I’ve got 23 weeks until I hit the 1 year anniversary of starting this. If I do a pound-ish a week until then, I’ll hit 65 pounds for the year, which wouldn’t be a bad number. To do the whole 100 by the one year point, I’d have to drop around 2.6 a week every week. That’s technically possible, but probably unrealistic. I’m hoping to hit somewhere in the 70-80 pound range by the February 2nd, 2010 weigh in and reach my goal weight by mid-June of next year.

We’ll see.

Besides “momentum eating” (where once I get started, it’s just hard to stop before I’ve eaten too much), convenience foods are my primary downfall. Pizza, burgers, etc., the quick fix usually causes as many problems as it fixes. And the “healthy” options at many fast food places are either a joke or far less appetizing than the options that you know you should avoid.

That’s not to say that convenience foods can’t be eaten at all. It’s like anything else… too much of a good thing is bad. Convenience foods in limited amounts on rare occasions are useful, tasty, and won’t kill you. But if you’re eating convenience foods for half your meals (which I’ve been known to do), there will be unpleasant consequences.

The problem with convenience foods is that they’re so darn…. convenient.

Come Sunday, the effects of the diet seemed to kick in and I was a regular guest in the bathroom. There was no pain or discomfort. There were no explosive situations. It just seemed that everything my body had decided to hold onto in the last few days was finally granted an exit visa, and it proceeded to leave in a calm, orderly fashion.

I’m going to stick with the low carb another week or two, not because I’m desperate to lose weight quickly, but because it provides a counterpoint to the “eat just about anything I wanted” rut I’d fallen back into and it feels easier to accept and implement the healthier choices I need to make when they follow a period of deprivation rather than after a period of playing it fast and loose.

We’ll see how it goes.

As of today, I’ve started back on a more restrictive low carb for a couple of weeks, just to sort of get myself back into “diet mode”. Then I’ll back off to more of a “healthier choices” mode again. I’ll get back to weekly weigh-ins and blog posts next week.

The most troubling thing about all this was how easy it was to fall back into old bad habits, especially convenience foods and late-evening snacking. And the troubling part is that avoiding these things is merely a matter of *not* doing something you don’t *have* to do.

Let’s say you got in the habit of skipping everywhere you went. But it started to negatively effect your life, because people thought you were freakin’ nuts. So you had two other options, running or walking. Both get you where you need to go, both give you a viable alternative to skipping. All you have to do is stop skipping and run or walk instead. But the moment you let your guard down, you find yourself skipping. It gives you some sensation you want, it gives you some form of reward, and that’s what’s hard to give up… the rewarding sensation you get from skipping. For all the negatives those behaviors cause, there is some rewarding or comforting sensation that comes with them, and that’s what makes it hard to stop.

It’s not just about weak will or strong will. It’s about having to resist that path of least resistance, about having to turn away from the easy road, the gratifying road, every time you’re hungry or even merely peckish, every time you’ve got two kids to manage all by yourself and feel like there’s no time to cook, every time you’re going over the delectable choices on a restaurant menu and they’re all more appetizing than a bunless turkey burger with sliced tomato instead of fries. If you let your guard down, it’s easy to choose the easy route. And when you choose it once, it’s easier to choose it the next time.

That’s the battle we all have to face. It’s not just making the right choice every time. We just can’t do it every single time for the rest of our lives. The battle is not letting one or two wrong choices turn into a spiral of wrong choices that goes on and on until we become so disgusted with it, we’re motivated to get back to the right path, but only after doing significant damage.

I can’t beat myself up about making wrong choices, but I do have to get better at recovering from them so I only make them occasionally instead of falling into patterns of them.

See y’all next week.

Seems like I’ve plateaued again with 241 as the point I’m wavering around. I haven’t been aggressively attacking it, though. I even had my first beer since the SuperBowl on Saturday night. Just one, but it’s been the first time I’ve had any alcohol in nearly 5 months.

Overall, my eating habits the last couple of weeks have been far from stellar, though still significantly better than before I started this journey. Still, I have been eating refined (i.e. bad) carbs with greater frequency and in greater quantity than I have in previous weeks and there are a couple of meals where I pigged out a bit. So whether it’s a plateau or I just found my “maintenance” point is probably debatable. I think I’m going to leave myself a little wiggle room this week, with the holiday weekend coming up, and then get more serious about the bad carbs and quantities again come Monday.

I actually cheated a bit this week, trying to shake up my metabolism and keep it off its guard. It wasn’t huge, gorging meals, but definitely more crap carbs. The odd thing was that I could sort of feel it when I was particularly crap-carby in a meal. I’d just feel a little fuzzier. Not a huge fan of it.

Now it’s back to the regular mostly-good choices. We’ll see where they take me.

So, today I visited to meet the doc I’d picked there and see if I was comfortable with him. And, of course, I got weighed and had my blood pressure checked. The weight — wearing shorts, sneakers, and a t-shirt (with my Treo, wallet, and keys in my pockets) — was 248.4. I asked them to check my records and see what my weight was the last time I visited the walk-in. I weighed in at 289.5 in October. Based on that, I’ve lost 41 pounds.

As for my bathroom scale, I was a naked 243.5 right after peeing this morning, then 244 a few minutes later. So that’s somewhere between 5 to 5.5 pounds since weighing in at 249 on Saturday morning. Could I really have been retaining that much water? And what was causing it? Was it the soda, the heat, that I’d been nibbling a handful of grapes a day for a few days and my body reacted to the uptick in sugar intake? Maybe it was a combination of all three.

