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.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Thursday, 24 February 2011
the plan
I think it's a pretty safe bet to describe myself as a nerd.
In particular I'm a scientist, having a degree in Physics. And that meant my plan was going to be one that utilised science. Or, to be more specific, I was going to do some research, come up with a plan - a theory - and to try out various methods to test it.
I've actually talked a lot abut this over the months, especially when I was starting out, so I won't go into too much detail. If you're interested you can look up the posts tagged with weight and walking.
What I will say is that there's a lot of stuff out there on the web, much of which conflicts. Obviously, there are loads of sites promising a miracle diet, but the basic point is that to loose weight you need to consume fewer calories than you use up.
What makes this tricky is metabolism, but perhaps not in the way most people tend to think. See, a classic argument of fat people is that their metabolisms are slower - if they ate the same amount as normal people, the argument goes, they'd still put on weight, as they're burning calories at a slower rate.
But that's cobblers - metabolism is mostly to do with the fact that we're warm blooded animals and must keep our bodies hot. Therefore, if you're bigger and have more mass to keep warm, this actually consumes more calories, so you have a higher metabolism.
As I say - it's complicated in the detail, but simple at the higher level. Since I was very fat, ate a lot a high calorie foods and did no exercise at all, I was gaining weight. By eating less and doing some exercise I would loose weight.
And that was the plan - I would devise a calorie controlled diet that worked for me and I would do some exercise. I would also set myself some realistic targets that meant loosing weight at a steady rate that was achievable.
The exercise proved to be the easiest to decide on - I would walk. I've talked a lot about the walking in previous posts, but what I thought I'd mention here is how far I've walked. As part of my plan and as a sop to my nerdishness I bought a pedometer and have noted down the number of steps I did every day since my first weigh in and I can reveal that I've taken a total of 997,555 steps. This equates to approximately 600 kilometres or 1.5% of the distance around the earth!
In terms of diet, my first attempt was pretty much just to switch to eating salads in the evening. Looking back on it, this seems daft, but at the time I thought it was genius. But after that first weigh in I put together my spreadsheet with my targets and to monitor my weight and steps and as part of this I did some calorie counting.
I therefore got the shock that what I thought was a diet was actually roughly equal to the recommended number of calories an adult man is supposed to consume - around 2,500.
See, this, it turns out, is one of the problems with fat people. We (or certainly I) have a distorted perception of what normal portions are. I'll give you a classic example - I used to regularly eat 3 Weetabix for breakfast, where the recommended portion is 2. I did this because of some perception that these normal portions were always "too small for a normal person".
Why ever did I think such a stupid thing? I now eat two and am perfectly happy with it, because what my diet has done is shrink both my stomach and my perceptions. And that was probably the hardest thing - the hunger.
For the first month of the diet I was properly hungry all the time. Now to be fair, I was experimenting with various things, but the main reason for this was simply that previously I had always eaten way too much and now I was eating too little, so it was a really big shift.
As for the last part of the plan - the target - I will discuss that tomorrow.
In particular I'm a scientist, having a degree in Physics. And that meant my plan was going to be one that utilised science. Or, to be more specific, I was going to do some research, come up with a plan - a theory - and to try out various methods to test it.
I've actually talked a lot abut this over the months, especially when I was starting out, so I won't go into too much detail. If you're interested you can look up the posts tagged with weight and walking.
What I will say is that there's a lot of stuff out there on the web, much of which conflicts. Obviously, there are loads of sites promising a miracle diet, but the basic point is that to loose weight you need to consume fewer calories than you use up.
What makes this tricky is metabolism, but perhaps not in the way most people tend to think. See, a classic argument of fat people is that their metabolisms are slower - if they ate the same amount as normal people, the argument goes, they'd still put on weight, as they're burning calories at a slower rate.
But that's cobblers - metabolism is mostly to do with the fact that we're warm blooded animals and must keep our bodies hot. Therefore, if you're bigger and have more mass to keep warm, this actually consumes more calories, so you have a higher metabolism.
As I say - it's complicated in the detail, but simple at the higher level. Since I was very fat, ate a lot a high calorie foods and did no exercise at all, I was gaining weight. By eating less and doing some exercise I would loose weight.
