Get down to 300 pounds

But I have made a little progress. I’ll just have to see how close I can get . . . and how long I’ll have to brown-bag my lunches.

I believe I can be below 315# by the end of this week.

With only 49 days left, and 20 pounds still to lose, I need to get more consistent. When I do the things I know I need to do, this is not a tough pace (just under 0.4# per day) . . . but I need to sustain this over a longer period.

I’m ending this month a couple pounds heavier than when I started it, after four weeks of minor ups and downs. Officially, I’m at 319.2# as of this morning.

The news isn’t all bad, though. I’ve kicked my exercise regimen up a notch, adding variety to my cardio workout with time on the exercise bicycle and in the pool. We joined the YMCA, and I go almost every morning before work (and sometimes on the weekends as well).

March needs to be a good month. I’m setting 308# as my target for March 31.

I made an appointment with a new doctor (a thin one, this time), partly as an attempt to get someone on “my team”. I let him know where I had come from and how much progress I’ve made, what my health concerns are, and what changes I was making in my life to support a more reasonable weight.

He thinks I should get surgery.

Frankly, I’d rather keep working on the software and let the hardware take care of itself. So far, I’ve had the good fortune to be a very healthy fat man.

As much as I had hoped to make it a ten-pound month, I couldn’t quite get there this time . . . I’m currently at 316.4#, down 9.6# from January 1.

My weight has been pretty flat for the last two weeks after an initial surge. I need to kick my physical activity up a notch or two to get things rolling again, since February needs to see me through to 310# to stay on target. That hasn’t been easy this week, in the face of an arctic blast that took the temperature below 0°F and kept it there for three days.

I still eat lunch out with the guys every day, and still have some bad habits (e.g. eating beyond the point of satisfaction, choosing fried foods over fresh) that are, without question, holding me back. And part of this challenge is to find a way to have that social time without keeping the weight.

As of this morning, I’m down to 318#. Considering that I was hoping to hit 320# by about two weeks from now, that’s pretty encouraging.

This week, winter made a surprise appearance in Minnesota, and even my wonderful new jacket can’t persuade me that walking outside is a very good idea. So my exercise for the last couple of days has consisted mostly of Guitar Hero, which (even when played pretty aggressively) isn’t actually an aerobic workout. It does keep me off the couch and rockin’ out, though!

I’ve also rediscovered (for the umpteenth time) that I really do enjoy the taste of fresh fruits and vegetables. I had a mid-afternoon snack of a banana and some green grapes today that had me waxing lyrical on the phone to my belovéd bride.

Aside from the support I’m getting here on 43Things (Thank you!), I’m also finding The Daily Plate useful for tracking my eating and exercise. It takes all the work out of counting calories, and even tracks lots of other nutritional information.

In late February of last year, I found a bathroom scale that would actually tell me the awful truth. 358# . . . yikes. The highest number I’d actually seen before was about 330#, and that had been enough to give me the willies.

So I began an earnest and concerted effort to exercise more, eat better, and generally live more healthfully in order to drag my weight down out of the stratosphere to something a little more manageable. And, against every piece of advice I’d ever heard or given, I weighed myself every morning . . . mostly as a result of finding a widget on the Google homepage (the Google 15) that takes a daily weight and gives a nice graph with a 10-day moving average. That means that the little (and inevitable) fluctuations from day to day get sort of smoothed out in a more meaningful trendline.

My trendline for Spring 2007 was generally downward. I quickly achieved a couple of milestones on my way back to sanity (350# in mid-March and 325# by the end of June). I was feeling better, I was looking better, and I was taking generally better care of myself.

Then I leveled off.

Over the following six months, my weight moved almost not at all. I continued to walk more days than not (which had always been my target), but, truth be told, was not always as aware of my eating. I got as low as 318# or so, and (briefly) back up to about 330# before pulling back from that particular precipice.

So, starting 2008, I’m taking a look at the positive for last year. I dropped more than 30 pounds and kept it off; I’m starting this year more than 30 pounds closer to where I’d like to be than I did last year.

And I learned a lot about what works for me, and what doesn’t. So I need to stay conscious of the choices I’m making and focus on the progress toward the next goal.

That’s why I set a goal date for the next milestone. It gives me a focal point . . . of course I already wanted to hit that number some day, but without a date certain, there was no driving force to make the right choices every day.

The morning I set myself this challenge, I weighed 326#.