I always weigh in the morning after I get up and go to the bathroom, but before I eat or drink anything. One can of Diet Coke (breakfast of champions!) weighs 3/4 pound, so it makes a difference. If you have one of those high-accuracy scales (see below), even the weight of water in wet hair makes a noticeable difference.
I’ll have to check that out. On every home bathroom scale I’ve used, just shifting my weight from heels to toes or side to side will change the reading by a pound or two.
breaking-reality, it sounds like you have the right ideas; I hope you can tune out unrealistic or negative family members. My husband and I are both using calorie counting to lose weight (he discovered the app on his iTouch, started fooling around with it, and had lost a bunch of weight without really trying, so I decided to give it a try, too), and it has been great, having that support. 50 pounds in a month - I hope you didn’t just laugh in your dad’s face. When family members don’t support your efforts (and your weight loss ideas sound just fine, not a fad diet), I wonder about issues like jealousy, or that they wish they were doing it too, or they don’t want you holding their bad habits up to the light of day, or something toxic like that. Don’t let them get you down.
Well, mine does that too. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I know where and how to stand on it to at least get a consistent weight.
Well, after clarifying he meant 50 and not 15, I did laugh at him. Then I realized he was serious. I think the issue with him stems from the fact that he has diabetes and high cholesterol and he worries that with those things being hereditary I have a greater risk for them. Which, I probably do. So I think he’s getting tunnel vision of seeing me going through the same things he’s going through. Understandable, but he’s still being grossly unrealistic in his expectation of what I should be able to do and when I’ve lost 5lbs and am getting yelled at for it…I just want to tear my hair out!
I hope that my families comments are just misguided attempts to help rather than something more sinister. As it is, I am mostly able to bounce back from their comments.
It could also be he has no clue what 50 lbs. looks like. Alton Brown lost 50 lbs and did an episode of Good Eats on it…during which he shows a 50 lb. block of Lard. That’s a LOT of LARD! (hint:it’s like a 2 foot cube)
I figured I’d drop 20 lbs, now that I’m half way there, I think I’ll need to lose more than that before I’m happy.
I haven’t formally weighed myself (with an accurate scale that is) in a couple of weeks but using the bathroom scale, things seem to still be trending downward. Part of that is certainly having surgery this past Monday, with the reduced caloric intake that entailed, though that may have been offset some by the fact that I’ve had a few nibbles of ice cream since then.
I need to go back to my primary care doc within a week or two to get some additional bloodwork and discuss the fact that my BP doesn’t seem to be responding to some new medication (which I’d LOVE to be off of… it makes me cough and seriously disturbs what sleep I get).
All my food intake, except for a few days right after surgery, is carefully tracked via Sparkpeople of course!
And the funny: I bought some spices from Penzey’s including some jars of soup base (a paste-like alternative to bouillon cubes). I used some in making some couscous for lunch, and just went to Sparkpeople to enter it. Well, the search for “penzey’s chicken soup base” didn’t get any hints, but the site had an alternative suggestion.
“Penis’s chicken soup base”.
:eek:
I’m very, very scared 
And oh yeah: breakfast if I plan ahead is a bowlful of steel-cut oats (I make them in the slow cooker, in a bowl set into some water so it works like a bain-marie).
This past week, because of surgery and the need to go HIGH FIBER !!!1111one to counteract the pain meds… I went back to my old favorite of store-brand “crunchy granola-style raisin bran”. I could have polished off a 2-cup bowlful before I started watching my diet, now a cup or so was so much sugar it nearly made me gag. I forced it down because of the fiber need - it may have been sugary but it was loaded with the stuff my gut needed.
I’m glad things gut-wise are getting back to normal and I can eat the oats again. There may not be as much fiber there but I’ve gotten to quite like the stuff (helps that I dump some dried fruit in as it cooks) and it really feels like I’m doing Something Good by eating it.
I have treated myself to some goodies now that fat won’t try to kill me. A strawberry-rhubarb cobbler that I’d assembled and frozen last summer, with just a smidge of ice cream… in reasonable quantities it’s not bad and it didn’t make me blow my calories for the day either day I had some. It felt SO good to be able to have a small treat.
Ditto a very tiny brownie last night and today. I entered all the ingredients into sparkpeople and said I was having .03 of a recipe, and I’m feeling much less deprived. I’ve always liked to make brownies when we have snow.
I do see how those ramp up the calories faster than “real” food but it’s worth it to be able to have them occasionally.
How does he propose you do this? Ampute something?
I’m permitted one bad meal a week. Today’s Sunday, the first day of the week. I’ve had my bad meal…
Yesterday was LAST week’s bad meal of the week.
Well, and tuesday, too. That was pretty bad.
Yeah, I’ve found that also. We’ve currently got a cheapo spring-model but some years back when we had an LED-type it gave wildly crazy readings from one visit to the next.
