Last fall, I was considering taking a vacation. I wanted to go to Europe to see some of the Christmas markets. I’ve done it before, and I had a blast. I was considering going to Italy and Austria, or Germany and the Netherlands, and I was having a lot of fun building potential itineraries. Ultimately though, I decided against going. Not due to lack of money, or lack of vacation time at work, or family commitments. No, I ended up deciding against the trip for one very simple reason.
I felt like I was too fat to comfortably fly.
During a trip in April to France and Switzerland, I was barely able to fit the airplane seatbelt around me, and by October I was twenty pounds heavier than I had been in the spring. I’m 6’3, and I was up to 320 pounds. The trips on the plane had been extremely uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to put myself through that again. I decided not to fly to Europe that fall, but I set myself a goal: I would take a trip in April 2020, and I’d be down to 260 pounds by that time. That would be six months of weight loss at the rate of 10 pounds a month. I set two simple daily goals at the start: aim for 2,000 calories a day and stay under 2,300 calories a day, and walk the 10k steps a day that my Fitbit kept pestering me about. In February, I bought an exercise bike, and on days where the weather is terrible I’ve been riding it for an hour rather than walking 10k steps.
COVID-19 interrupted my April vacation plans, which makes not taking the trip in December an especially painful decision in retrospect. But I had a scale victory: my trip was scheduled to start on April 13, and on April 8 I reached 260 pounds. Since then, I’ve kept going. My ultimate goal is about 190, but it’s very much something that I’ll be reevaluating as I continue to lose weight.
I’ve somewhat inadvertently been doing some interval fasting; it’s not that I set out to interval fast, but usually I end up eating almost all of my calories in a four hour window between 8:00 AM and noon. One of the challenges for me was finding food that was A) filling, B) tasty to me, C) healthy, D) no effort to make. Still, I’ve found things that work for me: there’s a lot of Greek yogurt, chicken, berries and nuts in my diet now. Covid restrictions have given me an odd benefit: while working from home I can’t go down to the food court in my office building to be tempted. I have only what I have in the house, and it makes cheating somewhat difficult.
Some victories:
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My belt had been at the point where I was out of notches and I wouldn’t be able to loosen it further. I was going to need a new belt. And now, I’ve had to add two notches to it. I’ve had this belt since 2011, so to have had to add notches after so long is a pretty great thing.
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I’ve had to buy some new clothes. I’m on my second pair of new jeans in six months. I’ve also bought shorts that were XL rather than XXL. The jeans that I was wearing last fall are ridiculously oversized on me now. It’s like wearing clown pants. The funniest thing, in a melancholy sort of way, has been dress shirts. I have dress shirts that I grew to big to wear but kept anyways that are now too big and loose on me to look good.
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At the end of May and start of June, my workplace had a step challenge. I finished 3rd out of 162 people, averaging about 32,000 steps a day. One of those days I set a new personal best for steps in a day with 45,266.
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I started a Couch to 5K plan a few weeks ago. On Week 1, Day 1 I had trouble running for one minute. Week 7, Day 1 was Sunday June 7th. I was supposed to do 25 minutes of running – instead I did 36 minutes of running, and went well over 5K. Since then, I’ve done 5k runs on the 9th and the 11th, and my time has dropped each day. I hope to get my 5k time down under 30 minutes, and then maybe to start adding additional distance.
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On June 11th, I stepped on the scale and I was 239 pounds. That put me into “overweight” as opposed to obese. I’ve lost 80 pounds. I am literally ¾ of the man I used to be.
I currently have about 50 pounds to go to reach my next goal weight of 190, which will put me 10 pounds below being overweight, and was about what I weighed when I graduated from university back in 2004. Today is not the end, or the beginning of the end, or even the end of beginning, because even after I reach my goal I know that I have a whole lifetime to try to maintain it. But this might be the middle of the beginning for me.
And hey, there’s even an outside chance that travel restrictions will be loosened in the fall and that I’ll be able to go see those Christmas markets this year. I can always hope!
For those who care about such things, here’s my shirtless progress pic.
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