Tag Archives: weight loss

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Plateaus. I’ve been hovering about a pound or two on either side of 190 for a little over a month now. I’m not doing anything different than I was when I was steady losing. I’m just… stuck… in a spot where the numbers say I should be losing slowly but steadily. The obvious option – slash another hundred or two hundred calories out of the day isn’t appealing since I’m already coming in around 1800 a day. Losing even more time in the day to being out walking or on the damned exercise bike is equally unappealing. This process has already monopolized more time and effort than I really wanted to allocate for it. Fifteen months in, and there’s still not one bit of this effort that has proven to be a good time. 

2. The reward for good work. The reward for good work isn’t recognition, or accolades, or more money, it’s simply being assigned more work. In some cases, it’s being assigned more work that someone else in your work unit can’t or won’t do. Not only does that become a bit awkward when passing in the hall, but it’s also a bit agitating in that I don’t have the stomach to just let projects die on the vine because I don’t want to work on them. I wish I did. In the government there seems to be a whole cottage industry in being able to duck assignments you don’t want just by quietly refusing to do a damned thing with them. As I trundle into the last third of my career, I wonder if it isn’t time to take a page out of that book since there are no obvious consequences.

3. Buyer’s remorse. I bought a spanking new La-Z-Boy recliner a few months ago. It’s very comfortable. It looks good. I spent at least an hour sitting in it in the showroom before making the decision that it was the one I wanted sitting in the living room for the next 10-15 years. I thought I made a solid decision. Here’s the thing… I don’t like it as much as the recliner that it replaced. I don’t enjoy the fact that it’s a rocker as much as I thought I would. Because it’s a rocker, it also comes on a raised platform, and this is where my displeasure was unexpected and something I couldn’t have reasonably accounted for in the store. I’ve always kept a dog bed on the right-hand side of wherever I ended up sitting in every living room I’ve ever had. While I watched TV or read in the evening, I’d casually dispense ear scratches or pets. Because of the raised platform configuration of this chair, I can’t sit there and pet the dog while he’s laying down without throwing myself into some oddly convoluted listing position. So, I’ve done the only reasonable thing and pulled the old recliner out of mothballs and pressed it back into service while relegating the fancy new La-Z-Boy to the sunroom/office as a comfortable place to sit during the duty day.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. People in large groups. Concerts are one of the very few times I’ll concede to intentionally heading out into a crowed place. In just about every other endeavor, I make efforts to avoid finding myself in that situation. As Agent Kay well knew, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals.” The sheer density of people in large venues makes me incredibly uncomfortable. I’ll overcome it given enough motivation, but I’ll never manage to be entirely comfortable with it. 

2. Pope Francis. According to a news report I read, “Pope Francis praised Indonesians on Wednesday for their large families and suggested that people in other countries are choosing to have pets rather than bring up children.” That’s fine, but Jesus Christ there are now more than 8 billion people on the planet already. How can someone with such reach and influence honestly believe that the solution to any of the current problems facing the planet is to throw more people into the mix. The world population has grown by one billion people in the last 14 years, and you can see the hash we’ve made of that. Maybe, even with the words of the Holy Father to the contrary, it’s time we look at trying something else, because just throwing more bodies at our problems clearly isn’t getting the job done.

3. Clothes shopping. One of the many “fun” facts about weight loss is that clothes I was wearing at the beginning of this past spring no longer fit. Coats, sweatshirts, sweaters, long sleeve shirts of all varieties – not one in ten winter/cool weather things in my closet come close to fitting properly. I’m attempting to rectify that through online shopping, but my house has mostly become a waypoint for clothing as I shuffle it from a business’s shipping office back to their receiving desk in hopes that a refund may eventually be applied. Nothing fucking fits right, sizes make no sense, and I’m once again sick to death of shopping. I honestly have no idea how anyone has a good time with this process.

One thirty down and I have some thoughts…

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It’s been just about a year since I made the conscious decision to get my weight down towards something that wouldn’t trigger such a serious lecture every time I walked into a doctor’s office. Realizing that I was, in fact, both destructible and well past the demographic definition of middle-age gave me a level of motivation I’d never had before. Score one for the motivating power of fear and self-preservation. 