Like the time I gained (or lost? I forget which) some weight when I used it before and after breakfast. That sounds reasonable, you might say, but I’m pretty sure my food didn’t weigh EIGHTY pounds.
I just ordered a different Taylor model than the one linked above - it was pricier but came with Prime shipping so the price nets out to be the same. A number of the reviews mentioned weighing the same as at the doctor’s office, so it’ll definitely be more accurate than the one we have now (which is at least 2 pounds off).
211½, a pound in the wrong direction. Couple of weeks coming up with no going out for dinner or having guests round, which I hope will help or at this rate I’ll never get back below 200. 
I was off skiing this weekend, staying at a house with a huge potluck dinner on Saturday night. I’m getting a better handle on eating out, but this was a challenge, especially with the tray of brownies that came out near the end of the night. I’ll weigh myself tomorrow morning, let’s see how much the exercise worked off the extra food.
“You didn’t put it all on all at once, you don’t have to take it off all at once.”
That’s what I’m telling myself…based on it being Superbowl Sunday.
Today’s weight: 243.6 lbs
Total lost this month: 1.8 lbs
Total lost since tracking in January: 14.6 lbs
I had two exceptionally naughty dinners in the last week. On Wednesday, my partner was supposed to cook chicken and broccoli, but “got too busy” and ordered deep dish pizza instead with chicken wings. Pizza is still a huge weakness for me. Then Friday night, we took a friend out for India food and I feasted. I had naan, and paratha, and pappadum and had chicken shahi korma which was in a very buttery sauce. It was a bit too much.
Otherwise, I was pretty good, had a couple fresh fit Subway sandwiches, made 4 lbs of turkey meatloaf and had that as a bunch of meals too.
The one really remarkable thing is that I’m now able to sing along in the car without running out of breath at all. It’s such a huge improvement.
At the gym, well, I made it there 6 out of the 7 days last week. I grabbed a pair of XXL shorts yesterday and found that they have no become much too big for me. Luckily the drawstring let me cinch 'em so I wouldn’t have a very regrettable moment. When I started going back, I couldn’t do more than 5 minutes on the stair stepper without running out of breath and now I’m up to a half an hour.
That’s very true, and it’s something to remind yourself of when you have weeks when you don’t lose anything or you have a gain. My Slimming World class leader keeps telling us that sustainable weight loss for most people is a rate of 1-2lbs a week so if you look at it like that, you can see what kind of timescale you’re looking at to get rid of the weight you plan to lose.
The other thing she likes to remind us about is that one indulgent day doesn’t mean you’re having a bad week. It’s just one day, and you can get right back on your plan the day after. There’s no need to throw away the whole week just because you have a day when you don’t stick to your diet. There’s nothing to beat yourself up for, we’re all human and we all need a day off now and again. If you gain weight that week, at least you’ll know why!
Are any others tracking the effect the weight-control effort is having on things like blood pressure / blood sugar?
These are both issues with me - both discovered when my gallbladder flared up before Christmas. I’d actually had a normal BP when the flareup first happened, but then it was a bit high a week after that and has remained high despite an additional BP medication. I have to see the doc soon about that because a) high BP needs to be fixed, and b) the BP medication, while cheap and considered very beneficial for a lot of reasons (it’s an ACE inhibitor, which has shown some use in blood sugar control) is causing a side effect - coughing - which is starting to badly disrupt my sleep.
I want to get a home BP monitor to keep an eye on that. When I was in the hospital, my readings were also consistently high. One had a systolic of 150-something which is higher than it’s been since I had pre-eclampsia in 1997 (yikes!). I told the nursing assistant that this was extremely high and she blew it off. Heaven knows what it is now.
The blood sugar went from 154 during the height of the gallbladder flareup (doc did not think it was much influenced by the flareup, maybe 10-15 points, which still left me squarely in diabetic territory), to 107 2 weeks later which is higher than the normal range (99) but not awful… but my A1C that same day was 6.1 which is also into the diabetic range.
A glucose reading 2 weeks after that was 104, we didn’t do the A1C recheck since that takes a while to move.
Surprisingly, down a pound over the weekend. 
Time to get back to the regular weekly schedule and go for a run today.
I was, as of a year ago, 210 lbs.
I’m currently at 152 lbs. and the plan for the next six months involve me losing an extra 20 lbs
I’m 5’ 9"
Apparently Parkour doesn’t only teach to be careful and safe, but it’s a nice way to lose some weight
I haven’t noticed my blood pressure going down yet, but I have noticed my hypoglycemia seems to be getting better. My ability to exercise is going up, too - I have a half hour walk up a hill coming back from Safeway, and it’s getting easier all the time (and yes, my legs and butt are showing the effects of all that hill-walking, too ).
Yay! I lost 2lbs at Fat Club last night, that puts me back at my target weight so I’m happy about that. Since I’m allowed to be under or over my target by 3lbs, I’d like to try and lose those 3lbs as a buffer ready for my trip to Hungary next month.