Week 59 Update

This morning Mr. Scale said, "185.5 pounds!"

This week was one of recovery for me. I had thought I was dealing with an intestinal bug of some sort, because for several weeks I had been having trouble with stomach flu like symptoms. I discovered last Sunday, that it was the herbal tea that I had been drinking. When I drank the tea, I got the symptoms. So, this week I didn't drink the tea, and I have been doing much better.

However, with the change in my digestion, my weight made a correction as well. It started to creep up a bit for a couple of days, but then it started to fall back off. By Thursday morning it was down to 183.0. Normally when I hit 183.0, I give my points a boost, to bring it back up. So, I had a Butterfinger McFlurry at lunch, to see if that would help. Then when I got home, we ended up going out to eat too, and I ended up moving from a points boost, to a power boost, with 77.5 points for the day. The next morning the scale was saying angry things about how I weighed more than usual. So, I cut back on my points to compensate. As it turned out, my average weight for the week this past week increased by about 1.4 pounds, while my average points per day went down by 0.93.

For exercise this week, I walked every one of the workdays at lunch. I only walked 1.3 miles each day, and earned about 3 aerobic points per day, but I walked all five days, which I consider to be a success for now. On Monday, by lunchtime, the cloud cover was breaking up and the temperature was up to 73° when I took my walk. By the late afternoon, it turned out to be a fairly warm day, peaking at 83°. Tuesday, it was even warmer. By my lunchtime walk, it was already 78°, and it continued rising all the way to 95° before the day was done! Wednesday was nearly a carbon copy of Tuesday, as the temp was 80° at lunch and again it peaked at 95°. So, when Thursday turned out to be much cooler (70° at lunchtime and 77° for the high) I was quite happy! On Friday, it was raining fairly hard at lunch, but I put on my raincoat and grabbed my umbrella, and did my walk anyway. :^) The temperature was a cool 62°, on its way to only reach a high of 63°. I was glad to have the raincoat on just for the added warmth.

Each day, I was walking the 1.3 miles in about 19 minutes, or about 14.5 minutes per mile. I wasn't walking at maximum speed, but rather I just did what I could do comfortably. Since I will have some time off this next week, hopefully I will get some additional walking in.

This Week in Books

This week I listened to the entire book, Rising From the Plains by John McPhee, and it was pretty good. It described McPhee's travels in the state of Wyoming with the geologist David Love, inserting a bit of Love family history from the old West, (e.g. Love's mother was described as having hair that was so blonde that it appeared to be white, and while living on the Love Ranch, she would often go many months without seeing another woman.) along with the verbal descriptions that Love gave to him of various rock outcroppings they came across. Just like in a good novel, this non-fiction book picked up at the end with a great deal of geological information being poured out about the Rocky Mountains and their "rising from the plains."

It was really fun to read the The Wonder Book of the World's Progress vol. 2, by Henry Smith Williams, as it discussed his view of continental drift, alongside listening to the far more up to date info in the audio book. I have gotten over half way through the book, and enjoy Williams writing style, even if his material is dated. He brings the subject alive. (At www.knowledgerush.com www.knowledgerush.com there is a series of books by Henry Smith Williams online, called The History of Science in 4 volumes, in case you want to sample some of his work.)

I am about one-third through the unabridged version of Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000. I knew that I would not have time to get very far into the Iliad this week, and since I would be on vacation next week, I would not be listening to it much at all. So, instead of starting it when I finished the McPhee book, I went back to Battlefied to get me through the last couple of days this week.

Since I was walking at lunchtime, I did not get much reading done on The Anything Tree this week. But I will get through it in time.

I started a new Perry Mason book this week, the very first one written... The Case of the Velvet Claws by Erle Stanley Gardner. I thought that it was interesting because it said that Della Street was about 27 years old. Since that book was written in 1933, that means that Miss Street's birth year was around 1906. Of course in Gardner's later books, when twenty years or more had past by, Della still seemed to be the same age. The advantage of being a fictional character I guess. :^)

1 year, 48 days OP, a lifetime to follow!

-Al-

6'3" 239.5/185.5/185 ±2/BMI:23.1/WK-59
Weight Loss Graph/Maintenance Graph/Success Story