First, some good news: I've improved one more notch on my belt. Yay.
I've been asked if I have any particular weigh loss goals. I have three. I have no idea how far apart they are -- in fact, they might be the same.
First, I have a number in mind. See, up until a couple years ago, I was gaining weight, but in a fairly steady, go-from-a-size-4-to-a-size-6-over-a-couple-of-years sort of way, that seemed to just be the product of growing older and perhaps eating too many french fries. (And that was pretty much how I'd control it, too -- by cutting down on my french fries.) But then, I started on a medication with the unfortunate side effects of increased appetite and increased lethargy, and all of a sudden, I put on something in the nature of 20 pounds in about six weeks. Once I got my dosage straightened out, the weight sorta "plateaued," but I hadn't really been able to make it go back down until I went to that lifestyle health spa place with my dad.
So ... knock on wood ... I been losing weight ever since. People have been noticing. I forgot my Building ID at work the other day, so I had to go through the metal detector. They made me take my belt off and my pants slid down to my hips -- it's a great feeling when the Court Security Officer says, "Wow! You lost a lot of weight!"
Where was I? Oh yeah, goals. There's three. The first is, I remember the actual number of pounds that the nurse got when she weighed me in at the doctor's office the day I got prescribed the medication that caused the weight gain. That's a numerical goal, and I'm somewhere between 4 and 6 pounds away from it. (As I've said before, my scale is not a model of accuracy.)
My second goal, which may be near that first one (I'm not sure) is that I want my rain pants to fit. Back in October of 2004, I bought a pair of $100 rain pants. This was astonishingly expensive, but in 2004, I was thinking, "Hey, I'll be this size for the rest of my life; I might as well spend a little more and get the high quality rain pants I can use forever." Yeah. Right. Last time I tried, I couldn't get the damn things on -- nor could I put on the (also pricey) midweight fleece pants I'd bought to wear under them. When I boxed up all my clothes that didn't fit for Goodwill, I saved the fleece pants and the rain pants -- because they weren't that tight and the idea I might be able to wear them again wasn't totally out of the question.... and because they were so darned expensive, I couldn't bear to let them go without trying to fit into them again. As for approaching that goal, I haven't tried on the rain pants yet, but the fleece pants can, technically, be placed upon my person and zipped all the way. (Side zippers. Velcro closures above them.) I say "technically" because they don't quite have the roominess that one expects is fleece pants, but I'm thinking that they may, at some point in the foreseeable future. (Hopefully by next May, which is when I'm going on a vacation that will require them again.)
Which sorta leads us to the third weight loss goal. I am, more or less, pretty content with the current eating plan. It allows me to have a reasonable amount of snacks and desserts, so I don't feel like I'm starving myself or anything. I hope that I can keep it up indefinitely -- the idea being that it wasn't intended as a short-term "diet," but as a long-term "new approach to food." So the third weight loss goal is to pretty much keep losing weight until I plateau on this meal plan. (When my ankle gets better, I'll be able to add exercise back into the mix -- but for now, all weight loss over here is food-related.) I have no idea where that will be. For all I know, in six pounds I'll stop losing weight and my rain pants would fit -- which would mean that all three weight-loss goals are the same. Who knows? I'll just have to wait and find out what a healthy weight for me turns out to be.
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