Still losing weight, about a pound per week. I think it may be slowing down. I have tried to eat less than 3,000 calories per day but that gets too hard, so I am still eating about 3,000 calories. The goal is to not gain weight back. Already I cannot fit my size 46 pants anymore and can fit in size 40 pants somewhat. I’m not going to throw out the big pants however, since having to buy larger pants is severely depressing. There is also a positive side to buying larger pants when you have to: you finally get pants that fit you and you have to consciously realize and accept that you have gotten bigger. It was probably a big catalyst for my current diet.
As part of an effort to not regress I want to self-examine what led to my failure in early 2009. I managed to drop from 259 to 220 lb. over a period of a few months by counting calories. My diet at the time started at 2700 calories per day plus one free day and eventually I dropped down to 2100 calories per day. I was losing less and less weight and getting more and more hungry. I eventually tried to abandon the free day but my diet fell apart altogether and I started to gain weight and ended up back in the 230 lb. range until I put a halt to it with an insane 1300 calorie per day diet, which jumped to 1400 the next week and 1500 the next. That was unsustainable and at the end I was so hungry that I just could not care about anything else other than eating. The drive to eat was immense and while eating itself felt very rewarding and good I could not eat enough. I stopped recording weight and I realized, sadly that I was gaining weight but was unable to overcome my fear of going on the scale and seeing that I had gained weight after such hard work to lose it. It is quite emotionally difficult to get on the scale in a period of weight gain. It took me over a year to get the courage to get back on the scale and only after I was forced to purchase new pants. At this point I weighed 279 lb.
Through out this period of weight gain I tried different tactics to stop the weight gain and attempt to lose weight without weighing myself. I tried eating better foods, something that had worked for me in the past, but didn’t work for me then. I tried going for walks, but eventually I encountered physical pain from walking!
My wife left for a three week trip to Japan, during which I ate without considering my weight, at the end of this period I was quite tired of eating such terrible junk food and eating as much as I did. I was tired of being disgusted with myself. I had attempted to count calories simply in my head per day, but that did not work. In fact the only way I have managed to sustain weight loss is to 1) weigh myself daily. 2) write down what I eat and calories on paper. I can’t use an app on my phone. I need a record I can look at.
I think my progress so far has been promising. I do not do the free day any more since I think that was a problem with resetting how much food I could eat per day and not be hungry. I ate quite a bit on those free days. Now I am generally not hungry at the end of the day and I am careful to watch for that hunger. If a daily hunger pervades my day to day existence then my diet will be unsustainable. I have a long way to go to get to optimal weight. After over two months of dieting I still weigh more than when I began my diet at 259 lb. in 2008. Today I weighed 264.6 lb. I will continue to work hard to lose more weight.
