The Select Screen

Hey everyone, Word Press didn’t delete my blog thing.  Awesome.

Here we are, December 4, 2012. In a couple of week it will have been six months since the start on my weight loss trek and I have an update for the handful of people who are reading this, probably because you took a wrong turn somewhere on the information superhighway.  Anyway, as of this morning I have a lost a total of 104 pounds in approximately 24 weeks.  Pretty crazy, right?  I didn’t quite make my original goal of losing 100 pounds by Thanksgiving, but I wasn’t too far off I don’t think.  In addition, since the last time we talked I total fit in that shirt I bought myself back in 2007.  In fact, I just wore it to dinner with a few friends on Sunday.  I was quite dashing, I won’t lie.

So here I am.  I weigh 265 pounds and I’m 65 pounds away from pie in the sky goal of weighing only 200 pounds.  I still have a very long way to go, but I thought I’d share some of my more short-term goals with you as has been my M.O. here on The Select Screen.  Here we go!

• Before I started on this road to weight loss I hadn’t seen a doctor in about five years. Ashamed of what said doctor might tell me, I ducked and dodged medical personnel for a long time.  But back in September I went in and got a very encouraging set of test results, including a total cholesterol level of a mere 110.  Hurrah!  Well, to ensure the consistency of those results I am going back for a follow-up on January 2. I would like to see a similar total cholesterol level (anything under 150 is very very good) and perhaps another ten or so pounds off by then.  It is in less than a month from now, so I hope that is achievable in such a small stretch of time.  We’ll see!
• Now that I can fit into my goal shirt, it was time for a new one.  This time I went for a crazier goal shirt in that it is a size XL.  Now for the past several years I have struggled to fit into a 3XL and have needed to wear a 4XL.  Now, depending on the shirt, I can fit into a 2XL, but prefer the room I get in a 3XL shirt still.  But XL?  I haven’t worn an XL shirt probably since my first year in college.  This one might take a very long time, but how could not love this shirt.  Back to the Future Part II?  One of my favorites.  Here it is!

McFly! McFly! Your shoes’re unbelt!

• Since 2007 I have needed the assistance of a CPAP machine to sleep properly.  For those of you unaware, CPAP means continuous positive air pressure.  When I sleep I have a hard time breathing because the air through my nose is obstructed to my lungs.  This caused by my weight.  The CPAP machine pushes a constant stream of air into my lungs, so I don’t snore and I don’t gasp for air in the middle of the night.  Without the mask, my sleep is often very light and restless.  The only problem is I have to carry around a machine and mask whenever I plan to sleep.  If I go on vacation I have to lug that machine with me.  After five years I’m getting kind of tired of using it.  I want to get to a point where I don’t need to wear one when I go to sleep anymore.  I don’t know when that threshold will be crossed, but I weigh less than now then when I first got my CPAP machine in 2007.  So who knows…

There are a couple more but let’s save that for a future post.

All in all, I feel healthier, lighter, and have a ton more self-confidence.  It is a great feeling that I hope continues on the back half of my weigh loss trek.

Thanks for stopping by!

Wow, this thing still exists, huh?  Well I am just checking in to give whoever still reads this thing (or attempts to anyway) an update on my war on weight.  The last time we left off I had lost about fifty pounds – which was very exciting for me.  Well, I’m on to bigger and better things…

Hey, remember when I made those goal things in early August?  Well I am proud to announce that one of them has been successfully accomplished as of this morning.  As of 6:30 am, I officially broke the 300 pound barrier.  I have not weighed this “little” since 2008.  While my goal was originally set for October 31, 2012 – I accomplished this milestone some 37 days in advance.  Suck it, weight.

So now what?  Well I’m all about setting up new goals for myself, so I have one or two.  The first, of course, is to still fit in the shirt I bought way back in 2007.  I did try it on this morning – I told myself I was allowed to ONLY when I broke the 300 pound barrier – and lo and behold when I tried to after I weighed myself this morning, it fit and I could fasten all the buttons on it.  It is a little snug for my taste – I remember it fitting a whole lot better than that, but it was something.  So that still remains my goal.  Fit into that damn shirt.  Maybe when I do, I’ll put a picture of it up – I make no promises.

The next goal would be to hit 269 pounds by Thanksgiving.  Why 269 pounds you might be wondering… Well that’s simple.  If I ever get to 269, that will mark one hundred pounds lost for me – and probably the “fittest” I’ve been since I graduated from law school in the spring of 2007.  The goal is quite a ways ahead of me – and I’m not sure I can actually make it there realistically – but I’m sure going to try.  We’ll see what happens. I don’t think I’ll find this war on weight extremely successfully until I’ve shed that first 100 pounds.  Everything after that is gravy (even though I can’t have gravy).

So there you have it.  A brief update on yours truly.  If I lose another five or so pounds I’ll have lost 20% of my initial body weight.  Can’t wait!  So stay tuned folks… it is going to get interesting!