In any case, dropping 130 pounds over the last year hasn’t exactly been an adventure. I’m agitated every day about the foods – and lifestyle – I had to give up in order to achieve what would be easy to assume was purely a vanity exercise. I won’t pretend I don’t have my vanities, but none of them have ever been tied to my appearance, which is probably for the best.

I’m sure when I wander back to my doctor for my next scheduled checkup, he’ll make all the appropriate approving noises. My most recent bloodwork came back with significantly marked improvements over its historic baseline. Even if we haven’t gotten to the root causes of what was causing my heart to ramp up to a sprint of its own accord, it’s hard to argue against my innards being healthier than they were a year ago. 

What no one mentioned as they encouraged me through this process, though, was all the minor annoyances that would accompany this process. I just did my second cull of the clothes hanging in my closet and came to the unhappy realization that I only have eight shirts and two pair of pants that fit now. The rest – some of my favorite shirts mind you – are now comically oversized on my new frame. 

I’m going to have to take some time during this little Independence Week vacation for clothes shopping. I spent time doing that already this spring. This means I’ve spent more time shopping for clothes in the last three months than I have in the last three years. In fact, it will probably account for more time than I’ve spent shopping in the last decade.

I used to know the brands I liked and the appropriate sizes. It was easy enough finding them online and reordering as needed. Now, every damned shirt is a roll of the dice. It’s an enormous pain in the ass and feels a little bit like adding insult to injury. Sure, I’ll do it because wandering around naked is frowned upon by western civilization (and winter is coming), but there’s no power in heaven or earth than can make me enjoy the process. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Portion size. For most of my life, I’ve ignored the “recommended serving size” listed on most products. All it ever told me is that I identify as a family of four for purposes of meal prep. The reality is the serving size listed for most things is honestly absurd. Have you ever really measured out a single ounce of peanuts? It’s way, way less than an adult male hand full. An ounce of cheese? That’s something like a 1×1 inch cube. A serving size apparently isn’t half a package of bacon. Want a sandwich? Yeah, that’s “one serving” for each slice of bread. Utter bullshit that in the year of our lord two thousand twenty four, we haven’t come up with a consequence free way to eat the tasty food.

2. Never being satisfied. Sitting in the office doing stuff that I plainly have the capability of doing while sitting in the comfort of my sunroom remains pretty much infuriating. Look, I know that being in the office once or twice a week – in comparison to the five days a week that was the norm in the olden days – is a huge step in the right direction. Yet on those days when I have to put on pants and drive the 40 minutes to sit in fluorescent splendor, it all feels completely ridiculous. I don’t expect to see another revolution in office affairs in my lifetime, but having seen what could have been – what should have been – how we’re forced to operate “just because” feels entirely absurd.

3. Trash Tech. At one time Trash Tech was a reasonably well-respected trash company. Their cans were thick in the neighborhood on trash day. When I sold the truck and opted to hire a service, they were the top of the list. It was a horrible mistake. In the one month I maintained service with them there wasn’t a single day when pickup happened on its scheduled day. For two out of four weeks there was no pickup at all. Our business relationship was terminated for cause pretty quickly and that’s where the drama really started. Because I was “under contract” for three months of service, they wouldn’t come retrieve their containers until the end of that period – which would have been the end of March. For the last two and a half months, their cans continued to sit here. Finally tired of calling their customer service number, I opted for the far more humorous option of invoicing them for two months of storage and advising of the administrative fee that would be imposed at the end of June if I had to arrange alternative removal and disposal of their equipment. Sometime this morning, their cans finally disappeared. Sadly, the invoice remains unpaid. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Questionable aesthetic decisions. I drive past the house I rented when I first got back to Maryland every couple of weeks. I was dumbfounded to find that the current owner ripped off the large deck and planted a prefab garage in its place. It’s not just something simple that compliments the size of the house. Oh no. It’s a massive thing that overshadows the house completely. It doesn’t just look out of proportion with the property. but completely out of character for the neighborhood. It’s the kind of thing I’d lose my mind over if I had to look at it from next door. HOAs aren’t always ideal, but there’s absolutely a reason I’m ok with my local committee having to chop on any project that would alter the front facing profile of the houses here in my current hood. They may be the devil, but they’re the devil that will keep a neighbor from plunking down a massive steel building in their front yard. Sometimes that just has to be good enough.

