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.

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 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.

A few months ago I decided to make a few changes to some aspects of my life, one of those changes was to lose some weight.

At this point I’m down about 40 pounds. Now yes, I am Canadian, but for some reason body weight just seems to work better in pounds. I actually put on a bit of weight over the Christmas holidays, although I blame the bitter cold more then the holiday season, but I’m back on track now.

I had a interesting experience this morning, I woke up with what might be the worst pain I’ve ever felt. The pain was in my back, but it didn’t feel like back pain. Layman’s self diagnosis? Kidney.

Decided to hit a hospital just in case it was something serious — The way I see it, pain is my body’s way of paging me to tell me I need routine maintenance.

11-something in the morning we head in to the hospital. I bring my iPhone and an extra battery pack, assuming this will be an all-day experience unless I should happen to start dying midway through the process.

In just under an hour, I’ve had various bodily fluids tested, an IV inserted and removed, and am walking out the door diagnosis, pain pills and a prescription in hand.

Now I realize this may or may not be typical, but still, it’s pretty hard to argue with that level of service when I did need it. Damn you Kline for ruining our health care system.

Oh, and for those curious, just a kidney stone.