I'm a loser, but not the right kind...

Yeahhhh, so I apparently have zero willpower and self-control. Fast food? Uh huh. Extra snacking during the day? Yup. Buying extra bad junk at the store on the way home, despite the fact that I've got perfectly good Lean Cuisine-type meals waiting in the freezer? Guilty.

Two weeks ago, I rang up at 290.8 lbs, and swore that things were gonna be different. And surprisingly, over that weekend I managed to make some significant progress. I did expect that by Monday morning there would be some slippage, and I blogged about that here, but I figured that with the weekend momentum it wouldn't be a problem to stay in the groove. And that lasted all the way to Monday evening. First of all, I wasn't able to hit the gym. Second of all, I was able to hit the Chinese buffet (which I hadn't visited in several months). Not a combo designed to aid weight loss. And because of my spectacular exhibition of Fail, I stopped logging my food intake and exercise (what exercise?) in My Fitness Pal. End result? From the low point of Sunday morning, 285.4 lbs, I'd managed to rise back up to exactly 290.8 lbs! Zero loss.

Obviously I seemed to be ready to throw up the hands in defeat, and acknowledge my fatness. Ah but wait! A wrinkle occurred literally 90 minutes after said weigh-in that, while not correcting every bit of my weakness, will certainly aid my efforts. That wrinkle is this:


Meet Champ. After months of diligently trolling the interwebs, DAPGF managed to find this year-old male Dobie at a shelter north of Los Angeles. She called me at 9:15 a.m. Friday morning and said that she'd been approved to adopt him (this is a big deal, because young Dobies in good health, particularly with the ears and tails done are rare and go quickly). So I bailed on work and we drove up to get him. So Friday consisted of fast food, but with DAPGF riding shotgun I was able to keep under control. At Carls Jr, for example, I bypassed the Western Bacon Cheeseburger combo for the BBQ Chicken sandwich combo, thus saving probably 600 calories (chicken breast, no cheese, etc.). A similar story for dinner. But where this becomes helpful is that I'm back to going on regular dog walks every day! Just like with my beloved Ginger, I get about a half-hour or so walk in the morning, and then an hour or so walk before I crash out for the night. Obviously, by virtue of the fact that my weight has barely moved, it hasn't had a huge effect. Still, my weight had been hovering in the low 289s for most of the week, so it had probably helped a bit. That and dinner on Friday involved a pretty fatty helping of Gyros, so a better dinner might have kept me at least below 290. End result: this morning's weigh-in was 290.6 lbs. A net loss of .2 lbs for the week.

So. Here we are again. A rededication. Again. But the driving factor is the fact that my 38th birthday is fast approaching. When I went thru my awesome, illness-assisted weight loss, I set a goal of being down somewhere into the 230s by summer, which required a goal of 3 lbs lost per week. Had I managed to continue on that path, by my birthday I should've been under 260 lbs. 30 pounds in 2 weeks? Don't think that's gonna happen. But there's no rational reason why I can't summon up the willpower, stick to the diet plan I've put forth here, and follow through on the exercise. Frankly, I'm getting tired of this s**t, and for those of you who watched How I Met Your Mother this past week or grew up in the 80s and watched the Lethal Weapon movies, I'm getting too old for this s**t! I've got my meals for the work day planned out and logged into My Fitness Pal. Not sure how things are going to go with dining out over the weekend, but I'm going to try and control myself no matter where we go. For what it's worth, I have been doing better at not gorging myself on the bread or chips and salsa, and I've really cut back on the Diet Coke. I'm down to 1 per day (down from 2-3 cans plus several glasses at home after work per day), and trying to drink more water, iced tea, and anything else that might be healthier than Diet Coke. Here we go again...let's see if we can make this go 'round work.