Fat Man on a Diet

Like I’ve been saying, I’m in no rush to lose the weight any more. The turning point is the desire to change the lifestyle to suit the conditions… and right now that’s what I’ve done.

This morning I weighed in at 141.0 kilos which is still dreadul bearing in mind the 119.? I was before Xmas ‘07 but I’m happy enough because it’s also less than the 143.5 kilos I was on 2nd September… and a lot less than the 153.5 kilos I was when I last saw the specialist.

Is 2 kilos a lot? Not compared to the 15 kilos I lost the first couple of weeks of the competition last year… but a kilo lost is two kilos not gained I say. One kilo a week will suit me.

Ok it might well be this time next year before I’m down to an acceptable size, but at least it’s moving in the right direction so let’s not knock it too much!

It’s taking me a while to get back ‘into’ diet mode despite knowing this *is* my ‘last chance’. Still I *am* at least in there struggling along. The headaches have stopped though the ravenous hunger still has a few more days to run. I’ve not given in to it… yet… but while I stuck to the 150 grams of steamed chicken breast last night, I *did* rather overdo it on the cooked veg!!

While the headaches have stopped… they’ve been replaced by other aches. For a start I’ve started walking again. Nowhere near as far or as fast as previously, my back won’t let me, but I *am* doing it. What I’ve been doing is walking for 50 mins or so over to the library in the local town centre. If this wasn’t enough (which it probably isn’t by the way) I’ve been taking an old laptop and all the ancilliary support rubbish I think I need. The total weight of all this is around 10 kilos so whilst I can’t walk too fast… or too far… I *can* at least make the walk count for more by using a lot more energy whilst I’m at it.

I wouldn’t say it’s having a marked effect on my weight… but it isn’t supposed to, well not straight off anyway. The point is currently to build some strengtht in my legs and back muscles so that if (when!!) I start to get the weight off I don’t wrench my back and end up spending months at home, in pain unable to exercise… and with the temptation of a kitchen full of food ever present.

So, the weight is still hovering at the 145 kilo mark… so what. I’m more active than I’ve been for months and be it just a couple of ounces a month… I’m confident it will move slowly in the right direction.

Ok it’s taken me a long time to get there but I think I’ve finally found the secret to weight loss. It’s really simple and can be summed up in two words… don’t rush!

I’m sure most of you out there are just like me in your struggle to get the flab gone and get fit. We are looking at ourselves and want the fat gone now. Well be reassured and learn that it just isn’t gonna happen *now*. It takes time!

Getting the weight on took time… getting it off takes time. maybe not as long as it took to gain it but almost certainly longer than you are wishing or hoping. The point is it *can* be done… just not quickly. And that’s been one of my fundamental mistakes.

More on this soon… right now… I’m going out for a walk. Exercise is useful. The sun is shining, I have a new camera. Walking is good.

Strangely enough I’m getting a lot of headaches since restarting the diet a few days ago. I’m putting it down to my body ‘cleansing’ itself… a detox of some sort.

I’ve cut the refined sugars and less refined carbs out of my diet already as far as possible by restarting the regime of two meal replacements and no a lot else!

What’s causing the headaches is probably the lack of caffeine. From drinking pints of full strength tea… I’m back to the liquorice tea I love! Actually I’ve been drinking it on and off for ages and not because I’m ‘dieting’ but because it’s really a very pleasant drink! My problem was that Woolworths, where I had been buying it, had taken it off their product list and I had to go wandering about until I found a new source (which I did today).

In the meantime I’ve been reducing the caffeine intake by swallowing buckets of de-caffeinated coffee, and/or tea which seems to have done wonders in washing out my insides if nothing else! To be honest I’ve been wondering if the buckets of coffee/tea (which I take with milk and sweeteners) were acting as a meal substitute and helping keep the stomach filled while the sugar was being leached from my system. If that *is* what they were doing then it worked pretty much.

The headaches are on a similar form to the hunger pangs and I can’t claim to be without hunger pangs either yet. However, from experience I expect that in a day or three as my body re-enters the ketosis phase both headaches *and* hunger pains will dissipate and I’ll be back to feeling good about the process.