And that was the plan - I would devise a calorie controlled diet that worked for me and I would do some exercise. I would also set myself some realistic targets that meant loosing weight at a steady rate that was achievable.
The exercise proved to be the easiest to decide on - I would walk. I've talked a lot about the walking in previous posts, but what I thought I'd mention here is how far I've walked. As part of my plan and as a sop to my nerdishness I bought a pedometer and have noted down the number of steps I did every day since my first weigh in and I can reveal that I've taken a total of 997,555 steps. This equates to approximately 600 kilometres or 1.5% of the distance around the earth!
In terms of diet, my first attempt was pretty much just to switch to eating salads in the evening. Looking back on it, this seems daft, but at the time I thought it was genius. But after that first weigh in I put together my spreadsheet with my targets and to monitor my weight and steps and as part of this I did some calorie counting.
I therefore got the shock that what I thought was a diet was actually roughly equal to the recommended number of calories an adult man is supposed to consume - around 2,500.
See, this, it turns out, is one of the problems with fat people. We (or certainly I) have a distorted perception of what normal portions are. I'll give you a classic example - I used to regularly eat 3 Weetabix for breakfast, where the recommended portion is 2. I did this because of some perception that these normal portions were always "too small for a normal person".
Why ever did I think such a stupid thing? I now eat two and am perfectly happy with it, because what my diet has done is shrink both my stomach and my perceptions. And that was probably the hardest thing - the hunger.
For the first month of the diet I was properly hungry all the time. Now to be fair, I was experimenting with various things, but the main reason for this was simply that previously I had always eaten way too much and now I was eating too little, so it was a really big shift.
As for the last part of the plan - the target - I will discuss that tomorrow.
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
pandorum
Bit of an interlude for a review today, then back to the weight posts tomorrow.
Pandorum is full of plot holes. I'm going to go through a few and so the rest of the review will be spoiler heavy.
During the film it's suggested that the weird mutant creatures are like that because the "evolutionary accelerants" they've had put into their system have adapted them to the ship. On the surface this sounds okay, except there are quite a few normal people running around too.
Why has this evolutionary acceleration affected some and not others?
Especially since it's also made clear that the ship has been on its mission for a lot longer than expected. This gives time for those people to evolve, but raises even more questions about those that haven't.
This could be because those who haven't been mutated were released more recently, but then how come one of them knows the origin story and the others seem very experienced? Certainly given the lack of general food which has presumably been the driver that's caused the others to become cannibalistic, what are these normal people surviving on?
And how come the evolution of the other has actually seemingly devolved them into a bestial state? And how have they managed to become merged with bits of machinery?
It's also revealed that the ship has crash landed on their destination planet. However, gravity seems to be working in the usual and expected directions - none of the corridors slope, for example, despite the reveal shot showing them at weird angles.
This might be because of artificial gravity, and yet AG wouldn't work like that - surely the gravity of the planet would combine with the AG to still give canted angles?
Even if that isn't how it worked, this enormous ship has crash landed on a planet - surely it would have broken up? If it was somehow tough enough to survive, then how come a relatively slight impact on a glass window cracks it?
Also, the very end gives the feel of being some sort of triumph - as in, now they've escaped and all the others are dead, because the ship's flooded.
And yet, by flooding the ship they block access to any of the stuff they'd need to survive. Also, the film clearly shows big chunks of the ship out of the water, so presumably many of the others could have survived in those bits?
Seems more like they've leapt from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.
Despite all of the above I actually still quite enjoyed it. The reason was because, despite trying to be all complicated with its plot, most of the film is actually sci-fi horror and is quite atmospheric and stylish with it.
I think it's a classic case of turn your brain off and you'll probably enjoy the ride.
Pandorum is full of plot holes. I'm going to go through a few and so the rest of the review will be spoiler heavy.
During the film it's suggested that the weird mutant creatures are like that because the "evolutionary accelerants" they've had put into their system have adapted them to the ship. On the surface this sounds okay, except there are quite a few normal people running around too.
Why has this evolutionary acceleration affected some and not others?
Especially since it's also made clear that the ship has been on its mission for a lot longer than expected. This gives time for those people to evolve, but raises even more questions about those that haven't.
