Week 331 Update

At 05:47 I stepped up on Mr. Scale, and he said, "Don't you ever get tired of this?" Oh, wait, that might have been me. What he said was, "201.0 pounds!"

Every once in a while I get up on Saturday wondering if this is all necessary. But then reality slaps me in the face when I see what the last year has shown me. I spent several years maintaining around 185, almost effortlessly it seemed. All at once about this time last year, the wheels seemed to come off the wagon, and I was off in denial thinking I could fly this plane on my own with no help from journals, and tracking. Right. Hitting 211 pounds, and knowing that it would be 240 or more pounds again if I didn't wake up soon, was like a dash of cold water in the face. "Thanks; I needed that!"

Well, I have been journaling now for a few weeks, watching what I am doing more closely, and I am still struggling to hold my weigh-ins inside my target range. Sure, I am close, but I am over, and my target range is right at the top of the normal category for my height.

If you will allow me to meander a bit…I have various ways to look at this situation today. I can view it as doing poorly, because I am not under 200 and remaining there as I should be. Perfection would require a lot better than what I am doing, or ever have done. But that is what is called "stinking thinking." I am not now, nor have I ever been perfect. No one is, and I certainly never will be.

So, some other standard must be used in evaluating where I am today. In the years before I started my journey, I would have been fairly happy with where I am today. In fact there were many years when I struggled hard to get down close to 200, only to fail, or to merely temporarily dip down below it, and then bounce back up where I started from, and very sadly, well beyond. So, there is a great deal to be thankful for from being on this journey. I am more or less where I have wanted to be for a long time. The blemishes that I see on the record of my results are minor when compared with what went before.

What I am left with is the fact that I am not doing too badly, but there is still room for improvement. Isn't that pretty much the way life goes, even at the best of times?

Today is the final day in my Journal Book 10. The 7-inch stack of filled out journals sits on the floor beside me, holding a piece of 2,318 days of my life. Over 6 and one-third years have moved quickly by, and during this time, while kids who were in the 7th grade have graduated from high school, and babies have been born and grown from infancy, through toddlerhood, and entered school, day after day weights, points, and water values have accumulated, filling each of these books, only to be set aside to make way for another.

And in the end, here I am, one more time, typing in my update for another week past. Why am I not in the 190s this morning? I can look at my journal and tell you with no doubt in my mind: I ate too much. That wasn't very profound, but it is true.

I found that I could not handle having saltine crackers in the house—on Sunday I ate 19 points worth of them—and they are now gone. If the cracker points for the week were removed, my average points-per-day would be well below 46. In fact, after the crackers left the scene, I didn't have any days over 46 points. If I don't come up with something equally stupid to snack on, I will probably have a better week coming up. That is my plan anyway.

For now, and for the foreseeable future, if there is such a thing, I will continue to build books to add to the pile I have already created, a day at a time. I will never be able to just move in a straight line towards thinness without the guidance that these books give to me. (It isn't always very straight even with their assistance.) They are my friends, though containing little more than cold numbers and a history of that which otherwise would be mundane. Eat, drink, and write it down—if I am to be merry afterwards.

Here it is week 331 of my journey. It is common to here the phrase, "a month of Sundays" but what of a year of Saturdays?

It would be November 27 if it were the 331st day of the year.

Thanksgiving is on the fourth Thursday of November, and that means it has to fall on one of the 7 days between the 22nd and the 28th inclusive. The weekly weigh-ins from August 11, 2007 (week 326) to September 22, 2007 (week 332) would fall on "Thanksgiving Week" in the "year of weeks." So, next week will bring Thanksgiving to a close.

The Weight Commander says that I weighed 200 pounds 90 days ago, and that is only 1 pound different from what I weigh today, so at least I am not moving up. A bit more disquieting is the projection of recent data into the future: it predicts that I will be gaining over the next 90 days, pushing upwards toward 204.6 pounds. This is based upon recent, cracker infested data, and hopefully I will turn that trend around shortly.

And that is the whole point of having the trend calculated by the Weight Commander. If you are living in denial and thinking that you are doing all the right things and everything is okay, the truth is a wonderful tonic to wake you out of your sleep, if you are willing to drink it. It is the way that we react to our mistakes, and unhappy trends that spells the difference between success and failure. We all drift off course from time to time, but the sooner we discover this, and take corrective action, the less damage that will be done.