2. Being old people. I unexpectedly found myself in attendance at a concert last Thursday. I couldn’t help but notice, when looking around the venue, that I was surrounded by “old people.” Old people who also knew that Chris Barron was the lead singer for Spin Doctors, a band who cut a swath through the early 1990s, and who remember his biggest two or three songs playing nonstop on radio and MTV. As it turns out it’s me. I’m “old people.” It was an unsettling moment of realization, even if sharing a very small venue with a guy whose music marked a pretty significant period in your life was a decidedly cool experience.

3. Self-denial. I’ve learned, over the last year, to go about the day in some varied state of hunger. Some days, I barely think about eating and don’t notice it. Other days, though, all I want to do is gorge on anything I can possibly get my hands on. Those days are the absolute worst, because falling off my particular wagon is no more than a quick walk to the refrigerator or pantry away. Self-denial has never been one of my unique gifts, so on days when hunger really sets in, it’s an all-day fist fight. They don’t hit as often as the used to, but when they show up, damned if they’re not brutal. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. A deferred milestone. I thought I was on track to hit the next weight milestone – 200 pounds even, or down 130 – on or about my birthday. Although I’ve started slowly creeping down again, the previous three weeks where I held all things equal has pretty much guaranteed I can’t get there from here unless I develop a pretty nasty stomach bug. It’s disappointing, of course. I was hoping to sit down to my traditional birthday lunch of crabcakes and hushpuppies and proceed to getting back to a “maintenance” level of eating. That feels out of reach. But I’m still damned well planning to have the crab cakes and hushpuppies.

    2. Foreign aid debate. You know what one of the most successful bits of foreign policy of the post World War II era? Yeah, that would be when the United States poured out absolute shiploads of cash, material, and expertise on Europe and rebuilt a shattered continent. It turns out prosperous liberal democracies bound together by deep ties of trade tend not to try to kill each other nearly so often as they did when international diplomacy was a zero-sum game. The weight of American troops and weapons arguably won the war, but it was the Marshall Plan that won the peace. It’s a pity that Americans consistently refuse to remember their own history when we’re talking about relatively paltry sums in the contemporary foreign aid budget. Every scrap of progress we can make by throwing money at the problem is far less expensive than anything that happens when we need to get involved kinetically. 

    3. Walking. Gods, even with the latest in listening technology, walking is just a deadly dull way to spend 30 or 40 minutes every day. Yes, the scenery in the neighborhood is nice. Sometimes I get to see neighbors doing something stupid in full view of the sidewalk. Aside from occasionally getting to interface with the local wildlife, I’m sorry, but there just isn’t much to recommend it. Living at the far end of the dead end street, there are only so many ways to make the path different… and after six months, I’ve trod all those down multiple times each week already. Look, I’ll keep doing it… under protest and purely because the doc says I must… but you’ll never convince me that there isn’t a more interesting or entertaining use to those 30 or 40 minutes of every day that isn’t called off on account of weather. 

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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    1. Stalled. My quest for more weight loss has been stalled for almost two weeks. I haven’t made any changes from what has worked consistently for the last nine months, but I’ve spent the last 14 days losing and gaining the same pound and a half. I’m trying to be a good sport and going after the 200-pound goal the docs seem to want me to hit… But I’m already sitting at an 1800 calorie a day hard limit and frankly I like eating too much to go restricting that much further. I should also note that I’m prepared to garrote the first person who chimes in and says “you just need to exercise more.” Bugger directly off.

    2. New computer day. Wednesday was new computer day at the office. Under most circumstances I’d say that was great. Except the new computer they’ve decided on is a desktop that will live permanently at the office while we take out laptops to live permanently at home. Instead of two work computers it means I now am signed for three separate pieces of equipment. It also means that in order to work between home and the office, I’ll be relying on “the cloud” properly being able to host two decades worth of work product instead of it living on my local drive and simply being backed up to the cloud. I’m not a fan of this for a lot of reasons. Color me curious to see what the response is going to be when our elderly laptops start dying off and someone has to be on the hook for machines that live at home being out of sight and out of mind.

