One Year Anniversary of Weight Loss Journey

"It's just this sweatshirt making me look fat, right?"
06 January 2018

Today marks the one year anniversary since I started on a deliberate journey to lose weight. In early March of 2018, my doctor gave me the fat-shaming talk because I had weighed in for that appointment at 185, or 20 pounds over the recommended upper limit for weight/BMI for my height. So, on May 29th, 2018, I started the 84-hour fast to precede initiation of a keto-focused dieting period with an initial goal of getting down to 165 and a fantasy of getting down to 150.

Or, as I sometimes put it, (1) I wanted to need a different waist size in pants and (2) I wanted people to ask me if I'd been sick.

As I noted in "My Keto Diary," the blog entry at about the one-month point in this journey, I'm pretty skeptical of how much the keto approach helped me versus all the other avenues I was tackling to get the weight off: exercise, yard work, deprivation, and so on.

This morning, I had my lowest weigh-in of the whole year: 127.2. Which is close to my memory of my high school weight and is also too much weight to have lost. I know that. I get that. I don't want to appear to be auditioning for Schindler's List 2, for heaven's sake. I overshot the mark and I definitely look like I overshot the mark.

A drop in the bucket of what went to Goodwill.

I've gone from Size 34 dress pants down to 29...which sometimes can feel just a tad loose. I do feel much, much better. I'm glad that tying my shoes doesn't make me groan and grunt, and that my knees are no longer bothering me, and that I'm never in situations where I realize I'm sucking in my gut because I'm self-conscious. I regret how expensive it is to replace one's wardrobe (I had to get rid of some really nice suits and stacks and stacks of jeans and trousers.)

I miss beer, having had fewer than 10 bottles in the last 12 months, I suspect. I hardly eat bread anymore, I'm pretty good about sweets and snacking, I eat a lot of salad and salmon and yogurt and granola and fruit. Yes: sometimes I skip meals. But I weigh myself every single morning and have kept track for the whole year. It lets me know where I am and deserves a lot of credit for helping me avoid wild weight swings. (In May, except for today, I've stayed between 128 and 131. In April, I kept it between 128 and 133. In March the high was 132.8 and the low was 127.8. In February, I got as high as 134.2 and no lower than 129.8.) Month-to-month for the last year has showed fairly stable decline...pretty dramatic for the first six months and then appropriately gradual for the next few months and steady maintenance for the last several.

That's the state of things as I mark the beginning of Year Two of watching what the heck I'm doing to my body!