The trick is to get back up

Well, it's been a long time since I wrote. Too long. And my weight's gone up. More than it should have and more than I'd like to admit, but not more than I will admit.

And so Saturday, I weighed myself, I recommitted, and I strolled through the blogosphere. Jo is in Onederland! Monica got a job! (That was old news, but I was reading through the archives and saw a mention to coworkers, plus you can never read too much of Monica's blog.) Katie J. is making all sorts of progress and now has the most beautiful picture as her icon! 266 is at a normal BMI! And Sue aka Mrs. Fatass is having the birthday celebration to end all birthday celebrations.

And me? Well, on Saturday I weighed 264 pounds.

Yes. 264 pounds. That's only 14 pounds lower than my original starting weight. How miserable.

But at the same time, in some ways, it also wasn't all that bad. I'd kept up a loss of just over 5% of my starting weight for a year and nearly two months. I work in health policy: the literature on obesity is bleak. Keeping 5% of my starting weight off for over a year actually makes me, statistically speaking, a success story. Imagine that.

Of course, that's not the level off success I want. I want Learning to be Less levels of success. (Who, by the way, is pregnant and due in just over a month. Congrats!) I want Diane from Fit to the Finish levels of success. I want to be what they are: namely, the awesomest kind of statistical aberration there is.

In my last post, on the last try, I said "Falling is okay, though. The trick is to get back up. And I'm going to get back up."

Well, I'm back up. I've been going for walks. (My gym shut down, and I'm not really up for finding a new one just yet.) I've been eating well. And I've been steadily progressing down down down the scale.

Saturday, 9/18: 264
Sunday, 9/19: 262
Monday, 9/20: 261.5
Tuesday, 9/21: 261

And finally today, Wednesday, 9/22: 259.3. 4.7 pounds down, a bunch to go.

The Return of Lunch Time Walks

I took a walk today during my lunch hour. I used to do it almost every day back when I was blogging and genuinely focused on trying to lose weight. As I was out there in the not too terribly cold fresh air, I knew what I needed to do. I've known what I've needed to do for a while now. I'd just been too terribly scared to do it.

I needed to come back.


Slightly before Thanksgiving, I made a few food mistakes. At home for the holidays and my birthday, I made more. And between the icky gains on my scale and the fact that I just couldn't really control myself around food, I became too afraid to come back and own up to my failures. Not coming back immediately was a mistake.

While I was away, for most of the time, I kept yearning and thinking about going back. I silently visited some of the blogs of people I just couldn't let go of�Katie J., Jo, Monica, the kittehs, Actual Scale, Learning to Be Less, and 266, just to name a few�but avoided my own like it was toxic. I winced every time I typed anything starting with an "H" into my browser.

From November to late December, my weight hovered in between about 238 (what it initially jumped up to) and 240. I kept going to the gym, but not with the regularity I had been. I kept hoping that on my own I would find the strength to get the numbers lower, that I'd be able to come back here and post some number, any number that was lower than the 235.5 I left. As late as the beginning of January, I had a weigh in at 237.7.

And then there was the rest of January.

My weight this morning was 244.5.


These past three weeks have been entirely and ridiculously out of control. And it stops now.

I'm heading home from work in just a few minutes. I'm going to go home, change, and head right off to the gym. When I come back, I'll toss out what junk food I've accumulated these last few weeks, make myself a healthy dinner, and come say my hellos in blog land.

I've missed you guys, and I've missed making progress. It's time to get this weight loss show back on the road.

Tuesday Weigh In (with Bonus Pictures!)

Well, today is my official Tuesday "side of the blog" weigh in. It's also the first day of the GAG challenge and their official weigh in day. (It's pretty damn convenient that they sync up.) And the results are:

Weight: 251.6
BMI: 43.18

I'm required by GAG rules to post a scale picture. I took one (I swear!) but forgot to email it to myself this morning so I could post from work. So, I can't post it now, but I will be posting it as an addendum later in the day.

I did, however, remember to email myself both my before photos, taken on July14th when I weighed 270.5 (I don't have any at 278), and ones I took this morning at 251.6. I'm hoping you guys will be able to tell which ones are before and which ones are after on your own! Well, here goes:

I (stupidly) turned a bit in the profile photo, so the difference is barely noticeable in that one, but I think you can really see the difference around my tummy in the first one. A substantive difference from "beach ball" to "slightly deflated beach ball" if you ask me! My butt/fat right above where a butt ought to be also looks way better in the profile picture, now that I'm really looking at it.

And those are my progress pictures. Now I really should try to crank the rest of this post out before I change my mind and have a "what was I thinking posting photos?!?!" moment. So, I'll just say one more short thing:

Today is Tuesday, September 1st. I'm creating a super short term challenge for myself to get to 250.2 (exactly 10% of my starting weight) or below by this coming Saturday when my brother visits. It's only 1.4 pounds and incredible doable. If I step up the workouts and eat cleanly, I should hit it. Let's start the challenge off right, turn up the pressure, and be done with that first 10% before I see my brother.

