Category: health

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve written an update, for absolutely no good reason. Things continue to go really well and I’m very happy with my progress. I weigh at 225.6 lbs. now, which is not only 147.4 lbs below my start weight — it’s lower than I’ve been since, most likely, high school! My blood pressure today was 108 over 70, which is fantastic and really in the end justifies the work.
Because we’re closing in on when I should switch to the maintenance part of the program, they remeasured my body stats.

And some pretty graphs to go along with it:

I’m maintaining my 2 lb/wk rate, more or less, though it’s been a little erratic — for example, almost no loss last week, four pounds this one. That’s odd. The next month will be a challenge because I’ll be doing a lot of traveling and I won’t actually get to class more than once or twice. I’m relatively confident I can keep on the straight-and-narrow but we’ll see.

Not much of note here. I’ve really given up predicting the details of my weight change. I don’t know why it dropped off some, but that can apparently happen. Anyway, I’m still pretty happy with where I am.

A pretty good week for me… which is baffling, as I have not (as far as I know) done anything materially different in any of the past three weeks, but my weight loss has fluctuated wildly.  Odd.   It’s also odd that my weight loss has been an integer in each of those weeks as well, but I have to believe that has no deep meaning.

Today I got two 10-lb. hand weights and I intend to start using them a little every night … not so much for the calories it’ll count towards but because I want to balance with a little upper-body stuff.  I should probably also start stretching and doing those sorts of things, but I don’t see that in the foreseeable future.  🙂

From a weight-loss perspective, this was a very good week: nearly ten pounds. But of course, given the spike upward last week, that just about puts me where I should be anyway. That’s somewhat frustrating and will, I suspect, be a good goad not to go out-of-box in the future. More reassuringly, I didn’t have to change all that much to achieve the higher number; I just had to stick to the program.

More disturbingly, my blood pressure crept back up a bit. It’s not any cause for worry as of yet. Part of the issue might just be that I got checked at a later time than usual; BP is known to be somewhat dependent to time-of-day and such. (I attended a later class than usual due to a school commitment.) The doctor doesn’t seem worried and he didn’t put me back on ramipril, so it’s probably not an extremely bad development, but it warrants keeping an eye out.

As mentioned I attended a different class. For the past month or so I’ve been going to a “maintenance” class (even though I’m still in weight loss) because Tuesdays work much better than any other night and there wasn’t any Tuesday night weight loss. As of last night, there is — a new cycle is beginning with four new people. PWMC gave me the option of choosing which session I attend from now on. I’m probably going to stick with Maintenance, in part because it’s a more convenient time. But also, I’ve seen a lot of the weight-loss stuff and what is informative the first time becomes tedious on repetition. Also, I predict that I am going to have more difficulty with maintenance than I am with weight loss, so it probably make sense to put the extra edge there.
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There’s no Week 14 not because I’m a time traveler who skipped forward 7 days but because I went off to Chicago and didn’t get around to an update. 🙂

The past couple of weeks have been good ones. I’m actually a little surprised at that, because being in Chicago meant having an entirely different schedule. I wasn’t sure I could get my physical activity in and I distrust my estimate for “casual PA”. But in fact even off-schedule I did lose over two pounds.

I haven’t published my blood pressure for a while because I haven’t to see the doctor in a few weeks, which is a good thing. But I’ve been off the ramipril for two weeks now and feel no different. In fact I am once again heart-med free. (I still take urso forte, which is a gallstone preventative.) Being close to 70 lbs total loss is a great feeling, too, and has started me thinking on choosing a goal weight. For the moment, I’m going to head for 100 lbs, and then see how things are going. I think, ideally, I’d like to lose 150 pounds, but that might be an unreasonable expectation to set and I don’t want to obsess on it right now.