Weight Loss and Maintenance

For the first half of my nearly fifty-one years on this planet, I was a thin person. And up until my mid-teens, an extremely thin person. So thin, in fact, that once, in the sixth grade, a classmate asked me point-blank whether I’d had polio! At the time, I thought he was joking with me, but now I believe he was serious. I’ve seen some photos of concentration camp survivors from World War II, and I’m not kidding when I say that my appearance was not that far from their’s. Every rib on my chest prominently stuck out, and I had an emaciated look about my body. It’s not that I was underfed: it’s simply that my metabolism was so high that my nervous energy quickly spent anything that I ate. As I grew older and began to progress into adulthood, however, my metabolism began to slow down. By the time I was 26, I had actually become slightly overweight, even though I had a very physically-active lifestyle. Since then, my weight has gone up and down like a yo-yo (varying between 140 and 205 pounds), with it being on the overweight side right now (for my 5'9" frame). Besides the fact that this isn’t good for my health, I also want to get back to running cross-country outdoors, and the shock of my excessive weight hitting the surface with each stride is not good for my legs and feet. So, I’ve begun, a few weeks ago, a weight-loss program that combines the following elements: eat more healthful foods, eat in measured amounts, drink plenty of water, and exercise. The exercise is something that I was already doing. Drinking more water is easy, too. The more difficult part is the eating. For I not only love foods like pizza, cheesecake, and popcorn, but I love eating them in large portions! It is in this area that I have to consciously change my lifestyle habits. To help with this, I have decided to publish, “on the eights”, as I have done with running, piano, and reading, my progress with weight-loss and maintenance on this blog (there’s nothing quite like a sense of public accountability). So, eight weeks from now, you’ll see another entry describing my progress in this endeavor. Here are my weights from the past few weeks:

DATE WEIGHT (LBS)
8/11 189.2
8/18 187.6
8/25 183.0
9/01 181.4
9/08 179.6
9/15 181.0
9/22 180.6

I am weighed once a week on Saturday mornings on very accurate scales, so the weights are pretty valid measurements of my progress. My personal goal is to get under 160 pounds and then permanently maintain it below that level.