Another week completed on the war on weight and another victory.  Today I happily discovered that I had lost another four pounds in the last seven days, but more importantly, I achieved a significant milestone.  I have now lost over 50 pounds.  Let me spell that out: f-i-f-t-y p-o-u-n-d-s.  It was hard to believe I weighed fifty more pounds than I do now just nine short weeks ago.  My self-confidence has improved, I feel as if my health has improved, and my clothes definitely fit a lot better than they used to.  Some major strides have been made thus far.  Yay me.

What’s unfortunate about it is that the entire time I was in denial about my weight; I actually thought I weighed what I do now.  Even with terrible eating habits and exemplifying a sedentary lifestyle, I still convinced myself that I remained the same weight for more than three or four years.  I was either very naïve or very delusional.  Maybe both.

Regardless, the point is that I have won yet another small victory on this war on weight.  This isn’t the end, this isn’t even the beginning of the end of my struggle with weight.  But I hope that the fifty pounds I have lost and the momentum I have established means that this is the end of the beginning.

Looking at the calendar today, I have been at this thing for eight weeks now.  There has been some major progress in my war on weight and I’m proud to announce as of this morning I have lost 47 pounds.  I still have a long way to go, but it looks like I am well on my way.

But enough about the weight war.  Let me talk about something interesting for once.  Next week, I will be attending STAR WARS CELEBRATION VI at the Orange County Convention Center from August 23 to August 26.  This will be my second Celebration – and I am just as excited as I was before my first convention in 2010.  There is a lot to see and not a lot of time to do it in.

My friends Colin and Colleen will be flying down from Virginia and joining me like they did for CV.  And much like last time we have already planned out the schedule of panels we want to see, we have picked the actors we’d like to get autographs from and we already have an idea on some of the merchandise we would like to get our hands on.  With only four days – you have to plan this stuff out.  To add to the festivities, I will be staying at a nearby hotel so I can just waltz right into the convention center every morning promptly at opening (but most likely waaaaaaaaaaay before).

While I participate and appreciate Star Wars Weekend at Disney’s Hollywood Studios – the event gets less and less impressive the more times I have attended.  Living locally in Orlando spoils me a bit – and Star Wars Weekends ends up being the same thing every year.   Celebration is rarer (although the time between CV and CI is only two years compared to the usual three years in conventions past), the panels are much more varied and interesting, the merchandise is better, and quite frankly, attracts way better guests (this year, for the first time in the US, Ian McDiarmid who played Emperor Palpatine will be on hand). If you are a Star Wars fan, you should definitely make your way to this or the next Celebration, because there really isn’t anything quite like it in scope.

In other news, VIDEO GAMES.  We are finally starting to get out of the muck that is the summer and games actually worth playing are starting to trickle out.  Last week it was Persona 4 Area.  This week is Sleeping Dogs and Darkstalkers 2.  In the coming weeks and months, X-COM, Assassin’s Creed III, Borderlands 2, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Resident Evil 6 (although I’m a little wary about this one), and Hitman: Absolution.  So hopefully I’ll be talking more about games for the rest of the year.  We’ll see what happens.

Currently I’m playing Persona 3.  I skipped it and played Persona 4 back in 2009 – much to my delight.  Persona 4 became one of my favorite games ever.  Before I dive into Persona 4 Arena, a fighting game set two months after the events of Persona 4, I thought I should finish its predecessor.  Apparently some of the characters are in P4A and I don’t want to do myself a disservice and miss anything.  Once I’m done with it, it is on to P4A.

Upwards on onwards.  Excelsior!

When I started out on this journey I had pretty much two goals in mind.  The first goal was my ultimate weight loss goal – the long term and ideal weight that I would like to be when this is all said and done.  I’m on my way but I have a looooooooooooooong way to go.  The second goal was to lose 10% of my starting body weight.  Research has shown that a 10 percent loss of one’s body weight “translates to significant health benefits.”  Positive changes in such things as lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, a decreased risk of premature illness, decreased health care costs, as well as a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes.  As someone who has been in poor health for many years it was important to me to reach this goal as soon as possible.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, exactly seven weeks into this war on weight I am proud to announce that I have shed 10% of my starting weight. Take that, sedentary lifestyle!

Now that I’ve crossed that threshold, I have been thinking of what other goals I want to achieve to my ideal weight.  I’ve come up with a couple, tell me what you think.

Weigh under 300 pounds by Halloween:  Like I said, I’m a big guy.  I have been hovering over 300 pounds for years now.  At some point I guess I just accepted it and didn’t bother trying to improve my lifestyle whatsoever.  But now that I have made some decent progress on my war on weight, I want to push my success as far as I can.  And why Halloween you ask?  Well I’m hoping that my momentum will sustain itself and I will be able to break the 300 pound barrier in a relatively short time period.  It isn’t necessarily a hard and fast date, but I want to have a deadline to look at and work toward. 

