Tag Archives: weight loss

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

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?

    Posted on by

    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?

    Posted on by

    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.

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

    Posted on by

    1. Summer clothes. It was warm over the weekend and I thought it was probably a good chance to go through some of my summer garb to see what still fits. Surely, I thought to myself, among my stack of tee shirts and shorts I’d find more than enough to get me through the hot weather. Yeah, no. Out of twelve pairs of shorts, there are two I can probably wear… if I keep my belt cinched really tight. Tee shirts were a bit of a better result, but not by much… as long as you don’t mind that oversized and baggy look. This means I’m being forced against a wall where I can’t avoid more goddamned shopping. Of all the things I’m loath to spend money one, clothes ranks not far off the top of the list. I need to find someone in Cecil County who offers personal shopping and stylist services, because I’d like to participate in this process as little as possible.

    2. Rematch. Barring the unforeseen it appears that a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is inevitable. Every four years I say it, and every four years I mean it… I can’t imagine being less inspired to vote for a candidate than I am by the prospect of one of these two geriatrics running the country for the next four years. If, in the country of 300 million people, these are the best our nation has to offer, honest to god we should just pack up and call it a day. We’re not so much a country as a circus protected by a large standing army.

    3. SoTU. This week will mark Joe Biden’s 3rd State of the Union Address. That’s pretty good for a guy who according to wackjob right wingers isn’t technically President of the United States. There was a time I’d have laid in the chips and dip and treated the State of the Union as an alternate reality Super Bowl. Sitting here now, though, I know there’s not a chance in hell I’m going to make any special effort to watch. The simple fact is, I can’t think of anything I’m interested in hearing Joe Biden say… and I’m even less eager to poison my ears with whatever treason-scented fuckery spews out of the Republican response.

    Overweight…

    Posted on by

    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.

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

    Posted on by

    1. Insurance. For the most part I have had very good luck with my health insurance provider. Presently, though, they’re picking a fight over the bill for the 30-day heart monitor I got to enjoy last year. “Not medically necessary,” they say, though the cardiologist who called for it seems to disagree with their assessment. Just now I haven’t been billed for anything yet, so I’m on the sidelines while Phillips, my doctor, and Blue Cross throw shade at each other. I assume at some point they’re going to fling a $9,000 bill at me just to see if maybe I’ll pay it on spec. Being a professional bureaucrat, though, I’m entirely prepared for whatever paper drills may come. Hopefully, though, this doesn’t devolve into a full-blown pain in the ass… but I’m not overly optimistic.

    2. Clothing. I almost never have a reason to do something like put on a dress shirt or, god forbid, a suit, but almost isn’t never. What I’ve discovered this week, while raiding my closet looking for something to wear is that even the suits I held over from my long ago time working in DC no longer fit. In fact most of them have me looking like a kid trying on his father’s clothes. One or two of them might be salvageable, with a tailor who knows their business, but otherwise, I’m going to have to go shopping for clothes… and there’s honestly no variety of shopping I want to do less.

    3. Congress (and the average American). If it weren’t tied directly to my ability to make a living, watching the ongoing fuckery that is the United States Congress would be entertaining as hell. There seems to be no hope of passing a budget. Republicans in the Senate just shot down the most conservative border security bill proposed in my lifetime. Republican leaders in the House of Representatives can’t manage to muster votes from their caucus to do… well… anything at all. It’s certainly the most dysfunctional government I’ve lived through – and it has no real signs of improving any time soon. But, we’ve gotten the government that the American people, in their wisdom, have voted for… which I suppose just goes to prove how deeply stupid the average American is.

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

    Posted on by

    1. Trash Tech. Now that I’m without a pickup truck for the first time in more than a decade, I embraced my inner suburbanite and hired a trash company. I failed to do my due diligence. Honestly, I looked around at some of the cans sitting out when I walked around the neighborhood and threw a dart. Had I bothered to read the reviews on Trash Tech, I’d have never signed on. By “trash day” on the first week, they hadn’t delivered cans. They didn’t bother to come by to pick up on the second week at all. Their office staff, though pleasant enough, blatantly lied 3x when contacted by phone. So, they were terminated for cause in less than three weeks. I’ve since signed on with a company that’s much better reviewed and had glowing recommendations when I asked some of the neighbors.