Years ago, I did a little research on navigation at sea, and I learned about the concept of a "rhumb line"...where a constant compass course is taken for your course heading, even though it only approximates the shorter great circle route. To hold on the "perfect" course you would have to continually change your course "on the fly" to a new compass heading in order to hold the line. But a rhumb line course is approximately the same as the great circle course. Your ship moves in the right general direction. Over time an error will creep in, and you then calculate a new rhumb line course that will correct for the error and point you close to the great circle ideal again. You then hold to that rhum line course until the error once again is too great, and yet another rhumb line is taken.

Just like in a weight control journey, this allows you to deal with the real world by making adjustments every so often, and not having to remain perfect all of the time. Weekly weigh-ins and even projections of where you are headed all help you to determine your rhumb line course to your goal.

Saturday 9/8
Weight: 200.0
Points: 53.0
Unfortunately, my weigh-in on Saturday was the lowest weigh-in all week long. I over-snacked and ended up eating 53.0 points for the day.

Sunday 9/9
Weight: 201.0
Points: 63.5
Even though my weight moved up a pound, I didn't take warning, and did even worse on my snacks (especially on the crackers). After eating my way to 63.5 points, I finally had had enough! All of the crackers were eliminated and I have not touched one since. But the damage was done, and I spent the rest of the week trying to undo what I did on the weekend. (Alas, I didn't try hard enough.)

Monday 9/10
Weight: 204.0
Points: 41.5
The extinct of the penalty I was to pay for my wandering into the Mirkwood Forest, far off the path, hit me squarely on Monday morning's weigh-in. Oh yeah. I did eat 22 fewer points, and that was a good thing, but it still wasn't much below my maintenance target of 46 points-per-day. So, I couldn't expect too much of a recovery from that.

Tuesday 9/11
Weight: 203.0
Points: 45.0
I dropped a pound, but was still 3 pounds over my target range. More work was needed, but I only ate one point below my maintenance level. That wasn't going to do much. Still, Dotti and I walked to Borders Books and that was 2.2 miles of exercise, and I carried books in my backpack both ways. (We use Borders like many people use Starbucks: a place to read and study.) I only had 1 point of creamer in my coffee, and had a really productive study period on PHP.

Wednesday 9/12
Weight: 203.0
Points: 37.5
The scale held steady at 203. We had a busy day with dental appointments for both Dotti and I with our new dentist. We then went to our doctor's office for an appointment for Dotti, to help with her sleeping problem. I did better on my eating on Wednesday, even though we stopped at Applebee's for lunch and I had a burger and fries. I only ate half the bun and just over half the fries. It kept the points reasonable and at the end of the day I was under 40 points.

Thursday 9/13
Weight: 201.0
Points: 39.0
The scale dropped a couple of pounds, and I was happy to see that. In the evening I walked to Borders (I took the long way for a 2-mile walk one-way) and I met Dotti there who had gone to the gym earlier. After our study time there, we both drove home together. I only ate 39.0 points, and so it was a pretty good day.

Friday 9/14
Weight: 200.5
Points: 45.5
The scale responded by dropping a half pound, and I had hopes of seeing a weigh-in for today inside my target range again, but it was not to be.

I spent the day studying, and made a lot of progress on my road to learning PHP and it was fun. When confronted with the confusing situation where (0.7 + 0.1) would not register as equal to 0.8, I wandered into the area of how a floating point number is stored in memory and that was quite a little journey all by itself. (Including the sign bit, 127 adjusted-exponent, and mantissa, with assumed leading 1, and special cases for zero and infinite. If you are interested, here is an interesting discussion of how to floating point numbers are added/subtracted and how they are multiplied together.)

In any case, by the end of the day I felt like the small-headed student in the old Far Side cartoon I used to use in my classes. (I would put it up on the overhead projector at a point in the course where we had just gone through a particularly complex bit of material.) The student raised his hand in class and asked if he could be excused because his "brain was full."

With PHP you don't just have to learn the commands, but you also have to learn the exceptions and there are plenty of "gotchas" in the language. It is closely related to "C" and that has helped, but it isn't a simple road that I find myself on in learning it. I am convinced that it will be well worth the trip when I am done (if that is the correct term).

Over the day I put away close to my limit for points and so, this morning there was little joy to be found at the scale, but I am only one pound out of my target range and that isn't too bad.

Positive thinking: next week will be better.





6 years, 127 days on my journey; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-
6 '3" 239.5/201/197.5±2.5/BMI:25.12/WK- 331

Starting weight: 239.5       Target Weight Range: 195 lbs to 200 lbs