It’s more than a little odd, as my numbers don’t seem to be tied to what I actually do during a week.  Weeks where I hew closely to the plan and work out and such can be low weight-loss weeks.  Weeks where I fall off the wagon a little can be high weight-loss weeks.  All I know is, things haven’t stabilized enough for me to consider Maintenance seriously.  Anyway, I’m excited to be closing in on 100 pounds.  I might just get there by six months, and if not, then soon after.

Class has been a mixed bag.  Kristi is great and works hard to keep people motivated.  But I feel like I do best just plugging away — the variety and hoopla doesn’t really do it for me.  I know that that’s different than for most people but then, I’m different too.  In any event the accountability of a weekly meeting and a weekly call have been very helpful, and the other stuff is certainly not horrible, so I’ll keep on with it.

This is the first week in which I’ve gained, rather than lost weight, and it’s a simple morality tale: It’s also the first week in which I went “out of the box” a significant amount. While at Lunacon, I wasn’t able to have the HMR entrees because the Hilton Rye Town doesn’t have microwaves available to the customers (or hot water boilers, either). While I could have enough shakes to get the nutritional requirement in, there’s a psychological component to going several days without the act of eating that I wasn’t entirely prepared for.

In the end I wound up having one meal a day in the restaurant. Combined with a slight fall-off in physical activity (I met the prescribed minimum, but sitting in a con is a lot less active than even teaching), it reversed my previous trend. In essence I’ve lost two weeks (the weight I gained and now one more to get back to where I was). In return I’ve gained a valuable lesson, which is that things turn around darn fast when you stop paying attention to them. *sigh*

My weight loss is a little less than last week but certainly satisfactory at nearly 4 lbs. I suspect that rate isn’t entirely sustainable but I’ll take what I can and I’m relatively proud of that. In other good news, my cardiologist took me off the rampiril so I am now heart-med free (yay!) though I still take urso forte for gallstone prevention.

No grand experiments in food preparation this week. I’ve been putting a little Da Vinci’s Blueberry syrup into the HMR-70 Vanilla shake as a pudding and it’s not bad. Between that and the benefit bars, I’ve discovered a soft spot for blueberries, which I never knew I had. Da Vinci’s Root Beer syrup enhances a HMR-800 nicely — I’m going to try a “root beer pudding” at some point, too. I am still too scarred by last week’s curry-cake debacle to try actual baking, though, at least for a while.

Updated pictures will be added soon. I can’t make them on my laptop at school.

It seems I’m back on track. I primarily credit the recalibration of my physical activity, which means I’m doing more. I’ve been forcing myself to go a little longer hungry, too, though not too much. I’ll admit that the past two weeks had been pretty disappointing and it’s nice to be on a good trend again. My doctor told me that my 13-week weight loss exceeds the average by 20 pounds, which was nice to hear.

I proved last night that I remain not a cook, mangling a recipe for “curry cakes” so badly that I had to throw out the cookie sheet. Oops. Although I’ll keep experimenting, for now I am just a Lego chef. *sigh*

Not a terribly uplifting week, not that I expected one. Coming off being sick and then flying out to Chicago threw off my stride. In particular, I had long ago decided that — with this being not only my first Valentine with Annie but indeed my first ever with a girlfriend — I was going to enjoy myself that day and blow the diet. I did, by eating a to-die-for chicken parm at a great little hole-in-the-wall Italian place called La Cantina.  Combining the out-of-box meal with the disruption to my workout schedule led to a negligible weight loss for the second week in a row.  Yet I don’t feel a single iota of guilt.

Compounding that, I’m almost certainly overestimating the physical activity calories I’m getting from walking.  Now that I’ve shed 50 lbs, I don’t get as much bang for the buck, or rather, calorie for the minute.  So I have to adjust that, too, which in turn means either a higher-intensity workout or more sessions in a week (probably the latter).

Hopefully this will get me back on track.

Since the weight was mostly unchanged and they didn’t take my blood pressure this week, I didn’t produce new graphs.

I fell just short of the magic number, 50 lbs total weight loss.  That would put me halfway to my first goal.  Oh, well, I’ll take a 6 lb/wk loss rate.  My blood pressure is now in the normal range and seems stable, which is nice.

People at PWMC were nicely supportive.  I’m going to say something all other dieters are going to hate, but this actually hasn’t been too hard.  I think the HMR system is uniquely suited to my own quirks.  For example, I don’t missing cooking at all, and despite being a continual grazer, I don’t actually miss food all that much.  A lot of the weekly class revolves around strategies for variety, which leaves me cold.  I’m OK with eating the same 4 or 5 things day in and day out.  I like not having to work at it.

That said, there are still challenges.  When I’m in school and on schedule, everything’s easy, but weekends and snow days still throw me for a loop.  I’m not sure how well I’ll handle my upcoming conference and trip to Chicago.  But most days, this is remarkably easy.  Still, a long long way to go remains, and then I face the challenge of maintenance.

This was a better week from the viewpoint of weight loss — nearly three times as better, in fact.  Even better, my blood pressure seems to be improving as well:  This week, the BP was 112 over 80, enough of a drop that my doctor considered taking me off the rampiril.  (He didn’t, though.  The recent fluctuation has been enough to warrant further treatment.)  I can’t complain about 33 pounds over five weeks.  That’s a lot better than I would ever do on my own.

I attribute the improvement to the opening of school and the end of the holidays.  I wasn’t a holiday binger at all — I stayed “in the box” — but the loss of a regular schedule really played havoc with my program, I think.  While school’s in session, life is more bland but more steady, and that helps.  I did have one more adventure with chicken chips, but that was for the dinner party for Annie before she went back to Chicago, and I figure that’s a special enough occasion.