Edited to add the promised scale pic:

On weigh ins and motivation

Weight: 269.3
BMI: 46.22

In recent mornings when I've hopped on the scale, I've always been quite certain that the number would go back up. This morning was no different. I stared at the glass monster that lurks in my bathroom for a short bit, resigned at the bad news it had for me. I tapped it, let it zero, and hopped on. And there, staring back at me, was not bad news, not dreadful news, not even "no progress news." Looking back at me instead was .4 pounds less than yesterday: the slow, and steady march of progress.

It's just plain weird.

In my life, I've seriously attempted to lose weight precisely two other times. Each time, my morning weigh in was filled with anticipation. Each time, I was working *hard* at my weight loss. I was moving as much as I could, eating healthfully, writing prolifically, and generally putting my heart and head into losing the damn weight. The scale was my (imperfect, noise-filled) progress checker. Each day, I cared deeply about what would show up, and worried if it would be an up or a down, and how great any loss would be. The morning weigh in had mystery and excitement: a daily battle of expectations vs. reality.

My weigh ins these days are nothing of the sort. Each morning I wake up, and I'm pretty damn sure the scale is going to go up. It's not even a question. And since I started 10 days ago, every morning but one I've been wrong.

I don't really seem to believe that I'm actually losing weight.

One of the things that's weird about this "don't say diet" of mine is that, well, I'm not really on board with it. I mean, I've been very much not overeating (to the point where I have, in fact, been undereating). I'm certainly eating less than I'm burning, so by the rules of physics and logic, I should be losing weight. And, what with the world tending to follow those rules and whatnot, I am in fact losing weight. I just don't believe it.

I think the main problem is that I started this diet, essentially, on a lark. Late last Tuesday evening, I hopped on the scale in my bathroom and just thought, "hmm, 278, that's a pretty high number. Maybe I should diet." But I wasn't really being all that serious about it. I messed around and set up an excel spreadsheet�one of these days we'll discuss what a giant nerd for numbers I am�and sort of just let it be. The next day I weighed myself, I was down a bit, and sort of decided "I guess I will go ahead and diet." And I did.

There was no moment of reckoning, no spark to get started, just a blah, meh, I guess I might as well. And that's not really a good way to start a diet.

On the other hand, 10 days of sustained healthy food choices and an 8.7 pound loss are, absolutely, a way to start one. I'm moving along pretty well, I've found some goals and motivation, and I've been able to keep going even through some pretty heavy temptation. And I've just kept muddling through, slowly but surely sticking to things over the past week and a half.

I just need to believe that I am actually doing this.

So, I took a before photo . . .

A few before photos, actually. They're really bad. Like, really bad. Like I feel terrible I've made everyone look at me for all these years.

No, I'm not sharing.

Maybe when I've lost a bit and want to share progress I will. But for now they can be my icky "omg gross" secret. I intentionally wore very tight clothes for the photos to make the difference easier to see later on, but YEESH. I'm very, very sad faced at the moment.

So, when I started up this whole diet thing, I joined Spark People again under a quickie name that I just made to set up an account. I'd been using that for the past few days, for tracking purposes, but had been intentionally not participating in the community. A little over a year ago I lost a little under 20 pounds using this account.

I'm excited to actually rejoin the Spark community. I still remember a few people from there fondly, and especially one of the groups called Done being the fat girl. So, I am excited to get back into that, and to get started again with everything there. My new account name over there is HalvingHadley, so please come on by and visit.

Since I'm not posting a before photo, I will instead post the current excel graph of my weight loss. I've definitely got a trend going:


Anyway, that's where I'm going to leave it for now. Have a nice night all, and I'll report in with a number tomorrow. (Or with random insomniac musings in a few hours.) Again, fearing a gain, but I suppose we'll see what happens.

And so, it starts . . .

All things must come to an end. Before, however, things may end, they must begin. And so, with that in mind, let's start.

My name is Hadley. I'm morbidly obese. On July 7th, when I started my weight loss journey, I weighed 278 lbs. I'm down a bit now--I hit a new low of 270.7 yesterday--but not by much. I have a lot of weight to lose. I need to hit 145 to no longer be overweight. 145 lbs is, essentially, a world, 58 leagues, four languages and two centuries away, so I won't be focusing on that number much. Sure, yeah, it would be nice and maybe I'll get there eventually. For now though, it's such an alien concept I can't even really focus on it.

So I don't. I focus on not being morbid.

Morbidly obese is one of those icky, icky terms. It's one of those shock terms. Scary words. A scary concept. And yet, also day-to-day reality for me and millions of others.

Right now, my goal is just to not be morbid.

For that, I need to get to 233 pounds. That's a trim 45 pounds away from my starting weight and 37.7 pounds from my current low. It's pretty far away, there's no doubt about it. If you do the standard 1-2 pounds a week with the occasional slip up, you could spend anywhere between half a year and a year on it. But, 233 pounds is something I can imagine. It's a place I can see myself getting. And it's a place I'm going to go.

So let us drink (water, of course) to the end of morbidity, and, one hopes, to delayed mortality.