Antonitos...do I really have to call it a diary?

A

antonito

New member
Pretty standard stuff, grossly obese, want to change. I can't think of any barriers that I have to losing weight other than my own willpower, ie: no medical concerns or anything like that. As you can tell from my registration date and now, this isn't the first time I've considered this.

So what makes this time different? For once I'm not trying to do it alone. There have been many people that have wanted to help me, but I've always wanted to keep it a secret. Partly because I want to surprise and amaze people when I make a huge change, but also (mostly) because I don't want them to badger me when I fail. What has always tripped me up before is that I'm not alone in this world. I work with people, I have family and friends, and I can't hide from them. So instead of breaking down and going off the diet the first time someone asks if I want to go to McDonalds, now I'm going to say "dude, I'm on a diet, come on"

This has actually been working for me for the last month, and is very effective. Those that don't really care are being shamed into being supportive by others. My boss really wants me to get into shape, and has threatened to fire the first person that goes out for fast food with me (an idle threat....I think). But most importantly is my wife. We've both dieted at different times, and it's almost impossible if you're not on the same page. This time we are, and I even joined Weight Watchers with her. This is also big, as the weekly weigh ins really give me a sense of urgency. Now instead of going "well, I guess next week I'll start over again" I go "oh crap, if I don't get back on the horse by the next meal, I'm going to look like a fool at the weigh in". Good stuff

As far as the element of surprise, I have some friends in Calgary that I want to see this summer. It can be a surprise to them. Everyone else can just cheer me on as I go :sifone:

Down to bussiness:

Starting weight (as of January 1st, yeah yeah, New Years Resolution): 399lbs

Current weight (May 08/2010): 351lbs (-48)

Super short terms weight loss goal: >2lbs a week. Whatever week this is.

Short term weight loss goal: 50lbs by July 1st. (2lbs a week from Jan 1st onwards, which is the high end of safe weight loss to the best of my knowledge). I of course want to lose more, but I won't get depressed if I can't do significantly more than what most professionals consider to be safe.

Mid term goal: 100lbs by Jan 1st 2011. This was a wager I made with my mom and wife. Again, 2 lbs a week. Theoretically any inevitable plateaus will be evened out by the weeks where I lose more than 2lbs.

Long term goal: 200lbs (both lost and final weight) by... sometime 2012. Given that the closer you get to a healthy weight the harder it is to lose those last 20-10-5-2 lbs, I'm guessing it'll be a long road to my final destination. Honestly I'm not even thinking about this, it's just mind numbing to think about losing 200lbs. Exciting, but daunting

So, what am I going to do to lose this weight?

Diet: Weight Watchers. I have to admit, I'm lazy when it comes to cooking. Luckily, my wife is not. That's why I joined Weight Watchers with her. She cooks, I eat (and do the dishes). Huzzah.

Exercise: For now it's going to be mostly what I do at work. As a commercial painter I am pretty active. Really the better shape I get into, the more I can paint, so it's kind of a progressive thing. I've been wearing a pedometer recently and I'm walking about 6-8 miles a day on average at work. My goals right now are to walk faster, take the stairs more, and just go faster in general. When I started painting 10 years ago at 270-ish lbs, I could for example walk up to the 10th floor (and back down and up and down for tools and breaks) and paint 20 doors and frames in a day by hustling. As it is right now I could maybe get up there once in a couple of tries, and then paint maybe 10 or 15 because I just can't push myself. This must change.

Once I get to the point that I can get home from work and not be hobbling around like an old man, I'll be adding in extra exercise.


I think that's it for now.
 
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One thing I'm noticing about eating properly is that it really is so much cheaper for groceries, but goodness gracious is there ever a lot of food involved. Typically we'd go out, get a bunch of chips, soft drinks and frozen dinners and call it a week, it'd be a hundred bucks or more for 6 bags of stuff, and oh the looks from the cashiers. This month is the first time in a long time that we've been going out and not a single thing in our cart is unhealthy, and for a hundred bucks we're walking away with 12 bags of groceries. And without the crippling shame.
 
That's awesome. I always get a buzz from looking at all my stuff laid out by the till, being scanned through, when it's all healthy. I'm like YEAH BITCHES, IT'S ALLLLLL HEALTHY! I'm clearly slightly insane but I love not being ashamed of what's in my basket!

Hope you have a wonderful day and keep up the super work :D
 
It was always worse when the people before/after would have healthy stuff.


