Week 37 Update

It was 6:30 when I weighed in. The temperature, at 33º, was one degree above freezing outside, as I stepped up on Mr. Scale, and he said, "183.0 pounds." (NS: 179.5) That is a pound lower than any other day this week. When I had checked my weight at 3:00 AM it was 184.5, but I went back to bed and woke up 1.5 pounds lighter, thanks to some additional water that I got rid of in the meantime. It is going to be a 32-point day today. For the week, my weight averaged 184.6, even with this one day downturn included, so I have not be far off from 185 all week.

It has been a great week. First of all LeRoy, our son, has made it safely home from his tour of duty on the USS Kitty Hawk! Dotti and I are so happy to have him home!!! He is looking very well, and it so wonderful having his cheerful smile and great sense of humor around the house again. He is nearly the same height as I am and broad at the shoulders. He has grown up during his nearly 5 years in the Navy, especially the last 3 years on the USS Kitty Hawk in Japan. We couldn’t be more proud of him!

On the weight loss front, I have been working on trying to pick just the right number of points each day to hold my weight right at 185 pounds. To help me in my calculations I plotted out my points versus pounds in a new way. I have created a graph that is marked out in unspecified units on the left. It runs from -5 to +5. Then I have plotted in GREEN the number of points each day that I have eaten referenced to 29.0 points. (If I ate 29.0 points, I graphed it right on the 0 line, because it is 0 points away from 29. If I ate 32 points, I plotted it on the +3 line.) I also plotted my weight each day over the same period of time, only referenced to 185.0 pounds. (All days that I weighed 185, I plotted on the 0 line.)

[Note: at the time that I wrote this the graph only went up to 1/25/02. I have added one additional week to it since] Up until January 12, my weight and points were jumping around a bit more than they were afterwards. From January 12 on, my weight was never more than 1.5 pounds above or below 185 (until this morning, when I was 2 pounds under, but that is not shown on this graph). What I did during that period of time was to weigh myself in the morning, and then pick how many points I was going to eat for the day based upon what the scale said. If it read above or below 185, I attempted to eat below or above 29.5 points respectively. As a general rule, if one of the graph points was above the 0 line, the other was below it. (For example, on the 23rd of January, my weight was 186.0 pounds. So, it was graphed on the +1 line, above the 0 line. My points for that day were 28.5, and were graphed on the -0.5 point, below the 0 line.)

I was not perfect in following the procedure, but this past week worked out pretty closely to what I wanted.

In general what I strive to do is this:

If I weigh 185.0 in the morning: I attempt to eat 29.5 points for the day.

If I weigh more than 185.0: I attempt to eat a point less than 29.5 for each pound that I am over, down to as low as 25.0 points.

If I weigh less than 185.0: I attempt to eat at least one point more than 29.5 for each pound that I am under, up to 32.0 points.

With this system, I will always eat between 25 and 32 points, and will eat on the high end of the range when my weight falls below 185, and on the low end when I move above 185. This is what I have been doing this past week, and it seems to be working okay so far.

I hope this upcoming week will be better for exercise. LeRoy sounds anxious to get to the gym, so that should help. :) Other than that, I plan to work my program the same way next week as I did this week.

By request: This week and books…

I finished reading The Planet of the Apes. It was different than either of the movie versions, but had bits of similarity, especially to the original movie. Although the story mostly happened on a different planet from earth, the final ending was not all that different from the ending of the original move, as far as earth was concerned. I am glad that I read the story.

I also finished listening to the unabridged audio book for Brave New World. This is a story that has a society controlled as completely as was done in Orwell's 1984 but the physical oppression mostly comes before "birth." They call the process of bringing babies into the world, "decanting," since all babies are born from bottles. Partly because women no longer have babies (just saying that phrase was considered dirty), the word "mother" had become a complete obscenity to the society as a whole. As opposed to our system, where the daily programming comes from various sources, including the television and music industries, the children were programmed with "sleep learning" to implant all of the desired behavior producing ideas. By the time they are adults, the vast majority of the people of society were not capable of thinking for themselves at all. They parroted the same things that they had been programmed to say, and found anything which contradicted their programming disquieting at least, and absolutely disgusting at most.

One wrinkle that neither our society nor Orwell's managed to produce, is to be found in Brave New World: the forced depression of the innate ability of most men. By starving the embryos of oxygen for a measured amount of time, and by introducing certain chemicals into their systems during the babies' development process, there were several "casts" of people create. The "Epsilons" were the bottom of society and they were just barely capable of doing simple manual labor, and they were happy and satisfied to be doing it. The Deltas were slightly more intelligent, and were used for slightly more difficult manual labor jobs. And so it went right up the top, where the Alphas, who were not physiologically damaged at all, and were controlled simply by their sleep conditioning. Every once in a while an Alpha would run amok a bit, but that was the price that the state had to pay to have a cast that could handle the mental effort required to run a society, and there were ways to deal with such a renegade.

The net result was a society that was extremely stable and virtually impossible to overthrow, because the people were incapable of rebelling against it. The people were conditioned to be happy in what they were doing, and if any unhappiness occurred, they were programmed to take a drug that made everything okay. They all took the drug, and it was as common as eating dinner. There were virtually no people that were introspective enough to identify any other possible way of running a society. They just happily played the game until they died.

Brave New World is an important book. It is perhaps not as terrifying as 1984 in that it does not have any wars, torture, or much mental reprogramming of adults going on. (All the real dirty work was done to the unborn babies, and to the other children.) However, it has a powerful message just the same.

For my lunchtime reading, I am over halfway through The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, which was written in 1957, and hasn’t been too bad so far. I have started reading, as time permits, Alice in Wonderland, from a CD on my computer. I have also begun the unabridged audio book for The Fellowship of the Ring that a friend loaned to me. (Concerning the Lord of the Rings series of books; I read The Hobbit years ago, and I started The Fellowship of the Ring but had trouble staying with it at the time. For years I had intended to get back to it. Well, now I will finally be able to finish it.)

259 days OP, a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

239.5/183.0/200/BMI:22.8/WK-37
Weight Loss Graph/Maintenance Graph/Success Story