Day 173 - So close!

I haven't posted in a while, so this is going to be a bit of a re-cap of the last four weeks, plus this morning's news. At the end of July, I visited the doctor for a check up. He was pleasantly surprised by my progress, although still decided he should remind me that people who got surgery keep the weight off longer. I felt like telling him that while that may be true, I'll worry about that the next time I need to lose weight, because right now the diet seems to be working.

My weigh in July 30th was officially 319lbs, for 113lbs lost. Apparently I've been miscalculating how much weight I lost, as my initial weigh in at the bariatric center was 432, not 433lbs. However, my initial weigh in when I went to the doctor for the referral was actually 442lbs, so somehow I lost 10lbs between my first doctor's visit and starting the diet. I haven't been counting that, as 10lbs at 442 is just over 2%, and could be explained through water retention, etc. Still, it is an "official" weigh in, and when the diet is complete, I might count the total weight loss from there, rather than from the 432. In the meantime, all of my progress has been measured against one yardstick, and I don't think it'd be fair to suddenly add 10lbs to my tally.

In terms of progress, this morning's news is mildly frustrating but actually exciting. After a disappointing July (only losing 15lbs, ending right around 315 instead of 310 as planned) I've had an equally uneven august. Today, however, I weighed in at 300.4lbs. I could have take off my shirt or tried some other way to squeak out a half pound, but I think I might just enjoy the feeling of being close to a big goal, and try to stay on course to blow past 300lbs by tomorrow.

I did speak with the doctor about how long I'm to stay on the diet, and he gave what I considered the worst possible answer: "Until you stop losing weight." I've gotten used to the diet, to be sure, but I was very much hoping to have an end date to look forward to. I'm in some sort of Gitmo style diet: I have no clue when I get to leave. Of course, given the increasingly sinister sounding "phase two" the doctor talks about, I'll probably never fully leave some sort of dietary control. I guess I'm to stay on the PSMF until my weight loss completely stops, and then I refeed. This worries me for another reason: I now can just sabotage the diet to leave it. Before, when it was based on time or amount of weight lost, I could focus on a goal. I'm a task oriented person, so that's fine. Now, it's about the process: stay on the diet until it stops working. Since I can make the diet stop working, I now can leave the diet whenever I want: just eat poorly.

I'm not going to do that yet. I'm still working on a few of my big goals. I'm almost under 300lbs, and I'm only about 15lbs from no longer being morbidly obese. I'm fitting easily into size 52 pants, meaning I'm not far from the upper ends of mainstream stores that stock 48s. For a variety of reasons, I think 250lbs is still a very good goal, and is the first point I'd feel comfortable really considering cycling off the diet. There is a part of me that's curious to see where I can end up if I just stay on it till the end.