My latest favorite discovery is the combination of an HMR entree (specifically, the chicken parmesan pasta) with the chicken soup.  I’ll admit to being a little dubious when the counselor said to just dump an entree into a soup and see what happens.  But this one is actually quite good.  It’s exactly what’s called for on a cold winter’s evening.  It’s also a relatively clean background on which to experiment with spices, an art I do not have any grasp of at all yet.

There was a mini-crisis looming in my program, in that next week my group would technically “end core”, meaning finish the original 13 week program.  After that, one transitions to either “ongoing” or “maintenance”.   While 33 pounds is fantastic, I’m still nowhere near my goal weight, so maintenance was out.  But the ongoing session meets Thursdays 7-8:30, and I’m on duty that night and can’t leave campus.  It’s pretty hard to engineer a duty crew swap this late in the year and I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to work it out.

But in fact it turns out not to be an issue, at least not yet.  I started quite late in the core group, and missed about half of the sessions.  So my counselor agreed I should probably just restart the core, which (in addition to the two weeks inter-session we’ve set up) means I don’t have to think about it for 15 weeks, or roughly until late April.  Yay.

After two weeks of holidays, my total weight loss was 4.6 pounds.  While that represents a falling-off of my original rate, such is to be expected.  And at least I can say I lost weight during the holidays, which is something uncommon in America.  I’m hoping that, with school back in session and me more on a regular schedule, I might up that rate a little bit.

My blood pressure hardly changed at all, which was disappointing after several weeks of strong improvement.  Of course 120/86 is still better than 180/120(!) and even than 120/90, though barely.  My doctor put me back on ramipril last week but it hasn’t seemed to have an effect yet.

One thing is that my physical activity is probably starting to have less impact, ironically.  I walk for half an hour every day (so far on the treadmill) and now cover 1.5 miles compared to less than one when I started.  But because I’ve shed the weight, each step is less effective at burning calories.  I’ll probably have to recalibrate my workout.  Maybe I’ll start doing some resistance-band stuff at night.

The other factor in slowing my weight loss has been my unlocking of the secret of making “chicken chips”, which are (sort of) chips made from the HMR chicken soup.  Prepared correctly, they turn out somewhat crispy and a not-bad substitute for potato chips.  HMR doesn’t publish the recipe (in fact, it’s a bit of an acquired art) because they don’t particularly like people making them.  This week I discovered why:  Although they count as a meal replacement (like a shake or entree), they are far less filling.  It’s entirely natural to just keep eating them,  just like chips or pretzels.  This means you fill up more on “empty” calories.

As a result, I’ve made a pact with myself not to have the chips casually, even though I enjoy them a lot.  I’m still going to use them when I’m in a chip-snacking situation (such as a SuperBowl party) but not during a regular day.  Hopefully that will help avoid a further slowdown in weight loss.

• Basic Hun circuit (1.086 mi.)
• Southern circuit (0.776 mi.)
  
• To Palmer Square (1.577 mi.)
• To the Dinky (1.832 mi.)

Just like JD, I often think of that song… Anyway, if you’ve been reading our story so far, you know that an aching tooth sent me to (of all places) the cardiologist’s office. He mandated a number of lifestyle changes to help me stem off a heart attack. First and foremost would be to lose weight … a lot of weight, in fact, and as fast as possible.

Without mandating anything, he suggested I see a local weight loss clinic (Princeton Weight Management Center), an office affiliated with Health Management Resources, Inc. (hereafter HMR). HMR has 25 years of experience in doctor-managed weight loss and has a track record of bringing down weight by 100 pounds or more, safely. It’s a bit pricey but it’s a full-service weight management program.

I attended my first class on 2008 December 2, making it exactly four weeks ago. In that time, my weight dropped from 368.4 lbs to 344.0 lbs… 24.4 lbs in four weeks, and that during the holiday season. Although I have never seriously dieted before and so have no baseline, I’m reasonably sure that’s better than the typical self-managed diet. As importantly, my blood pressure has dropped from a life-threatening 180/120 to a high-but-manageable 110/80. (The improvement has been enough that I have been moved virtually off meds entirely.)

The program I’m on is called a “no-decision 5-shake” diet. It’s not really no decision, but decision-making is much curtailed. Later I’ll write a post on why this suits my particular habits very well. The 5-shake bit refers to what I am supposed to eat, which is 5 HMR shakes (chocolate or vanilla) each day, plus two vitamins and 64 ounces of “non-caloric beverage” (the best of which, of course, is water). In addition I am supposed to get 2000 calories of physical activity. All together this makes up my “minimum daily prescription” and so far I have not had too much trouble meeting it.

One of the interesting things about HMR is that there is no maximum. If I’m hungry, I can have another shake. I can also eat one of five or six types of entree (lasagna, stew, etc.) that HMR produces. These don’t meet my requirements but are otherwise “in the box”. At my current weight, it is estimated that I would have to consume 27 shakes per day to actually gain weight, so the program doesn’t really worry about how many I do consume. Fewer is better, obviously, but extra is not a problem. (As a personal record, I’ve consumed 10 meal-equivalents in a day. Usually it’s 6 or 7.)

So far, it’s worked pretty well. As I mentioned, I’ve lost an average of 6 pounds a week for the last month. Although that curve is already flattening, I feel confident I can keep a 2-3 lb/wk rate. I’m way off from my goal weight (let alone my “ideal” weight by BMI) so I’ll be at this for a long while. Once you reach your goal weight, HMR transitions you to “maintenance mode”, wherein they teach you how to eat so as to keep your weight stable.

There’s a lot more involved, such as the exercise program I’ve adopted or the various recipes you can use so that you don’t go shake-mad. And I expect to keep a weekly log of what I’m doing and how it’s working — or how it’s not, if I fall down. This is new territory for me but already I feel better, so I’m hoping to keep it going.