Stupid shorts

About three years ago I bought a pair of shorts that was 1-2 sizes too large. I don’t recall why, I think I picked them up because I couldn’t find much else and I was desperate, and I could always use a belt to make them sorta fit. Plus I’m good at shrinking clothes when I wash them, so I was hoping maybe I could make them fit. But it never worked, so they mostly just sat in my closet.

Come the start of this summer and they actually fit just about perfectly. Doh.

Earlier this week I put them on and wow, they were huge on me, literally falling off without a belt. Woot! Seeing progress on the scale is one thing, but it’s the random little things that make me smile.

Dave is fat? I didn’t notice…

… Said no one. Ever.

Well, except my doctor, who had a bit of a wake-up call for me a couple of months ago. Perhaps now it is time to lose some weight? Let’s be honest, this isn’t the first time I’ve attempted to lose weight. Wow, I hear you saying to yourself, someone had a diet that failed? Imagine that! STOP THE PRESSES!

So what went wrong in the past? Well to start with, I’ve only ever really put any serious effort into losing weight once, and it worked. I was doing well… until I wasn’t. I just crashed, completely ran out of energy, started putting on weight despite still eating a reasonable number of calories and being at least a little more physically active than was my traditional preference. I was motivated, but ultimately unsuccessful, until the lack of success and a killer cold (which turned out to be mononucleosis) and a fun round of depression finally killed off my motivation.

Skip ahead several months and I found out why, with a diagnosis of hypothyroidism. Left untreated, hypothyroidism makes it almost impossible to lose weight (and caused my depression, not that I’d ever admit I was suffering from depression, of course). Finding the right medication and the right dose took months of experimentation and semi-regular blood testing, and ultimately failed initially since the medication I was taking lost its effectiveness, so it was back to the starting point with a different medication. Things are better now, but I still don’t feel normal. Perhaps that’s a side effect of the thyroid condition, or perhaps just all the weight I put on? Lets blame the medication, less personal responsibility. Either way, I never got back on track to lose any of that extra weight I put on, and so my weight slowly wandered up, 10-20 lbs per year.

Since announcing your plans makes you less motivated to do the hard work needed, I decided to tell as few people as possible until I was making at least a little progress, and so a couple months ago, I started working on losing weight. I’ve made a little progress, so maybe it’s time to mention it?

The Dave's Weight

The red line is my “trend”, roughly based on John Walker’s The Hacker’s Diet, designed to filter out some of the natural daily variations in body weight, instead focusing on the overall trend. The trend line shows I’ve lost roughly 15 lbs since I started, with my real weight loss being right around 20 lbs in the last ~2 months. Technically I started some dietary changes before this graph starts, but this is when I got a new (accurate) digital scale and started keeping track daily.

So now the questions are:

  1. Can I keep up the weight loss? Well I hope so.  
  2. Will I keep the weight off? That’s always the tough one. I’d like to say yes, but I know that there will be ups and downs. I’d like to say that this is a lifestyle change and not a diet, but lets face it, it’s a bit of both. The real struggle isn’t losing weight, it’s keeping it off. If anyone knows the secret? — Well, lets face it, if you did, you’d be rich.
  3. Am I going to keep chattering about this on my blog? Probably. I hope so, since if I don’t, it means I’ve lost interest.

And with this post, a new Health category on my blog is born. With any luck, it will expand to more than one “Hey look, I’m fat” post, but I guess we’ll see — Perhaps I should retroactively add a few articles to this category so it doesn’t feel so lonely. That’ll do. That’ll do nicely.