    3. Some weeks are busier than others. This one has felt like every time I knock something off my list of things to do, two or three more rise up to take its place. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it has certainly been obnoxious as this trend managed to cross all lines between work and home. It’s the first April in a very long time that hasn’t been entirely consumed by working as an advanced party and event planner. It seems that finally having chucked that one large thing over the side, maybe it’s just a natural effect that 57 small things have come along to eat up that white space on my calendar. 

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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    1. The limits of better living through chemistry. My doctors and I like to play a fun game. The goal of this game is to wait until I am just about feeling normal and then decide it’s time to add, take away, or otherwise screw around with one or more of the medications I’m taking. The whole thing seems purposely designed to leave me feeling vaguely disoriented, tired, out or sorts, and anxious as often as possible. As we are closing in on a year of this abject medical fuckery, I’d hoped we were a bit closer to reaching some kind of steady state with all this. So far, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

    2. Eternal cold. I’m approximately 2/3’s the man I used to be. Apparently all of that represents lost insulation and I am, therefore, always uncomfortably cold. I’m forever wandering around the house putting on additional layers. I have extra fuzzy coats at the office. I have four layers of blankets on my bed. Every seat in the living room has at least one blanket… and I generally use multiple while watching TV in the evening. File this as yet another problem that I foolishly assumed would somehow be resolved by now. It’s very strange not having any idea what was the last time that I really felt warm. I didn’t realize it was something I was taking for granted.

    3. Streaming television. The number of people who look at me like I have 16 heads when I tell them I still subscribe to old fashioned cable television is pretty astronomical. I get everything from stunned disbelief to pitches for satellite, antenna, and every streaming platform under the sun. The truth is, aside from cost, I’m basically satisfied with cable. There’s one “box” to deal with and every program it supplies is available with the push of one or two buttons. My user experience with streaming services has rarely been so seamless. Whether it’s updating passwords, constantly switching between apps hunting for the generic “something to watch,” or some episodes of a series being available on one service while other episodes are on another, or the sheer cost of building out an array of stream services to match the programming natively available through cable. Most of my television “watching” is in fact, listening to television in the background while I do other things. Cable excels at performing this function. It simply doesn’t require any thought at all as something is always on when you push the power button. Sure, I’ll keep rotating through the myriad of streaming options as I slowly consume their “prestige television” contenders, but I don’t see any world where I’m happy with seven or eight streamers attempting to replace or replicate the proper channel surfing experience. I’m sure streaming is a brave new world for others, but for the foreseeable future, I don’t see it being much more than an add on for me.

    Overweight…

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    As far back as elementary school, I remember various “tests” aimed at assessing basic health. Is the President’s Physical Fitness program still a thing anyone does? I have some vague recollection of calipers and some kind of devious box we dutifully stretched our hands over to determine how flexible we were. Those and the damned timed mile run were the only tests I never really did well on in school. Gym classes are not among my cherished childhood memories in any case.

    I assume the calipers were there to make some measurement of our body mass index. As the years have screamed past, even the AMA has admitted that BMI is not a particularly unproblematic measure of health. The fact remains, however, that it is still what’s used by most of the American medical establishment to apply some statistical analysis to body composition. Like it or not, there is a correlation between high BMI and adverse health outcomes, so it endures.

    Here we get to a bit of surprising news. Apparently when I stepped on the scale Saturday morning, I magically qualified to be simply overweight instead of obese. Now, that’s still not medically ideal, but feels like it should be a reasonably significant improvement from ranging into the morbidly obese category. At least in terms of where I fall on someone’s wall chart, there has been demonstrated progress. I’d probably be more impressed if I the net result to date was, “well, I don’t feel any worse.”

    The helpful BMI charts online still say I should be somewhere down around 185 to be “normal weight.” I’m still not convinced that is in any way a reasonable target. The fact is, I remain a little sore at the doc for his latest bait and switch, so as far as I’m concerned 200 is the new “final” number. If I can manage to do that without chewing off my own arm, the saw bones just might have to learn to accept a final form of me being slightly overweight and devise his treatment strategy from there.

    At some point, likely sooner than later, I’m just going to decide I’ve had enough of this and get on with things on a maintenance level instead of giving a damn about whether I’m losing weight or not.