From then on it should be plain sailing down the path. Naturally, if the ketosis *doesn’t* kick in then we’re in a different ball game… but that’s a bridge to cross when we have to. Right now I’m mixing metaphors with gay abandon and to compound it still further… I’m metaphorically walking alongside that bridge!!

I just checked the early entries in the blog, the second to be exact, and discovered that today I weigh exactly what I weighed… a year ago.

What a waste of effort!

Still we’re on the move… as is the weight. Perhaps I won’t update the blog quite as regularly as I did, but I *will* keep it up to let you know where my head is so to speak.

Right now I’m off to ‘do’ something. It’s being online - and therefore sitting - for so much of my time that has partially caused this problem so I’m off to vacuum if nothing else!

Tomorrow the intention is to make a start doing what I’ve said I was going to do for some weeks, pack my laptop into a ‘trolley’ and walk over to the local library, about 20 mins or so, and then sit, read, write, listen to/copy CD’s or DVD’s… or whatever. Whatever I do, at least this way I’m out of the house, and out of the kitchen.

Without the gym work I can’t promise the weight will fall as rapidly as it did last year but stopping the increase is a first step. Weight loss is the second. Fitness the third. This time, perhaps, I’ll make a real go of it!

Not sure I should be calling this a ’state of play’… it’s way past being funny now and is getting too serious for my liking.

For anyone not up to date with the peculiarities of my ‘dietary path’ I’ll give a short precis of where I was… the progress I made… the fall… and the new, slow, climb back.

So, in the beginning I was a little ‘chubby’. Lost most of it around 1990 when I did my last degree and then after falling in the street found my weight climbing, but very slowly because I walked for several hours a day - in London we rarely caught the tube, even more rarely taxis… and never buses! We migrated, and because of the heat I found myself less inclined to walk but did a lot of gardening which helped a little.

I’ve been using computers on and off since 1983, hence the Masters in Computer Science  but bizarrely only got *seriously* into them around 15 years ago when I discovered the Mosaic browser and the World Wide Web. Since then I’ve been glued to my seat… but ate as much as when I was walking regularly and doing other exercise. The obvious result was a faster, and ever increasing weight gain.

The largest I became was just over 160 kilos… and bot did I feel it.

After some nagging from the wife… constant nagging from the wife… and the encouragement of friends I joined a local gym and got myself into their competition called ‘The Hills Biggest Loser’. If you read the blog from the beginning, or look at the weight charts you’ll see I did pretty well. The lo-carb diet worked exactly as expected and the weight fell off me.

Then came a few ‘issues’.

The first problem was Xmas. We had a dozen people to stay and I was doing the cooking. Unfortunately, as with Oscar Wilde, I can resist anything except temptation and found myself guzzling loads of ham, trifle, Xmas cake etc always with the intention of ‘going back on the diet’ once everyone had left. Was never going to happen.

Actually Xmas was just the start of a litany of disasters. I over-exercised and aggravated a long standing back problem which all bar stopped me walking (my favourite exercise), and was followed by my dropping a toilet bowl on my toe (don’t ask how) which again kept me off my feet… and also aggravated the back problem again. After that I caught flu *twice* and for a large part of the time became quite depressed by the remnants of our Xmas visitors still sponging off us, and doing as little as possible despite them being less than a half my age, living here rent free and having overstayed their initial welcome by months!

Nevertheless, for all the problems I was having, they were as nothing compared with the fact that I was overeating! Being ‘off the diet’ meant I was open to subversion by my addiction to every and any kind of foods that are bad for me… and I *mean* addiction!! I’m convinced that my body is addicted to certain foodstuffs and that the addiction affects my behaviour and ability to resist the temptation.

Anyway I digress, Eating like a pig for months brought my weight back to nearly the same point it was when I first started down the path. Currently, I weigh in at 143.5 kilos… a long way from the 119.4 kilos I was back at the middle of December. Still, having said that things could be worse… in that I am at least still alive!

Question is, or was what to do. I figured I’d explored *every* option from drugs thru every kind of diet around leaving me with just one option… surgery!