This could be because those who haven't been mutated were released more recently, but then how come one of them knows the origin story and the others seem very experienced? Certainly given the lack of general food which has presumably been the driver that's caused the others to become cannibalistic, what are these normal people surviving on?
And how come the evolution of the other has actually seemingly devolved them into a bestial state? And how have they managed to become merged with bits of machinery?
It's also revealed that the ship has crash landed on their destination planet. However, gravity seems to be working in the usual and expected directions - none of the corridors slope, for example, despite the reveal shot showing them at weird angles.
This might be because of artificial gravity, and yet AG wouldn't work like that - surely the gravity of the planet would combine with the AG to still give canted angles?
Even if that isn't how it worked, this enormous ship has crash landed on a planet - surely it would have broken up? If it was somehow tough enough to survive, then how come a relatively slight impact on a glass window cracks it?
Also, the very end gives the feel of being some sort of triumph - as in, now they've escaped and all the others are dead, because the ship's flooded.
And yet, by flooding the ship they block access to any of the stuff they'd need to survive. Also, the film clearly shows big chunks of the ship out of the water, so presumably many of the others could have survived in those bits?
Seems more like they've leapt from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.
Despite all of the above I actually still quite enjoyed it. The reason was because, despite trying to be all complicated with its plot, most of the film is actually sci-fi horror and is quite atmospheric and stylish with it.
I think it's a classic case of turn your brain off and you'll probably enjoy the ride.
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
bmi
But then came the big questions:
A normal set of bathroom scales maxes out at 20 stone. This, I knew, was a lot less than what I weighed - I'd weighed 18 stone when I was at school and still wearing XL level clothes. If I was now 4XL I had to weigh in the region of 350 to 400 pounds (ballpark 25 - 30 stone).
I therefore had to buy a set of scales that would weigh above 20 stone. It took me a little while to find one, but when I eventually did, on the 16th of August, I immediately weighed myself and found that I weighed 24 stone 2 pounds.
Fuck, that's big.
I'd often joked that I was "2 people" but it turns out this was scarily close to the truth, as the answer to the second question would reveal.
Question 2 is all about something called Body Mass Index ,or BMI.
A long time ago, some clever spod worked out a formula that allows you to combine your weight and height and come up with a new number - your BMI. This new number can seem arbitrary, but for me, this table really helps explain it:
So what this shows is your height (in feet and inches) along the left and the BMI along the top. The numbers in the individual boxes are your weight (in pounds).
What the table shows is that BMI is banded and has a simple interpretation - if you have a BMI of between about 25 and 30 then you're Overweight, but if it's over 40 then you're Extremely Obese as it puts it. Another name for this is Morbid Obesity, which is a way of saying you're so fat that, statistically speaking, your weight is almost certain to have extremely negative consequences on your health.
Guess what my BMI is? Well, firstly I'm 5 foot 11 inches tall and as noted above I weighed 24 stone 2 pounds when I first weighed myself. Well, there are 14 stone in every pound, so I weighed 338 pounds. That gives me a BMI of 47.1.
No surprise that I was over the morbid obesity line, but how far over might come as something of a shocker.
Or, to put it another way, to break through into the normal weight band I needed to loose a total of 159 pounds, or about 11 and a half stone. Which is why the joke I mentioned about being two people was horribly true. If I loose half my entire bodyweight from 24stone 2 pound to 12 stone 1 pound I'll be nicely into the normal weight range.
Indeed, what makes that slightly scarier is if you remember that it took me a while to get my scales and so I'd already been dieting for a while before I started weighing myself, so I don't really know what my maximum weight was.
But anyway, the point is there are two of me - inside this fat person there really is a thin one trying to get out!
But then there's question 3 - how was he going to do it?
I needed a plan.
- How much did I actually weigh?
- How much did I need to loose?
- 3. How was I going to do it?
A normal set of bathroom scales maxes out at 20 stone. This, I knew, was a lot less than what I weighed - I'd weighed 18 stone when I was at school and still wearing XL level clothes. If I was now 4XL I had to weigh in the region of 350 to 400 pounds (ballpark 25 - 30 stone).
I therefore had to buy a set of scales that would weigh above 20 stone. It took me a little while to find one, but when I eventually did, on the 16th of August, I immediately weighed myself and found that I weighed 24 stone 2 pounds.
