an hour and a half later than I was!) I only ended up eating 23.0 points for meals, but I had another 20.5 points for snacks. That brought my total points for the day up to 43.5.

Thursday 12/23/04 – After the late night before, when the alarm went off in the morning at 5 AM I did not want to hear it. I stepped on the scale, and it said 185.5. We got on the road after stopping at Starbucks for some “wakeup juice.” Dotti dropped me off at the customer site around 8:30 AM and headed over to the motel to check in, and to grab some sleep.

Thursday Dotti was supposed to have a Christmas party for her bowling league, but since we were now out of town, she missed it unfortunately.

I went to Eugene to help troubleshoot a "particle problem." Picture a human hair. Studies have shown that the human hair can vary in thickness from a blonde strand at about 20 microns, to a black strand around 180 microns. An average hair is somewhere in between, say 100 microns, or 4 thousandths of an inch. Hair is getting down to the size where you can just barely see it. Yesterday we spent our time chasing particles that were in the range of 0.12 microns, or about one thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. The wafer, where we were counting these particles, has a surface area of about 314 square centimeters (49 square inches). It is a flat silicon disk, 200 mm (8 inches) across. When a wafer is run through our machine, when in production, the standard says that it should not deposit more than 50 particles of size 0.12 microns or larger upon it.

If you rub your fingers together over the wafer, even if you are wearing clean surgical gloves, you will drop thousands of particles of that size upon it. The cleanliness of the area where the wafer is located is classified as “Class 1,” meaning that there is only 1 particle per cubic foot. This makes a hospital surgical room look like a dirt pile by comparison.

Chasing particles is one of the most frustrating things that we do, because the very smallest thing can throw just enough particles out there to cause the machine to fail. And since the particles are too small to see, it makes it very interesting locating where they are coming from.

By lunchtime, things had reached a point where we were just waiting for some testing to be run on the machine. That gave me an opportunity to give Dotti a call to see if she was awake enough to have lunch with me. She said that she would be happy to join me for lunch, and she started driving over. I set out walking while waiting for her to arrive. I got in half a mile, where I reached a point where it was the last place on that road where she could easily and safely turn in to pick me up, so I stopped there. Dotti arrived soon after that and we found a good Mexican restaurant nearby, where we had a nice meal.

At that time, the machine problem still looked to be up in the air. However, shortly after I got back things started falling into place, and soon the machine was back into production. At the end of the day, I called Dotti once more to ask for a ride, and then started walking to meet her. This time, since she was shopping at a store not far away, she had a shorter drive, but I hurried so I could get in another half mile. It came to only 1 mile for the day, bringing my year's accumulated mileage to 1167.8, but every mile helps.

Because we had taken a very late lunch, and our meal was so late in the afternoon, we didn't eat another meal in the evening. My total points for the day came to 53.5.

Late in the evening I got a call from the guy on swing shift with some very good news. The machine had run another particle test, after 4 hours of running product, and it was even cleaner than before! When the machine is running normally, it will actually tend to get cleaner with use. First of all, the material in the beam, that we are doing the implanting with, tends to coat things up, and that can stick the particles like glue against the wall where they will do no harm. Secondly, each time a particle is dropped onto a wafer, when the wafer is removed, that particle is removed from the machine also, and it can cause no further problems. So, when I got the call saying that it was running cleaner after 4 hours, things were back to normal. It looked like Santa gave us an early Christmas present, and we could finally put that problem to bed.

Friday 12/24/04 – Christmas Eve! I weighed 186.0 pounds. The machine particle problem had gone away, and it was getting cleaner with use. Since it took so long to get the machine back to normal, I remained in Eugene for the day, as a show of good faith to our customer, just in case anything else should pop up.

As it turned out, nothing else did come up and we were able to get on the road on time for Mom's house. When we hit the casino, that is a few miles from Mom's, Dotti stopped and played the slot machines. After wrestling with the one armed bandits for an hour and a half, she came out even.

During the same time, I took a 3.25-mile walk down the length of Canyonville's main street, and up a side street, and then back. It was a little strange for me walking there, because I have memories of that town that go back 38 years in some cases.

There is the barbershop that still has the name "Jerry" on the front window. The kids at school used to refer to the proprietor as "Jerry the butcher," not because he gave bad haircuts, but because he gave very short haircuts, and that was the era when long hair was just coming into fashion. Our school had a strict hair length policy for boys, and if you didn't get it cut yourself, there was the threat hanging over your head that you would be taken to "Jerry the butcher." I don't know if the poor barber ever knew what they were saying about him in the school 17 miles up the river, and I am sure that he did not deserve the handle. But high school kids sometimes do stupid things.

Down at the end of town is a feed store, that also used to sell bus tickets, and had an official stop for Greyhound. One time, in 1970, I purchased a ticket there, and it caused some stir back at the school when they found out. But that is another story.

Up the hill I walked to the medical clinic where my father passed away in 1973. That day I had arrived in Oregon a few hours too late to say goodbye to him before he passed away.

The Christian church school I passed was one where I sang once with my high school's small singing group when we came to visit in 1969.

I passed the road that begins right on this main street, forming a tee, and which heads up river, leading to my old high school, and beyond that, to my mother's house. Kids used to see how fast they could drive up that road to the school. It was 17 miles of twisting, turning, narrow road in the 60s and 70s, and if you could do it in 17 minutes you were really flying. Many people have gone off that road, over the bank, and into the river. Today the road has been widened, and it is much safer (and a lot less fun to drive ). When I took driver's education, for practice driving, our class drove from the school to Canyonville and back, trading drivers off along the way.

When I got back to the casino, with my walk completed, there remained one more very special memory that I had to embrace. My father's grave awaited me in the cemetery that sets up against the casino parking lot. Thirty-two years ago, minus a couple of weeks, I stood in that cemetery on a cold and rainy day, as we had the graveside service for my father. I was 21, and I was a father of a one-year-old son. I had yet to learn just how much I would miss Dad over all these years. I stepped up to his grave, on this Christmas Eve, and I shared with him many of the happy Christmas memories that I have of the years when I was living at home with my folks. He had loved Christmas, and he passed that love on to me.

The 3.25 miles that I walked brought my total up to 1171.1 miles for 2004. I had gotten in 25.22 miles in for the week, and worked my deficit down to only 28.9 miles, with 7 days to go. Mom's house has a couple of outdoor options for walking, and she has a very nice treadmill. My hope is to finish my 1200 miles up while I am at her house, so when we get home on Tuesday, I can rest up for the kickoff of my 2005 walking program on this coming Saturday.

When we arrived at her house, it was great seeing Mom, as it always is, and we are really looking forward to the rest of this visit!

I would like to wish all who read this a Merry Christmas!

3 years, 228 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3" 239.5/186.0/180±2/BMI:23.25/WK-189
GRAPHS: Weight Loss/Year 1 Maint./Year 2 Maint./Year 3 Maint./Year 4 Maint./
                2004 Miles Walked

Success Story

2004 Walking Stats