It wasn’t the hot sauce. That’s for sure. After dropping 4.5 pounds in a week, I was putting Sriracha or Tabasco hot sauce on at least one meal a day if not more and my weight went up. I kept using it, as things fell again. I’m thinking that low doses of hot sauce have little effect on my weight, but they do spice up a flatbread quesadilla with sliced turkey.

All of that translated to me weighing in at 249 last week. Yeah, up 5 pounds. I thought the culprit might be that I’d been nibbling grapes on occasion all through the previous week, but it hadn’t been much, maybe a handful a day. Still, I thought the sugar intake might have had something to do with it.

I cut out the grapes, but it wasn’t until the temperatures went down and I cut the soda back to the maximum of 2 cans a day that I’d been holding to earlier that the weight started coming back off. This morning I weighed in at 245.5. That’s a pound-and-a-half up from two weeks ago, but if you stretch it over the last three weeks, it averages a pound a week, and I was suspicious of that 4.5 pound drop in a week. So I’m not disappointed about being 245.5 this week, only I’m not sure that weight is accurate.

See, this morning, I got up and I was 245.5 in my underwear according to my scale. I went and checked my e-mail before getting some breakfast and got an urge to poop. I went and pooped, then decided to strip naked and weigh myself again, figuring I might knock off another half pound. The scale said 246. How could I, after shedding some waste and one last article of clothing, be heavier?

I know weights are supposed to fluctuate from scale to scale, but the same scale should be relatively consistent. Shouldn’t it?

Anyway, my watch that I got for my birthday in October is loose enough that most parts of the day I can turn it around my wrist. There’s some resistance. It’s not spinning, but it’s loose. I dropped another belt notch a couple of weeks ago, but it was a little snug and I didn’t want to crow about it. But in the midst of this craziness, it’s become less snug, so I’m having that experience of clothes fitting better while the scale acts screwy.

How much of the “weight gain” was me retaining water because of all the extra heat/soda, and how much was my scale giving me a low reading on Memorial Day that it wouldn’t likely replicate later? I don’t know. I just know that I’m back on a downward trend (I think), the average loss is still good, and I’ll start looking for a more trustworthy bathroom scale. Any recommendations of one that’s good and affordable?

Last, I’m going to the doctor tomorrow, so I’ll get a doctor’s scale weigh in. My doctor moved to a new office 15 miles farther away from my house than his old one was, and I’d only been with him a year since my long-term guy retired, so I’m switching to someone closer. Thus it will be two different scales, but still an interesting weigh-in because it’s got a multi-month gap.

I’m trying to think of what I did differently in terms of eating or exercise, and it’s really not turning up a lot. The only real thing I can think of was that I ate more hot sauce this week (Mexican hot sauce with Mexican food cheat, and a few mornings I put Tabasco or Sriracha on my breakfast quesadilla) and more fruit (brought home some sliced mango and some grapes from Costco and ended up being the primary eater of the mango).

I got a little bit more exercise in the last week, getting out and walking a bit more. I weighed in at 245 yesterday morning. Then we were going to go meet up with one of my son’s little friends and his family at a park, and my wife hadn’t realized that the entire point of the park is a 1.25 mile nature walk down to the beach with an accompanying 450-foot drop in elevation that’s not gradual (there are steep parts of the trail and not-steep parts of the trail). So I ended up on an unexpected 2.5 mile hike, helping push, pull, or carry the baby stroller up and down parts of the trail. Since our friend who invited us hadn’t warned us, she helped with some of the baby transport on uphill portion of the return trip from the beach.

I also realized, that even at 245, I probably outweighed the women by 90-100 pounds or more, so even when all I had to get up the hills was me, the weight I was pushing was equal to one of the women strapping both four-year-olds and the baby to her.

My baby weighed in at 19 pounds at his recent check-up. I’ve lost twice that, and I have more than three times that to go. The weight I still have to go is just about equal to the combined weight of my children.

Think about that. I not only carry my children with me in my heart, but on my thighs, around my waist… Every step I took, every time I pushed myself up a hill, I was pushing the me that should be, plus two children worth of excess me, and that’s after losing nearly 40 pounds.

It’s amazing to me, when I pick up my boys, to realize that I’ve already lost close to one of my oldest and just slightly more than two of the baby. Carrying them around in my arms gets tiring after a while, but I was carrying that around 24/7. And I’ve still got their combined weight to go before I reach my goal.

Wow.

One reason for being up a bit this morning might have been that I didn’t poop yesterday. No, matter. That resolved itself this morning after breakfast.

I also made a few self-indulgent food choices this week, knowing which menu item I should pick while out at a restaurant but choosing something a bit more fatty and or carby, like having a BLT on whole wheat with a sugar crusted bacon and a few fries instead of a salad. Although, looking at that particular restaurant’s nutrition guide, their caesar salad with chicken has more calories than their “Half-Pound BLT” (as in they put a half-pound of bacon on it). Gotta love the way salad dressing can take a healthy meal of greens and lean meat and turn it into a festival of fat and calories.

When I have a little weight loss like this, the thing I feel worst about is that I’m somehow not meeting the expectations or desires of the people following my progress. Me, so long as the needle keeps moving downward and I’m not feeling starved or deprived, I’m good. So ever onward, no BLTs this coming week, and hopefully I can have a more significant number to report next week.