    Simple concept, challenging execution…

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    On June 28th I had an epiphany. Maybe a lot of people do when they find themselves laying on a gurney in their local emergency department waiting for tests to reveal if they’ve had a heart attack. The tests, fortunately, didn’t reveal anything immediately catastrophic, but that didn’t do much to change the simple fact that I felt awful and it was categorically impossible to keep plodding along as usual with all the warning lights that were being flashed for me. 

    So, I did what any reasonable person would do… I slashed salt, downloaded apps, poured over internet discussion boards, and scheduled appointments with any doctor I could think of that might help get to the root cause of why I was feeling so badly… and more importantly why my heart occasionally decided to make a big show of trying to thunder out of my chest. Months of tests, scans, consultations still haven’t definitively what was going on with me through the summer of 2023. They keep poking at it, though, so maybe we’ll find out at some point… though as my symptoms have diminished, I’m less optimistic that will happen unless they reemerge and can be captured on one of their fancy tests or scans. If I’m honest, the part of me that things better out of sight and out of mind is winning out over the part of me that wants conclusive answers.

    One of the deals I made with myself laying in the ED back in June was that I would finally head the medical advice I’d been getting for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t control the test results or the lack of official diagnosis of what was happening, but I could, in theory, control my weight. It had to come off and it had to happen in a significant way. As someone who’s life is almost defined by being a dedicated creature of habit, it would be arguably one of the hardest goals I’ve ever set for myself… and one I was being drug too unwillingly by my own traitorous body. 

    July 1st I weighed in at 330 pounds. Not knowing a damned thing about weigh loss, I set an arbitrary goal of making it down to 250 by the end of the year. Eighty pounds. Six months. I had no idea if it was doable, or even if my own brain would let me stick with something I hated with a passion for that long. 

    I downloaded the LoseIt app, plugged in my vital statistics, and told it I wanted to lose 1.5 pounds a week. It spit out how many calories I should be eating each day… and that’s when I realized I had no idea how to effectively measure food. After that it’s been all weights and measures before anything gets on my plate. If you ever want to take the romance out of food, definitely weigh it all up first.

    If June 28th was my epiphany, buying that damned kitchen scale was a light bulb moment. I’d been protesting for years that I wasn’t eating absurd amounts of food. That’s objectively true. What I was eating, however, was incredibly calorically dense. A proper 400 calorie “serving” of lasagna is preposterously small. Same with anything involving cheese, really. Once I accepted the scale, though, things started happening. Yes, I was ravenously hungry all day every day, but the weight came off at a rate closer to 2.5 pounds a week than my planned 1.5. Chalk that up to the limited additional exercise I was willing to program into the day’s limited hours. 

    Two months along, I discovered I wasn’t ravenous anymore. I was hungry for sure, but felt decidedly less likely to chew my own hand off. That’s about the time the anxiety I mentioned in last week’s post started to make its presence known. After that it was pretty much a war between my own stubborn determination to lose weight and my brain screaming that something was wrong. We seem, for the moment at least, to have concluded that particular war. I’m particularly grateful to that particulate respite.

    What have I learned? Well, for me, losing the first tranche of weight was simple – radically decrease the number of calories going in while moderately increasing the number of calories burned. Calories in, Calories out as the people in the forums are fond of saying. The catch is, although the theory is simple, not a single part of it is easy. Learning about calories, how to measure them, abandoning long cherished menu items, learning to cook new recipes in an entirely different style, and sometimes being hungry all day no matter how well planned your meals are is hard. It’s damned hard. Every step of it is a goddamned fist fight with yourself. 

    This how I sum up my experience so far… it’s an incredibly simple concept, but wildly challenging in execution.

    I don’t think this process have given me any special insight. I still don’t know dick about losing weight. I don’t know much about macros or the fancy concepts of nutrition. I’m just a guy over here using an app and a scale to try to keep everything the experts say you need in between the lower and upper limits. Some days that works better than others. 

    Anyway, I hit my mark of losing 80 pounds two weeks early. I’m still losing – down to 248.6 as of this morning. All the charts say at my height, I should “ideally” weigh in at 185 pounds. Frankly that sounds unreasonable. The chance of me hitting a weight I haven’t seen since high school at the latest doesn’t feel like something that’s achievable. Now 220 or 225, something that puts me in the range of being merely overweight instead of obese, does seem that could be within reach.

    I’m plugging in my next goal as hitting 225 before June.

    We’ll see how it goes.