Diet:

Cereal
2 sandwitches
2 bananas
1 pear
2 pitas and hummus
2 weight watchers granola bars
Weight watchers bbq chicken pizza (2 slices) homemade.

total = 2475 cal

Pedometer reading from work: 4.98 miles.
 
antonito said:
do I really have to call it a diary?
Click to expand...

Not if you don't want to.... You could call it a Man Journal...that's kind of manly sounding, OR...you could call it a Chronicle, OR....you could call it a Man Log(hahaha..sorry couldn't resist that one), OR....you could just call it a diary...hahaha...

Seriously though, you sound like you're doing great...keep up the good work! :)
 
Hehehehe man log.

Diet:

1 cup 1% cottage cheese
1 low cal bagel
2 sandwiches
1 pear
1 banana
2 pitas and hummus
16oz lean steak
laughing cow fudgsicle

2789 calories total

5.5 miles at work, at least half of it lugging around 100 lbs fire rated doors. Sooo tired.
 
Diet:

2 cups cereal
1 low cal bagel
2 sandwiches
1 pear
2 banana
2 pitas and hummus
12" subway sweet onion chicken


2695 calories total

3 miles at work, way too much driving around. I'm more sore than if I was working
 
Limited access to the internet rocks :(

Well, weight loss waits for no series of tubes, and neither do I. I guess this'll mostly just a progress tracker. Weigh in yesterday went spectacular, down 4.6 pounds. That's more than I would have expected, and not really sure why, but hell, I'll take it :)

Also, I really hate being the big guy at events with food. Please, people, I'm not a human garbage disposal, stop expecting me to finish off the leftovers, especially when it's a whole large pizza. ARGH. "Come on, you must be hungry" Real answer: nah man, I had my lunch before this, I completely forgot, I'm so full I could die. Inner Answer: YES I'M F'ing HUNGRY YOU BASTARD, NOW STOP TRYING TO KILL ME OF HEART DISEASE!
 
antonito said:
Also, I really hate being the big guy at events with food. Please, people, I'm not a human garbage disposal, stop expecting me to finish off the leftovers, especially when it's a whole large pizza. ARGH. "Come on, you must be hungry" Real answer: nah man, I had my lunch before this, I completely forgot, I'm so full I could die. Inner Answer: YES I'M F'ing HUNGRY YOU BASTARD, NOW STOP TRYING TO KILL ME OF HEART DISEASE!
Click to expand...

haha, had to be said.... me in a nutshell.

I am also the human garbage disposal to friends or when we have food together their portion is like 1 or 2 slices and then they expect mine to be like 25. haha.

they always come after the big ones to get rid of the extra food -- thats how we stay big and they stay small.... no more though...

good job -- you seem to be doing great man.

B
 
Oh god, I get the same thing from people, especially those who used to see how much I could pack away before. Especially after being on a healthier eating plan for about 2 months now, my capacity to eat has gone down quite a bit. A lot of people just can't seem to understand a fat guy going 'nah, really, I'm full'.

It's almost funny watching them try to up teh ante too, then they pull out the 'well, we also have pie' like they're expecting us to light up and say 'oh, you have pie, why didn't you say so, bust me off half of that, wouldja?'. Before, I was like 'RAAAARRRRGGGHHH GET AWAY FROM ME TEMPTATION OR I'LL BITE OFF YOUR SOUL', now its just mildly annoying in a 'I'm going to rip out your spleen and beat your groin with it, you woman' type way.

now me, my food bill went up a decent bit, but I'm a cheap ass too. You'd be amazed what you can get from teh McDollar menu.

but yeah, I just can't call mine a diary.. I need better, more manly terms, like:
War Journal
Handbook of Awesome
The manly Pamphlet of Bitchin' stuff
Pedro
The Codex Fattyassus
Monkeys, v-8s, testosterone and things that start with Xtreme
or my personal favorite: The 700 day plan to see my dong again.
 
Ah, finally back on the internets for longer than 5 minutes at a time.

Weight loss is going good, a few bad weeks but overall on track to meet my goal. I'm torn over whether I should bring my scale with me next time I go home. On one hand it's good to monitor what's going on more than every second or third week, on the other hand it's motivating to not know, and push myself just in case.

