Tuesday Weigh In

Weight: 235.5
BMI: 40.42

I'm 2.5 pounds away from not being morbidly obese. Two and a half pounds. Wow. It makes me shiver just thinking about it.

When I started this blog, I said in my very first post that the goal I was using to drive myself was the idea of not being morbidly obese:

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.

I am two and a half pounds away from not being morbid. Wow.

This Saturday I found myself staring at my stomach. For the first time, really, it felt smaller than it used to be. I felt smaller than I used to be. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've known for a while that I've been getting smaller. My old clothes are way too big for me. When I do comparison pictures, the difference is clearly visible. The bathtub feels a bit roomier than it used to. But this Saturday was the first time I ever looked at a part of my body and just thought, point blank, "wow, that's smaller."

I'm a bit over four months in at this point so I know the luster should have worn off, but it just hasn't yet. These days I wake up and I'm just blown away by how much I've accomplished. I've entered some sort of twilight zone where there's not a doubt in my mind that this is forever, this is for real, that I will succeed.

Anyway, two mini goals for the week:

1. I'm going to push myself really hard to get to not morbid by next Tuesday. It'll be tough. I haven't put up a 2.5 pound week since early September, and I only did one pound this week. But, I think I can do it, and at the very least I'm going to try.

2. I'm going to get back into the habit of posting every weekday. Yes, work is still pretty crazy and Arabic is hard, but taking time to blog and comment on other blogs makes everything else much easier. So, see you all around the blogosphere!

It depends on what your definition of is is

Well, actually, it depends on what your definition of morbidly obese is.

The most common definition, and probably the fairest, is a BMI greater than 40. However, there is another, alternate definition "100+ pounds overweight." Yesterday, no matter which way you cut it, I was firmly in the morbid category. Today, not so much.

Weight: 244.8

Normal weight for someone my height tops out at 145. This means I am no longer 100+ pounds overweight! As of this morning, I am a mere 99.8 pounds over a normal weight. Ah, the things we can rejoice in when we're as far gone as I.

Seriously, even though I think the 40+ BMI definition of morbid is more valid, today marks a substantive milestone for me. My weight loss goal is no longer in the triple digits. And 11.8 pounds from now, I won't be morbid by any definition. Good stuff.

In other news, last night I decided that I was going to stop messing around and make sure I get to 1200 calories every day, even if I feel like I don't really need the last 250 or so.

Now, conventional wisdom in the dieting world is pretty definitive on the "You must eat 1200 calories a day or BADNESS." The badness they most typically threaten people with is that if you eat fewer than 1200 calories a day, your body won't lose as much weight as if you eat just at or slightly above this mark. There's also some shebang about how it's bad for your body and how you need nutrients and whatnot. (The last point is one I mostly agree with, although I'm not entirely convinced of it's importance. Losing weight is self starvation, an inherently unhealthy process. The result is healthy, the value of shedding excess pounds makes it healthy on balance, but the self starvation part still pretty trying on your body. I'm not, for example, 100% convinced that the value of getting things done more quickly--thus spending fewer days starving yourself--isn't worth more than the value of getting perfect nutrients along the way.)

But okay, my real objection is with the idea that if you go below the 1200 calorie low bound, your body will go into "starvation mode" and that you'll lose less weight than if you were above it. It strikes me as absolute nonsense that one would lose less weight at 1150 than 1250 a day, or less weight at 900 than 1200.

The first thing that bugged me about it was that it clearly broke basic rules of physics. Diet industry, meet Conservation of Energy. You see, my buddy conservation is a rule. A real science-y rule, not one of your made up diet ones. That said, I do understand that bodies are complex organisms, and that going below a certain point could trigger your body to do other things that conserve energy, but it's not going to be enough to make up the difference. I'd absolutely 100% buy that because of your body's response there are decreasing marginal returns as you cut more calories (for example, that going from 1800 to 1700 would be worth more than cutting from 800 to 700, even that the cut from 800 to 700 only produces as much bonus weight loss as going from, say, 1800 to 1760), but decreasing marginal returns does not mean the effectiveness stops all together.

Besides, there's absolutely no way that all those people who are out there in the world starving are really just doing so because they're hitting 1300 calories a day, and if they only ate 1100 they'd be unable to lose weight. Ridiculous.

And then there's the fact that when you get into more medical settings, they do use sub 1200 calorie diets with great success. The 1200 calorie rule isn't just nonsensical in theory, it's flat out wrong in practice. Gastric bypass patients, for example, will be on a 600 calorie diet for a few weeks post op. Physician supervised very low calorie diets do exist for rapid weight loss.

So, all that, but: I'm committing to myself to hit the 1200 calorie mark every day for the next two weeks. This is tough for me. I enjoy heterodoxy for its own sake and I hate doing things that I can't independently make sense of. But after seeing my bugg burn values for the past few days (3527 Wednesday and 3172 yesterday), it occurred to me that relative to burn, the extra 220 or so calories I save on sub 1200 days just aren't worth it. I'm better off spending my mental energy pushing myself to get off the couch again to go for a walk than questioning whether or not I really need miracle whip on my daily sandwich (30 calorie difference), and is picking turkey over ham or roast beef (15ish calorie difference) really worth the decreased enjoyment.

Don't get me wrong, I still think diet is more important than exercise in terms of weight loss. And the difference eating 2000 and 1200 calories a day is huge, but right now, for me, it makes sense to stay in the 1200-plus club. For these next two weeks, I'm going to hit 1200 even if it means stuffing down an extra cottage cheese before bed. After that, I'll see where things are, and decide where I want to go from there.

I'm still a little in shock from how much I poured out in yesterday post, so apologies for the overshare. I've now officially told you guys a whole heck of a lot more about me than I ever intended, and even shared a few secrets I don't tell people in real life. But that's blogging, right?