Week 62 Update

It was a pleasant 54° outside at 5:30AM, when I stepped up on Mr. Scale, for the 62nd time for my weekly weigh-in. He promptly said, "186.5 pounds!"

Well, that is my highest weekly weigh-in since I reached my target range. I am just a half-pound below the top of my target range, but I am still within it. So, that is a good thing. However, it was a bit of a battle to remain in my range. On Monday, I popped up over the top of it for one day, which was a first. I started working my points downward as the week progressed, trying to drive my weight back down to 185.0 or below. The best I could do was to get it to 185.0 on Wednesday and Thursday. Then it started back up again.

On Monday I was moving some boxes around, and I "tweaked" my back. It is an old injury that I got a few years ago, and since Monday it has made me uncomfortable, and I haven't done my walk since. Also, my digestive track has not been normal this week. It started to settle down the last couple of days, and I hope that bout is over with.

Yesterday, when I got home from work, Dotti and I took some boxes to our storage shed, and my back felt pretty good, even after the lifting. We then went to the mall for an All American Ice Cream cone. We found that the library, which has a branch in the mall, was having a sale of used books. :) Well, the next thing you know, I was carrying a canvas tote bag, which we also bought, filled as full as we could get it with books. We then walked around the mall for a while, and by the time we were done, I felt like I had had a very good workout. Walking the stairs, and through the stores, browsing while holding that bag of books, was a workout. It felt good to finally set it down when we got back to our car.

I didn't do well at all on water this week. (And I had plenty of salt this week, especially on Thursday evening with my corn on the cob.) I did squeak into the 6-8 cups minimum window each day, but I was not getting the 9 cups that I normally consider my minimum.

For points I dropped my average points per day from 45.71 to 38.86. That is a drop of 6.85 points per day! And still my weight went up 2.0 pounds for the week. Despite the changes in the way my body reacted to what I was eating this week, I was able to rein it in enough to stay within my target range for my weekly weigh-in and so I consider this week a success. Next week I will continue to pull back on my points as required to attempt to get my weight back to or below 185.0.

I am eating 12.5 points for lunch, as my standard lunch these days. It is a more substantial meal than I was eating during my losing phase, and the first part of my maintenance phase. However, I have not been eating the McFlurry's or Banana Splits that I was eating for a while to keep my weight up to 184.0. I think what I am eating now is far more nutritious and hopefully that will pay off in the long run with better health. A side effect of the bigger lunch is that it seems to affect the number of points that I can eat during the day. With the bigger lunch, I end up being able to eat fewer points overall for the day. I will see if that continues to be the case. (Last week I was eating 10.5 points or less for lunch on most days.)

Maintenance is an ongoing adventure. So far, weeks that have been surprising have not been overwhelming. To this point, I have not had a problem pulling back on my points as required. Yesterday I only ate 31.0 points, and I was perfectly comfortable with that. If I had to stay at that level, I would have no real problem with it. Since, I now have put a bit of road under my maintenance wheels, I feel fairly confident that I will not remain at 31.0 points per day, but if I did it, it would not be a big deal.

Walking this week:

Day......... Date....Miles...Time .....Minutes/Mile ...Aerobic Pts
Saturday ...7/13 ...3.00 .....40:45 ........13:35 ..........9.25
Sunday .....7/14. ..3.00 .....39:47 ........13.16 ..........9.57

This Week In Books

I didn't make a lot of progress on The Anger of Achilles: Homer's Iliad. I got side tracked with something that I haven't listened to for quite sometime: talk radio. On the morning drive I listened some music tapes as well. In the afternoon, I was listening to The Savage Nation (or for an alternate view) hosted by a loud guy named Michael Savage out of San Francisco. He sounds like he is just to the right of Rush Limbaugh, and he seems to be going for shock value. After checking him out a bit, I am sure that I will not become a regular listener of his, but it was interesting for a couple of days to have a change of pace on the road.

I hardly put a dent in CALENDAR Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year this week. I spent a lot of my free time writing a program to generate HTML code for my journal tables. I had fallen way behind on my updates on the web page, and to type in all that table data for each week was not something that I was looking forward to. So, I put together a program where I just fill in the blanks for the data, and it creates the code for me. As a result, I finished the program and updated all of the weeks that I was behind, and now I am caught up. I also have a tool that I can use in the future to make it easier to do my journal.

I finished The Anything Tree by John Rackham this week. This was on the flip side of The Winds of Darkover. I believe that the two stories were paired because of the major part played by a woman in each. In the The Anything Tree it was a female agent who was being chased by some bad guys, and she ended up on a planet called Jenson's World, where a Tarzan-like guy was living. It turns out that the two of them thwart the bad guys, fall in love and save the natural setting of the planet. (Okay, I don't expect "deep" in an Ace Double Novel. :) ) The book was named for a tree which would read your mind and make things happen that you wanted. For example the woman wanted to have a perfect body, and presto-chango, she was physically top of the line, and even her old scars were gone. The plot centered on keeping the bad guys from getting to the tree and thereby denying them the opportunity of wishing for something really evil for the tree to do. They were unsuccessful in keeping the bad guys from the tree, but they misjudged what the tree would do with the evil it was faced with. Alls swell that ends swell. :)

I started a new book during lunch, about a couple who were frozen and reawakened hundreds of years in the future. It was written in 1970, and is filled with the political cliches of that time, which are tough to swallow right after eating lunch. :rolleyes However, I am working around that, and moving along in the story. I am almost to the halfway point.

I have moved well into The Case of the Velvet Claws by Erle Stanley Gardner. This one has the flavor of an old Maverick TV show, where the woman Maverick dealt with was duplicitous and conniving, lying all the time, but he still had to make things work out well in the end. Perry Mason's client is constantly lying to him, and he has to solve the murder, and see through the deceit at the same time. Not only that, but she is on the verge of trying to pin the murder on him, while he is trying to defend her.

1 year, 69 days OP, a lifetime to follow!

-Al-

6'3" 239.5/186.5/185±2/BMI:23.3/WK-62
Weight Loss Graph/Maintenance Graph/Success Story