Week 250 Update

It was 06:40 when I stepped up on Mr. Scale and he said, "193.5 pounds!" I replied, "OUCH!"

Well, this one trips an alarm off in my head. I have had a lot of distracters going on in my life of late, and I have allowed them to push my weight control journey to the back burner. I have been going through the motions (journaling what I have been eating and drinking, and posting the results here), and I have been holding my eating down to what should be a reasonable level.

However, I have been using what might be termed "dead reckoning." With "dead reckoning," a navigator would set a course from a known position, and travel in a particular direction for a particular amount of time, and judge his new position based upon assumption and calculation. He would assume that he had been moving in the correct direction, and traveled at a correct speed to bring him to the correct location. Why would he do this? On an overcast night, it would be impossible to take a reading of position from the stars, and so dead reckoning would be used.

I feel that it is time to make my journey my first priority once more. My intention at this point is to set 40.0 points as my upper limit for my daily eating, until I am back in my target range. I averaged 42.36 points-per-day this week, but if I don't eat over 40.0 points on any day of the week, my average will probably fall well below that. This will require me to pay attention closely to what I am eating each day, do some pre-planning that I have not done for quite some time. Perhaps a shake up on my standard meals will be in order to make this easier to do.

Today it starts, and we will see where it leads…

Dotti maintained this week in “One-derland”! As usual, she is doing great on program! You can follow her progress at her Dotti's Return to Goal page.

Saturday - I weighed in at 190.0 pounds. LeRoy came down to visit with us for the weekend and we are very happy that he did! We ended up watching Zathura, and then Jumanji. They have a connection in the concept of a game running the universe for a while, and in events being dictated to the universe by "moves" in the game. However, beyond that, these movies have quite a different feel to them. They both have something to recommend them, and we enjoyed watching them both.

At the end of the day, my points tallied up to 51.5.

Sunday - I weighed in at 192.0 pounds. With a large evening meal the previous night, and some popcorn during the movies on Saturday, the jump up was not surprising.

We went out shopping on Sunday (we had a 6.0-point Very Berry Sundae at Costco), and then stopped in for a dinner at Sweet Tomatoes (11.0 points) before LeRoy headed back home.

By the end of the day I had eaten 47.0 points.

Monday - I weighed in at 192.5 pounds. It was a brisk 22° when I left for work in the morning, and it stayed fairly cool all day long. Fortunately, the roads were dry when the temperature was so low, so no harm was done to the driving conditions. J

The day at work was fairly routine. And that is a good thing on a Monday morning. Sometimes problems accumulate over a weekend, and we come in to a mess.

In the evening Dotti fixed us a nice meal that included mushrooms and other goodies, and all for only 8.5 points.

I ate 36.5 points for the day.

Tuesday - I weighed in at 190.5 pounds. At lunch today, my company had a meeting. (You have to just love it when they don't pay you for your time during lunch, but they insist that you be there. J) We have some kind of audit coming up next month and they wanted to make sure that we were aware of what needed to be done.

In the evening, I put a new chair together for Dotti (she had been having trouble with the one in her study and picked up the new one during the day), while she cooked dinner (9.0 points). I ended up eating light for the day and only consumed 33.5 points.

Wednesday - I weighed in at 190.5 pounds. Another meeting today, but this time it was with our customer, and not during my lunch hour. J

Dotti fixed us some of her delicious tortellini soup. I always enjoy it very much! Unfortunately, it has high sodium content, and as a result I usually go up on the scale the next day, but I know what caused it and it is no big deal. J

I ate 41.5 points for the day.

Thursday - I weighed in at 192.5 pounds. This turned out to be a bad day for my back. Things were going along pretty much as usual until midmorning, when I got a call and told that I needed to go over to another customer site and help out. The guy who was covering that site had to go to a meeting (meetings, I am told, are the "preferred alternative to work."J ) and I was going to help cover things while he was gone.

It turned out to be a bit more than I expected. I got handed a project that required the replacing of a large blower motor, and it was heavy, awkward to maneuver and located in a position that required me to climb onto the machine, and remove two motors in order to replace the one. Both motors were hard wired in so I had to unwire them, unbolt them, remove several panels, and slide them out of the machine. (They were mounted at about the 7-foot level from the floor.) After getting the new motor ready to go in, I had to put the two motors in place once more, and wire them in. The hardest part was a rubber "boot" that had to mount on the duct the blower was feeding. I spent hours in an awkward position for my back, and had to do a lot of lifting. By the end of the day I could hardly get on the ladder and climb back down to floor level. My back was protesting something awful. It didn't look good for Friday.

When I got home, I turned on my vibrating pillow for my back, and took some pain medication. Then I sat down to some more of Dotti's great tortellini soup. J She also had steamed up some artichokes for me, and they were delicious too!

I ate 38.5 points for the day.

Friday - I weighed in at 192.5 pounds. As I feared, my back was in complete rebellion in the morning, and I was not able to make it in to work. It was a long day of trying to limber up my back and get things feeling a bit better.

Dotti fixed me up a nice chicken soup with grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, and I am sure the combination helped boost the scale up this morning, but it was worth it. Sodium, Advil and other non-fat sources of weight gain are only temporary shadows, soon passing by.

I ate 48.0 points for the day.

A New Start-

As I stated above, I intend to start anew today, and lower my points intake a little. I am entering into a new—hopefully short-term—weight loss phase. My short-term goal is to hold my points at or below 40.0, and to drink at least 6 cups of water every day. I also am planning on doing some walking regularly this week. This last item is a little vaguer than the other two items. I hope to build up my walking stamina once more, and am not sure how rapidly I am going to do that just yet. I consider my exercise to be separate issue from my weight loss.

If I moved all my daily weigh-ins down 5 pounds from where they were, all would be well with the scale. So, I am set on doing just that: dropping 5 pounds. It begins today.

How do I rate this week?

Painful. Aside from my back, which definitely added plenty to the pain, I was not happy looking at the scale each morning. Naturally, the Ibuprofen, and the sodium were at the heart of the overall increase in my weight for the week. However, the starting point is the really painful part of the scale's reading. The fluctuations are only mildly troubling, but the average about which those fluctuations are occurring is what bothers me most.

Eating – Overall, I can't fault the amount that I ate this week, at least based upon previous data that I have collected. I did eat high on Saturday. I ate a little over my norm on Sunday and Friday, but then I ate below that norm the rest of the days of the week. My average points-per-day came to only 42.36. Based upon my new goal, that is high, but I did not set that goal until this morning. We will see how the next week goes.

Weight – I averaged 192.0 pounds this week. That is up nearly three-quarters of a pound from the previous week, but my average points-per-day was down by over 3 points from that week! There are a few complex things going on right now, and I will have to make some adjustments to get around them.

Water – I did pretty well here. I missed my goal of at least 6 cups per day on three days, but I didn't miss by much. I averaged 5.81 cups (46.48 oz.) per day, and I came up just a bit short. I hope to do much better this week.

Exercise – Poor, very poor. However, this week looks like it may be a better one. (Dotti and I plan to have a hike this week, and that would be a great way to kick off a new start!)

4 years, 290 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3"/239.5/193.5/180±2/BMI:24.19/WK-250