May 28, 2004 - Down 50

My dog, Una, and I burst out into the confusing sun for our morning walk. Now that the weather is nicer, I've become accustomed to taking two daily walks with the dog I've nicknamed Booboo, not to be confused with the Bobo, the dance invented by the new American Idol, Fantasia Barrino.

We take a morning walk and then later in the day, when I've done my exercises and am sufficiently sweaty to hope for some natural hair lightening benefits (salt, baby!), we take a second walk. This regimen has contributed to my renewed success in weight loss over the past five weeks.

I can now claim, quite honestly, that I've lost 50 pounds since beginning my weight loss quest several years ago. Not the sort of progress that will sell a lot of weight loss supplements, but it's genuine and I intend to make it permanent.

Now that my web cam has died on me, I find it more difficult to provide recent pictures, but I'll make some attempts, using the mirrors in my apartment. The one at the top of the page, taken with my bathroom mirror, was more successful than the one I took with my full-length mirror, although that one's more dramatic. NOTE TO SELF: Low angle shots are fab.

 

The Gryphon has promised to get some better pictures of me this weekend at Memorial Day festivities with our mutual friends, so we shall see.

I told a friend recently that I can now quite honestly tell people I'm down to my college weight. The fine print on that would be that it's the weight from my senior year in college, by which point I had gained roughly 40 pounds from the weight I was when I began. My ultimate goal is to get back to my freshman fighting weight, if you will. Or, another two or three sizes (having lost three so far).

Una is on her own fitness plan. Now that we've doubled her daily walks, she bounced right back into trim form. In fact, The Gryphon looked at her the other day and wondered aloud if she had lost weight. I said that she probably had, because while she was never flabby, she's now all muscle. It doesn't take her long to get cut. The irony being, of course, that dogs don't care.

One ironic aspect to my weight loss is that I can't go by my weight alone, which I assume is because I've built more muscle this time around. Having a somewhat precocious recall of what I've waited at sizes past, I have noticed that I currently weigh about 15 pounds more than the last time I was this size. So clearly, I'll have to eventually adjust my thinking about my end goal, perhaps shooting for a size rather than a weight.

I am currently at the size that had been my original goal, and now that I've achieved it, I'm continuing for the next manageable goal (whee!)

What's my secret, you might ask? No easy tricks, I'm afraid. Simply monitoring the amount I eat each day, opting for healthy alternatives, such as nonfat latté over regular, and a regular schedule of weekday exercise. I go a little easier on myself on the weekends, allowing myself to indulge a little and going easier on the exercise, although I do try to get some activity in, even if it's just walking.

And if it weren't for my annual holiday backtracking, I might have gotten farther by now, but that's okay. I'll just keep at it and keep my spirits up.

The hardest times are, of course, the plateaus, when I stay at a similar weight for weeks or months and have no idea how to get past it. At those moments, I think, "There' s nothing more I can do." But then I usually do some reevaluation and discover that either I was slacking on exercise or I was too lenient on myself in terms of my food intake. So I go back to my routine and the pounds come off once more.

I'm hoping to serve as a good example for my mom, whose debilitating arthritis would be greatly relieved, doctors say, if she could lose just 10 percent of her body weight. For Mother's Day I gave her a Weight Watchers book, which is an easy enough plan I hope she'll follow it. I plan, when I see her on Father's Day weekend, to do a little flaunting of my success, in hopes she'll be inspired.

The big challenge will be figuring out a maintenance diet, once I've reached my goal. I imagine I'll keep up my activity level, perhaps upping the calorie intake a little bit. But basically maintaining the lifestyle I live now. That's why I felt it was important to come up with a plan I could live with for the rest of my life.

And there are big incentives to continue: regular exercise is great for not just weight loss and fitness but also mental well-being.

So now I discover I've been rambling on like some sort of weigh loss guru for most of this walk. But hey, that's what happens when the universe wake me up too early.

Other weight loss milestones:

April 18, 2003 - Incredible Shrinking Woman

December 6, 2004 - Sixty Down!

February 16, 2005 - Down 70

April 26, 2005 - Down 80

 

Moral:
Important goals are worth taking your time to achieve.