the results and the future

So the last part of the plan was to set a target.

I started properly weighing myself on the 16th of August and, by a nice coincidence, the end of the year was exactly 20 weeks away. This was a nice round number and so I had my target date.

Also, since by BMI was 47.1, I decided a nice target would be to get my BMI below the morbid obesity line of 40.0. This, to be fair, was an ambitions target - to reach it I would need to loose a total of 3 stone 9 pounds. That equated to around 2.5 pounds a week.

Which is where I have to diverge from my original posts, because obviously I didn't actually make the target.

My target was 20 stone 7 pounds, giving me a BMI of 40 by the end of the year. However, as noted at the time, I didn't make this, my weight bouncing up to 21 stone 9, having reached a low of exactly 21 stone. So close, but no cigar.

However, I can now say that I have finally reached this target, as my last weigh in was 20 stone 5 pounds.

In my original post as designed I then gave some graphs and stats, but I think I'll remove those. I may to a longer review if I hit my next target. Certainly when I finally achieve a weight in the normal range I'll do a proper review of how my diet progressed.

What I will say is that, overall, the weirdest thing is that it's actually been relatively easy. The first month was the worst. I was constantly hungry and I remember more than a few occasions where I felt light headed.

But after that it got so much easier. The hunger calmed down - I now only get it occasionally if I'm late having my planned meal, and I think that's a pretty normal hunger.

Which isn't to say I no longer crave food.

One of the things this has revealed to me is I lust after food - high calorie foods in particular - like a junkie. The BBC website has a food section and I visit it all the time, reading recipes and dreaming of eating the glorious food.

The other thing is I boredom eat - if I'm bored, I have this tendency to fill that vacuum with food. Now if I was doing sensible snacking (on fruit, say) and my meals were smaller to compensate, this wouldn't be a problem, but I don't - I'll eat a chocolate bar because I'm bored and then still eat big meals.

I've even had to build this into my diet plan to accommodate it - there's several snacks (now, thankfully, all healthy ones) I have throughout the day.

Of course, I know I'm a long way off a normal weight, so although I'm hugely happy about hitting this target, it also means I need a new target.

Again, there was a lot here about my new targets, which have been a bit messed up by not hitting my original target.

I think the basic point still remains though - in order to squeeze into the normal zone I need to loose a further 8 or 9 stone. It would be nice to achieve this by the end of the year, but I think I need to be sensible, especially given my first target was so ambitious and I overshot it by so much.

I've therefore set a much more modest target of loosing about 2 pounds a week across the whole year, which obviously comes to 104 pounds technically, but if you think about it as being 7 stone that comes to 98 pounds, which means that my ultimate target for the end of the year is to be at around 14 and a half stone. This means I would still technically be fat, but that's a lot better place to be in than where I am right now.

More closer to home, my birthday is the 1st of May, so my first target is to get down to around 19 stone by then.