    2. Cold. For as long as I can remember I’ve been hot. Or at least I’ve felt hot. What no one mentions when you start losing weight is how goddamned cold you’ll be all winter. I’ve got extra comforters in the bed. Two layers of almost everything on and I’m still cold. For the first time in my life, I understand the impulse that leads people to move south. I’m not going to do that, of course, but I increasingly understand why people do. It’s absurd.

    3. Food. Not really. I love food. I just still don’t particularly love the kind of food I’ve been cooking for months now. It tastes ok. It’s sustenance. There’s not one drop of joy in the eating, though. That’s the circle I haven’t been able to square yet. Maybe I never will. I want food that tastes like home, but what keeps showing up on my dinner plate is full of fresh veg, low fat protein, and a reasonable amount of sodium… but it doesn’t contain a hint of love. Food should be more than just fuel otherwise I honestly don’t know what we’re doing here.

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

    Posted on by

    1. Wrinkles. Look, the losing weight has been fine. I’m down around 85 pounds since July. The catch is, I’ve apparently been losing weight in my forehead. I can’t help but notice when I throw the right facial expressions, there’s a definite wrinkle in the fabric now. As I race through the back half of my 45th year, it shouldn’t be a surprise, but I know damned well it wasn’t there 30 or 40 pounds ago. I’m not an especially vain person, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find this… troubling. 

    2. Caffeine. About two months ago I made a concerted effort to start weening myself off caffeine. Having survived in a steady diet of coffee since I was 15, it was no small undertaking. The doc and a therapist both noted that caffeine could sometimes exacerbate anxiety, so it had to go. After two weeks of intermittent headaches, it was mostly ok. Today, having felt as good for the last few days as I’ve felt in months, I decided to treat myself to an iced tea with lunch. Bad decision. By quitting time my anxiety was doing its thing and didn’t ease up until bedtime. Lesson learned, I guess. It’s decaf and caffeine free soda for the foreseeable future. Obviously not the end of the world, but it’s hard not to notice – and grieve – the things that continue to fall away under this new regime of mine. 

    3. Presidential immunity. According to Donald Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, a sitting president would be immune from prosecution if he ordered Seal Team Six to assassinate a political opponent. Not only is this a wild misapplication of what any reasonable person would consider the proper bounds of immunity, but it also raises an inevitable question. If this interpretation of immunity is held to be valid by the courts, what’s to stop President Biden from launching a cruise missile attack on Mar-a-Lago the next time Donald lays that giant melon of his down to sleep? The whole line of thinking is batshit crazy.

    Simple concept, challenging execution…

    Posted on by

    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.

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

    Posted on by

    1. The U.S. House of Representatives. I was really counting on the House of Representatives to completely shit the bed and shut the government down at the end of this week. I mean I don’t want them to close up shop forever, but a week or two furlough over the Thanksgiving holiday would have been some much appreciated time off for which I’d have ended up getting paid for eventually anyway. Alas, the House managed to drop back and punt… and do it without waiting until the last possible moment. It’s not that kind of performance I should find impressive, but given all their recent fuckery, it’s honestly surprising.

    2. Timing. The six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years are, in my experience, pretty much dead space. Sure, technically there are a fair number of work days in there, but the universal consensus is that the vast number of bureaucrats are focused on other things. Just now, the week before I launch into my five day Thanksgiving weekend, I’m feeling the siren’s call of a near total lack of motivation. Yes, of course I’ll keep plugging away at whatever crosses my desk, but it’s undeniable that my annual holiday lack of motivation has arrived early this year… and it’s only annoying because some of my distinguished colleagues haven’t arrived there yet themselves. I question their timing.

    3. Cold. For most of my adult life I’ve been thermally protected by the extra weight I’ve carried around. With the recent arrival of cold weather combined with some appreciable weight loss, I find that for the first time in memory, I’m constantly cold instead of running just a little bit warm. It’s a predictable side effect, but I’m finding it more unpleasant than I expected.