Fuck, that's big.
I'd often joked that I was "2 people" but it turns out this was scarily close to the truth, as the answer to the second question would reveal.
Question 2 is all about something called Body Mass Index ,or BMI.
A long time ago, some clever spod worked out a formula that allows you to combine your weight and height and come up with a new number - your BMI. This new number can seem arbitrary, but for me, this table really helps explain it:
So what this shows is your height (in feet and inches) along the left and the BMI along the top. The numbers in the individual boxes are your weight (in pounds).
What the table shows is that BMI is banded and has a simple interpretation - if you have a BMI of between about 25 and 30 then you're Overweight, but if it's over 40 then you're Extremely Obese as it puts it. Another name for this is Morbid Obesity, which is a way of saying you're so fat that, statistically speaking, your weight is almost certain to have extremely negative consequences on your health.
Guess what my BMI is? Well, firstly I'm 5 foot 11 inches tall and as noted above I weighed 24 stone 2 pounds when I first weighed myself. Well, there are 14 stone in every pound, so I weighed 338 pounds. That gives me a BMI of 47.1.
No surprise that I was over the morbid obesity line, but how far over might come as something of a shocker.
Or, to put it another way, to break through into the normal weight band I needed to loose a total of 159 pounds, or about 11 and a half stone. Which is why the joke I mentioned about being two people was horribly true. If I loose half my entire bodyweight from 24stone 2 pound to 12 stone 1 pound I'll be nicely into the normal weight range.
Indeed, what makes that slightly scarier is if you remember that it took me a while to get my scales and so I'd already been dieting for a while before I started weighing myself, so I don't really know what my maximum weight was.
But anyway, the point is there are two of me - inside this fat person there really is a thin one trying to get out!
But then there's question 3 - how was he going to do it?
I needed a plan.
Monday, 21 February 2011
before
I hit my first weight target on Sunday, so this week I'm posting the modified version of the things I wrote in anticipation of meeting said target before Chrimbo.
For as long as I can remember I have been overweight.
When I was young, this was simply on the scale of being plump, or, if you were less kind, fat. I remember a few trips to the doctor to ask about diets and I even remember the rather odd advice that if I didn't put on weight then, as I grew older and taller, I would kind of 'stretch' into fitting my weight.
I didn't do either of these and instead my girth grew with my height.
When I was a teenager I was starting to get into the territory of being obese, or, if you were one of my bullies, a fat fuck. It was only really at this stage that I actually started to be bothered about being fat. Before I hadn't actually cared, but now being fat affected how people perceived me.
But, and this is crucial, I never really had the desire to do anything about it. I dunno - it's difficult to explain, but even though I knew my weight caused people to make all sorts of snap judgements about me and generally regard me with disgust, I didn't do anything about it.
Why I didn't, I actually have no idea. I could claim that it was some sort of weird rebellion, but that wasn't true. I could say I didn't care what people thought of me, but that would be so far from the truth as to be silly. I could also possibly go for an argument that I was stuck in a cycle of knowing people saw me as disgusting and that made me miserable with the comfort eating that resulted only reinforced this viscous circle.
This would be closer to the truth, but it would also be ignoring a major factor - I'm greedy and I'm lazy.
That may come as something of a shocker - fat people rail against the stereotype, but whether it's generally true or not, it's certainly true for me. I could happily spend the entire rest of my life sitting down, watching telly, stuffing my face with junk food.
When I went to University I had entered, to use a stereotype, American levels of fatness. I had huge man breasts bigger than any girl I knew; I wobbled when I walked and people would stare at me in shocked disgust on the street.
And yet I still did nothing about it. In fact, the opposite happened - I grew fatter and fatter. After leaving university I eventually reached the point where no high street store sold clothes I could possibly fit into (well, I could buy socks, but it gets a little chilly if all you have to wear are socks). I therefore had to seek out specialist big clothing suppliers. I was introduced to the world of extra X's.
Most people are not aware that there is a world of extra X's, because they're looking at clothes that never contain more than the single X of XL or extra large. The world of extra X's goes further than this, starting with XXL and going up as far as 6XL. Yup. that's right - XXXXXXL.
