Seven Month Update on my Quest for Better Health

Today is the seven month anniversary of the date I began my quest for better health. This morning, I weighed in at 195.5 pounds. That's a loss of about 77 pounds. My weight has been hovering between 200 and 195 pounds for about two weeks now. Prior to Thanksgiving, I had been experiencing a steady decline of about two 2 pounds per week. However, since then, my weight has fluctuated up and down by as much as 5 pounds in a week. This has been mostly due to the Holiday parties and the Super Bowl party. Fortunately, the overall trend has about a 1.25 pound loss per week since Thanksgiving. My progress is shown in the graph.

Mike Summers Weight Loss as of 2/17/2015

As predicted by my doctors, I am in much better health since I have lost weight. My cholesterol, triglycerides, and A1C readings have been within the healthy range for the last three visits to my endocrinologist. I am completely off any medication for diabetes. My blood sugar has been normal. (I am not even showing signs of pre-diabetes). Additionally, I have been able to cut my cholesterol medication to the lowest possible dosage.

I have found that, for the most part, I am having very little problem maintaining my low calorie diet. I am still averaging about 1,500 calories per day   The one exception, as I have indicated has been the holiday parties. I have found that at parties, the consumption of alcohol tends to lower my self-control, and I find myself eating way more than I had planned. Eating 4,000 is madness. However, I have also found that I can recover from these lapses in a day or two just by reverting back to the healthy diet. This is an area I am going to need to monitor more closely moving forward.

Once surprising result has been that I appear to have lost some muscle mass in addition to the fat loss. This is based on the fact that since I have started going back to the gym on a regular basis, I have noticed that I cannot lift the same amount of weight I could lift in August. Now, this could just be normal muscle atrophy from lack of use as I have only been doing cardio exercises regularly in the past six months. However, most books I have consulted suggest that the body will burn muscle first before it burns fat (over the short term) so losing a small amount of muscle mass is not completely unexpected. No matter what the cause, I have decided to address the issue by adding regular strength training exercises to my weekly fitness regime. Again, as with the weight loss, my strategy is to keep meticulous logs of my workout to determine my progress over time. My experience in most things has been you are mostly likely to see progress on those things you choose to measure and track. I also believe it is much harder to backslide if you know you are being watched, so I will keep you updated on this new goal in this blog going forward.

So, I am seven months in and I need to loss 22.5 more pounds to get to my goal. I expect the weight loss from here on in will be slower than at first, despite my planned increase in exercise activity. This is because with less body mass, I am burning fewer calories per day than I was when I weighed 180 pounds. No matter how slow, progress is progress. I am hopeful that I will continue to make slow progress through next few months.