I'd Love to be as Fat as I Used to be

Does anyone else have this in their story?

When I was younger, I kept a diary.  One of the reoccurring themes in my journal was how horribly fat I thought I was.

Yeah, fat at all of 130 pounds, soaking wet.

I would love to be as fat as I used to be.

Even Rapid Weight Loss Takes Forever

It's dawning on me that even rapid weight loss takes forever when you have a lot of weight to lose.  While I hear lots of stories of people on VLCDs being able to lose 100 pounds in 100 days, I don't think it's going to be a realistic hope for me.  It is hard for me to lose weight.  Even when I stick to the strictest of diets, the weight doesn't seem to want to come off very quickly.

I figure I'll be lucky if I average 3 pounds a week over time.  If I lose at that rate, it will be almost 41 weeks before I'm at goal.  That reaches into late February of next year.

Right now, I'm mostly sticking to shakes.  On the days that I don't, it's because I have social obligations that center around food.  I don't want to tell everyone I'm dieting, because it inevitably results in comments that I don't want to hear:

• You're losing weight too quickly.
• You're not making much progress, are you?  Are you sure you aren't cheating?
• Should you be eating that?
• My cousin lost weight by doing x.  It's much healthier/better/etc. than what you are doing.

Since my restart, I'm down 10.9 pounds in 17 days.  That's an average of just over .6 of a pound per day.  At that rate, it might be possible to finish by the end of this year.

We'll see how it goes, I guess.  All I can do is keep doing what I'm doing.

The Odds Are Against Me

Here's another explanation of why it is so hard to lose weight.  This is from CBS News:

Weight loss can be a battle for everyone. But a large new study says that for obese people, the odds of reaching normal weight are near impossible.

The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, shows the odds of a clinically obese person achieving normal weight without surgical interventions are just 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women in a given year. Among the most morbidly obese, the chances were even worse.

If you would like to read the study, you can find it here.

1 in 124.  Those are some pretty shitty odds.  I'd like to think this time around I'll be successful, but I have to admit those numbers are daunting.

All I can do is to keep doing as I'm doing.  Today is day 9.  Optimistic me hopes I'll be able to drop close to 100 pounds in 100 days.

Realistic me thinks it will probably be much longer than that.

Levels of Obesity

Back when I started this blog, my first goal was to get myself to be obese.  At the time, I didn't realize there were multiple categories of obesity.

At 241.9 lbs, I am morbidly obese.

Based on new classifications of obesity I have found, I have updated my goals table:

If I reach...	BMI...	I will be...
218 lbs	39.9	severely obese
191 lbs	34.9	obese
163 lbs	29.9	overweight
136 lbs	24.9	normal weight
118 lbs	21.6	at goal
101 lbs	18.5	underweight

This means my next mini-goal is 218, where I will only be severely obese.

It seems like that is an odd goal to celebrate.  On the other hand, it is still better than being morbidly obese, right?

Feeling Pressure to Lose Weight

For the first time in my life, I feel real pressure to lose weight.

Now sure, I've felt pressure at times when my mother nagged me about my weight when I was a teen, or when I went to my doctor and was given a lecture.  For the most part, though, the pressure only lasted as long as the lecture.  Once it was over, I didn't worry about it so much.  Sure, at any given point in my life I might or I might not have been on a diet, but I didn't feel all that pressured by it.

Now, I feel pressured.

In roughly 18 months (perhaps less, given the way things are going with the STBX right now) I will be back in the dating game.

I need to do something about my weight, because most people want to date those that are HWP (height-weight proportionate) or slim.  I'm neither of those two things.

As my relationship with the STBX has unraveled.  I've given a lot of thought about what I'm going to look for next.  Though I haven't contacted anyone, I've been trolling the personal ads just to see what's out there.  It seems like all the ads for people that sound interesting are also those who insist on skinny women.

I've been really making a concentrated effort to eat less.  I hope I start seeing some better results soon.

Of course my biggest frustration is this: despite having lost as much weight as I have, I still haven't shrunk out of my clothes.  The pants that were once tight are now very loose, but I'm still not small enough to fit into the next smaller size that I've found in my closet.

I'm trying not to have to buy more clothing.  I'm trying to make do with what I have.  Then I'll buy more when I'm finally at my goal weight.

If I Could Lose Five Pounds

So I've been here before.  I've been to the point where mere obesity is just a few pounds away, but I've never managed to cross the line.  I've come tantalizingly close, but each time I get there, things change and the goal slips ever more elusively away.

If I could lose just five pounds I would no longer be morbidly obese.

Will it happen this time?

I don't know.

I will say that my worries about divorce are big enough that my appetite is unusually low.  I've skipped dinner several nights this week for various reasons, but I haven't been particularly distressed about it.  Usually, going to bed hungry is my worst nightmare.  I find it hard to fall asleep, and I'll wake up at 3:00 AM starving and unable to drift off again.

But lately?  Last night The Wife made dinner, and I just didn't have the stomach for it.  I couldn't even finish my lunch.  I felt hungry, but my stomach was flipping and rolling like and I knew that if I ate anything I would end up feeling sick.  The day before, I ended up forgetting to eat my lunch and didn't eat until almost 4:00 PM.  By the time dinner rolled around, I wasn't hungry.  A few days before that, I met a friend for coffee (I ordered bottled water) and didn't get home until late.  I figured it was just too late to eat, so I went to bed.

Surprisingly, I haven't had much trouble being unable to sleep because I'm hungry.  Sure, I've been awake thinking other things, but my stomach has not been one of them.

So I see that goal of being simply obese floating ahead, tantalizing me.  It's so close, and yet it seems like it is a million miles away.