I never quite made it that far, but I can assure you that I'm currently sitting here typing this in a pair of 4XL boxers and wearing a 5XL shirt. Admittedly the 5XL is because I prefer baggy collars, but the 4XLs were rather tight not so long ago.
Anyway, the real point here is that this last summer I finally consciously decided to change.
There's a line of thought with junkies and drug addicts that they won't ever reform until they reach rock bottom. For some, this rock bottom is so low that they unfortunately kill themselves before they get there. For others - those that relapse - they are stuck in some sort of half-way state where they never got that far down but managed to affect some change that keeps them bobbing up and down.
For those that truly rehabilitate, they hit the bottom and realise that they need to change and they make that change.
Now, I'd love to say that there was a conscious moment where I realised I'd hit rock bottom, but if there is I don't recall specifically what it was. What I do remember is that this last summer, not that long after my birthday (perhaps that was the trigger - reaching 33) I remember thinking something along the lines of "Why don't you actually go on a proper diet then, instead of just constantly thinking you should start loosing weight?"
And that's when I finally decided to start loosing weight.
For as long as I can remember I have been overweight.
When I was young, this was simply on the scale of being plump, or, if you were less kind, fat. I remember a few trips to the doctor to ask about diets and I even remember the rather odd advice that if I didn't put on weight then, as I grew older and taller, I would kind of 'stretch' into fitting my weight.
I didn't do either of these and instead my girth grew with my height.
When I was a teenager I was starting to get into the territory of being obese, or, if you were one of my bullies, a fat fuck. It was only really at this stage that I actually started to be bothered about being fat. Before I hadn't actually cared, but now being fat affected how people perceived me.
But, and this is crucial, I never really had the desire to do anything about it. I dunno - it's difficult to explain, but even though I knew my weight caused people to make all sorts of snap judgements about me and generally regard me with disgust, I didn't do anything about it.
Why I didn't, I actually have no idea. I could claim that it was some sort of weird rebellion, but that wasn't true. I could say I didn't care what people thought of me, but that would be so far from the truth as to be silly. I could also possibly go for an argument that I was stuck in a cycle of knowing people saw me as disgusting and that made me miserable with the comfort eating that resulted only reinforced this viscous circle.
This would be closer to the truth, but it would also be ignoring a major factor - I'm greedy and I'm lazy.
That may come as something of a shocker - fat people rail against the stereotype, but whether it's generally true or not, it's certainly true for me. I could happily spend the entire rest of my life sitting down, watching telly, stuffing my face with junk food.
When I went to University I had entered, to use a stereotype, American levels of fatness. I had huge man breasts bigger than any girl I knew; I wobbled when I walked and people would stare at me in shocked disgust on the street.
And yet I still did nothing about it. In fact, the opposite happened - I grew fatter and fatter. After leaving university I eventually reached the point where no high street store sold clothes I could possibly fit into (well, I could buy socks, but it gets a little chilly if all you have to wear are socks). I therefore had to seek out specialist big clothing suppliers. I was introduced to the world of extra X's.
Most people are not aware that there is a world of extra X's, because they're looking at clothes that never contain more than the single X of XL or extra large. The world of extra X's goes further than this, starting with XXL and going up as far as 6XL. Yup. that's right - XXXXXXL.
I never quite made it that far, but I can assure you that I'm currently sitting here typing this in a pair of 4XL boxers and wearing a 5XL shirt. Admittedly the 5XL is because I prefer baggy collars, but the 4XLs were rather tight not so long ago.
Anyway, the real point here is that this last summer I finally consciously decided to change.
There's a line of thought with junkies and drug addicts that they won't ever reform until they reach rock bottom. For some, this rock bottom is so low that they unfortunately kill themselves before they get there. For others - those that relapse - they are stuck in some sort of half-way state where they never got that far down but managed to affect some change that keeps them bobbing up and down.
For those that truly rehabilitate, they hit the bottom and realise that they need to change and they make that change.
Now, I'd love to say that there was a conscious moment where I realised I'd hit rock bottom, but if there is I don't recall specifically what it was. What I do remember is that this last summer, not that long after my birthday (perhaps that was the trigger - reaching 33) I remember thinking something along the lines of "Why don't you actually go on a proper diet then, instead of just constantly thinking you should start loosing weight?"
And that's when I finally decided to start loosing weight.
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