Wear a shirt I purchased in 2007:  This one is inspired (read: copied) from my friend Brian’s site.  I hate that I have outgrown the majority of my closet.  Most of my clothes are too tight on me, despite already being sizeable themselves.  I’ve lost some of my favorite shirts over the years, causalities of my poor lifestyle.  This weekend I walked into my closet, and there hung a number of shirts I don’t even remember wearing since I have moved to Florida (and that was back in 2008).  I grabbed my favorite shirt, a black and blue aloha shirt from Sig Zane, hammered a nail in the wall of my kitchen and hung it up.  My favorite shirt ever will hang on my kitchen wall until I have lost enough weight to finally wear it again.  A cliché idea, for sure, but one that I hope will inspire me to continue to wage war on my weight so I can resurrect some of my fallen comrades.

I’ve fought hard to lose the first 10% and I intend to work even harder to reach these next couple of goals. 

I guess there are just a few things in my life that I never learned.   Sure, I learned the code to get extra lives in the NES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the second one, not the crappy original one that had little to no resemblance to the TV show) (second parenthetical: B, A, B, A, Up, Down, B, A, Left, Right, B, A, Start).  I also learned most of the dialogue of Back to the Future and Star Wars at an early age (“What a minute, Doc… Hey Doc?  Are you telling me you built a TIME MACHINE… out of a DeLorean?”)  But one thing I never quite learned as much as I should have was what was healthy and what was unhealthy.   I mean, of course I realized that a bag of Cheetos was garbage food and that an apple a day kept the doctor away.  I wasn’t a complete doorknob.  But when it came to food that SOUNDS all right for you, I was, and I guess still remain, completely in the dark.

Case in point!  Last week, during my lunch break I was at home watching the latest installment of some terrible television show when I decided to grab for a can of peanut butter.  For the past five weeks I have been trying to eat as healthy as possible – and I thought, well, one or two tablespoons of peanut butter isn’t going to spoil the well-balanced lunch I prepared for myself (veggie burger, no bun, three leaves of lettuce, a pickle, and a small serving of Baked Lays).  I sat down, letting the television show wash over me, as I began to eat one spoonful of peanut butter. Then a minute or so later, I ate another spoonful.  During the commercial break, I looked at the nutritional facts, something that I have slowly come to do as I fight this war on weight.  Well, surprise, surprise, surprise!  Peanut butter is apparently really high in calories and in fat content.

I think I must have read the label at least a half dozen times.  My jaw dropped and my eyes widened.  I think I dropped the spoon on the ground too.  I can’t really remember though because I was mad.  Furious, even!  At the peanut butter company?  At the Peter Pan guy on the front of the can?  At the betrayal of the tasty and delicious contents within?  No…  I guess I was just mad at myself for not taking .004 seconds to read the label before I dove into the peanut buttery goodness. 

Of course I acted like any sane and rational human being would respond when confronted with their own naiveté and stupidity.  I stood up with the peanut butter can (or is it a jar?  Whatever, it’s too late to change now!), walked calmly to the trash, and threw it in like I was a major league pitcher trying to pitch a perfect game.  That bit of theatrics was pretty satisfying and helped me forgive myself at my misstep.

I guess I should have learned this stuff sooner, huh? 

I have a rocky relationship with my treadmill.  In August of 2011, in one of my moments of lucidity, I thought the best way to kick start my road to weight revolution was to own my very own treadmill.  I’ve only been the member of a gym once in my life – while I was studying for the bar exam in Hawaii – I needed to take my aggression and frustration over preparation for that horrendous and mammoth of a test.  But other than that I’ve never used a gym, mostly because, as we’ve established before, I’m really good at being a lazy person.  So my thinking back in August 2011 was, well, there is no excuse now.  I have an exercise machine in my home. All I have to do is roll out of bed and start on the treadmill.  It made sense to me.

After it was purchased and put together, I used it immediately.  It has a fancy iPod dock with on board speakers, a little fan, and programmed routes… it is very fancy. On the second day I thought, “Well, I exercised yesterday… I’m probably good for today.”  And that mantra became a continuing one as days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months.  By November, I started using it to hang out my clothes.  I unplugged it. And it simply sat there, collecting dust.  Despite being in my room, where I had to walk by it every day when I woke up and when I went to bed, I completely ignored it.  Maybe if I didn’t acknowledge its existence then I wouldn’t feel guilty for not using it?  Even now, as I type this, I’m shaking my head.

Declaring war on the weight meant that I had to stop acting like a child and start using that infernal machine.  Dieting alone wouldn’t be enough, I needed to exercise to have the best chance at losing the excess weight.  So the first day, I plugged it in.  Hey, progress is progress, right?  The next day I stepped on it and walked at a decent pace for 30 minutes without stopping.  I did that for a few days straight.  The next week I made the incline of the treadmill a little steeper and walked a little bit faster.  The next week I walked for 45 minutes instead of only 30.  Every week I try to make a small but noticeable change in my routine to increase its intensity.  I’m not quite up to jogging yet, but I am fast walking at a reasonable incline.  I did three miles this morning – and man am I already feeling it.

It took me almost a year of indifference and ignorance to realize that my treadmill is an ally in my war on weight. And while I might curse at it, flip it the bird and give it evil looks (things I have done in the past five weeks to an inanimate object…), the treadmill will help me reach my health and wellness goals.

So here’s to you, treadmill…you piece of shi…