So, throughout this process, I've been scheduling cheat weekends. My biggest weakness is fast food. I. F'ing. Love. Fast. Food. Most people, even those that have bad eating habits, will eat out more than they should, but will generally eat at home as a default. Not me. Unless I purposely keep myself from doing so, I will eat every single meal at a fast food restaurant. Has been that way since I was 20 and had a stable income, Which pretty much explains how I got up to 400 lbs. Knowing this, when I started I bargained with myself that if I eat right during the week, the weekends I could satiate my fast food hunger. It's been working out well. I'm sure I could be losing weight faster if I didn't have these weekends, but especially for the first couple of months, those weekends are what kept me going. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I was good with the knowledge that I'd had my weekend, and fairly satisfied. Thursday Friday I could keep my cravings away knowing that come Saturday morning after my weigh in I could hop over to McDonalds

More and more however, these cheat weekends have been leaving me feeling not so awesome. Not guilt or lack of progress, but I mean physically. I feel a bit more sick after every weekend and now even after every cheat meal. This greasy crap is not as good as I remember. Last night I went to Wendys and got my old school favorite meal (triple burger meal and nuggets). Even at my most gluttonous, after that meal I'd be full and content. Yesterday I had to throw away about half the triple burger, not so much from being full but just because I wasn't enjoying it

This is fucking fantastic. I'm contemplating next weekend, and I may not go for fast food at all. Usually I extend my cheat weekend into Sunday, and today I had no desire whatsoever to go for fast food.


Also of note, as the weight is coming off, I'm beginning to get back into that zone of being the "fit fat guy". As I mentioned in my first post, when I started working, I was in relatively good shape for a fat guy. I used to take pride in being able to work harder than some of the skinny guys I worked with. In the last few years it became that I was the slowest guy, no matter what. But in the last month or so I've been getting comments again. Walking up the stairs at work I've had skinny guys just about dying by the time we get up to the 5th or 6th floor, and say "man, how do you do it?". Same with the actual work, I'm getting the production levels up to the point where some of the guys can't beat me even if they are trying. I know that if we had to run for our lives I'd be left in the dust, but it's nice to know I'm not the slowest at something

I've also been a good influence on my boss. He's always been on my back to lose weight, but lately he's been putting on the pounds to. So now that I'm losing and he's gaining, I've been reciprocating the "motivation". On the surface, he eats healthy. But once we actually started looking at things, the problems became evident. It's not so much the food that he eats, but how much. All his life he worked hard labour, so his metabolism would burn at such a rate that he would eat like a lumberjack just to get through the day. Now that he's older and doing more supervising than labour, it's catching up with him. Since he's never had to worry about dieting before, he had no idea what was going on. He's one of those people whose knowledge of healthy eating is basically the food pyramid, and to avoid chocolate and ice cream. He was actually amazed that eating three helpings of meat and rice could be bad for him because of total calories, even though it didn't have sugar or any other "fatty foods" involved.

So yeah. He's losing weight, I'm losing weight, my wife is losing weight. Things are going pretty good. Dieting with other people is so much easier. I can't believe I screwed myself over for so long by sneaking around and hiding my weight loss efforts, which obviosuly did not work. I was worried that since I had to be away from my wife while I'm working on the road that I'd be losing that support system, but now I've got my boss there too. Not to diss my wife, but actually my boss is a better diet partner than my wife, just because as big manly men we have no problem really chiding each other. My wife and I will nicely say to each other "oh, dear, do you really think eating that is a good idea?", whereas my boss and I have a dynamic more like "what, you're going to eat that? Do you want to be a fat slob? Get that *$&%*ing $*%* out of here. Pansy. Wuss!"

Ah the competitive spirit of men ;)
 
Congrats on the fast food. I know what your saying. I have a horrible problem binging on sweets. I can eat a dozen donuts easy. Last night I told myself I'd let myself cheat and I ate 3 candy bars (1000 calories worth), but at least I cheated within my calories for the week and didn't eat 5000 calories worth.

It is nice being the 'fit fat guy.' :) I love seeing people out of breath and realizing I'm not even though I'm 300 lbs.
 
3 weeks and 7 pounds lost. I was hoping for more, but I'll take it. Mostly for psychological reasons I wanted to break that 50 barrier, both 50 lost and below 350. Oh well.
 
I understand. I haven't lost a lb in 9 days. I've lost only 12 lbs in 5 weeks : P I'm going to kick it up a notch. Just try not to let the number get you down. I know it's hard not to think about it. The scale plays with our emotions. Try not to let it.
 
Yeah, hitting 50 pounds down is a big goal of mine too. My family just started a biggest loser contest. It's definitely soooo much easier when everyone around you is trying to lose weight too. You'll be down 50+ in no time!
 
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