Off I went to the ‘diet doctor’ to explore that option. He referred me to a specialist, and so I went to see him as well. We discussed mainly his pet surgical procedure ‘Gastric Banding’, or more specifically “Laparoscopic Gastric Banding for the Morbidly Obese” which I appear to be.

I’m not going into the plus and minus factors of this procedure here, the post is too long already. That can wait for later posts. All I’ll say is that as wonderful as the results sounds… the actual practice frightened me so much I backed off at a rate that might win me a medal for it at the Olympics… was there such a sprt of ‘Backing Off’. I decided that before I went down that road, I’d give the diet one last try.

Ok the chances of success might seem pretty minimal bearing in mind my previous failures, but the alternatives are really unpleasant… both on and off the diet. Off the diet I could either have the operation, or remain well overweight and drastically increase the risks of heart attack or stroke. They are bad enough right now, I think I owe it to my family to at least try to get healthy even at my advancing age.

The result has been that the morning after visiting the latest specialist… I’m back on the diet! Not quite the same one… but on Optifast… which I will also write more about in coming posts.

I’m going to resurrect the weight chart and enter my details, but I’m not going to go back to the original diet guy (Dr Stephen Parsons). He helped, I know the direction I need to go, and this time I have to get there myself. The wife is again helping me by doing as much cooking as she can to keep me out of the kitchen and after backsliding all that way I’m at last moving forwards, one step at a time, one day at a time.

Will I get to the end of the road this time? We;; you’ll just have to keep reading to find out!

Indeed it *is* a long long road and after months of effort and dedication… I am again right back where I started. Bugger.

What happened? Where am I now? Why am I here… ?? All will be revealed over the next few days, suffice it to say that, sadly, the label ‘fatman’ is once again an accurate label.

I may as well fess up now as later to have *totally* screwed this diet. So much so in fact that I’ve dropped out of the Biggest Loser comp this time.

Not only haven’t I *lost* weight I’ve put on kilo after kilo to the extent I’m heavier now than when I started. Ok this is probably due to my not having exervised… and because my back has been hurting because I’ve not moved around much… and well I can name any number of excuses , but the truth is I’m back addicted to those high-carb foods again.

Yes it’s my own fault, but it *does* creep up on you insidiously until you end up sucked in worse than ever. I suppose it’s the nature of addiction but whatever the cause the effect is the same… in this case, excess weight piling on.

Question is how to deal with it.

The obvious answer is stop eating, but of course as with any addiction it is easy to say it but to put it into practice isn’t as simple as it appears.

For starters I’ll need to get out of the house. I mean *right* out of the house for the larger part of the day. While I’m around food and easy access to it the temptations is always there and as I’ve said ad nauseum I can resist anything except temptation.

This isn’t going to happen for a few days at least. I’ve got to tie up loose ends first and that will take a few days at least… maybe another week. But I think I ought to tell myself that I can *only* have that one more week and then that’s it. Anything not finished has to be done at night when the rest of the family is there to haul me out of the kitchen.

Other than that… well get back on the diet, and just play it by ear I think.

Ahhh… those last words again. I was really sure I was on the way back to the gym a few days ago… how long it seems. Immediately afterwards I got hit by the flu and I’m still falling over.

I suppose I’ll get back to it soon enough but still I feel dreadful. I’ve not put on quite as much weight as I’d feared but I’m still not losing it and that was the point and purpose. I’m way off ‘the diet’ eating anything I feel like including all the high carb stuff I *know* is bad for me… my head just isn’t in the right space right now.

Yesterday I was even considering nagging the wife into letting me go for stomach banding! Still, bad as I feel I’m *not* as bad as I was so maybe if I leave things alone and don’t try to do anything silly, by Monday I’ll be feeling workish again. I do hope so.

The back is all bar right now so I think tomorrow I’ll be ready to get back to the gym and start walking again. Be too easy to just quit altogether, tho I think the competition is out the door already. I’ve lost nothing since it started and actually put weight on the last week or two.

Still, the intent is there so if I can maintain my current weight it’ll be enough… not what I want, but better than getting back to the previous size!!

So. Basically I’m here… just… and keeping it together… just

I so much hate having a bad back!