Mission 44

Project 43 is finished! I'm pleased to report that I lost 28 pounds in the 31 days of January and exceeded my 25 pound goal. Today is also my birthday, and it was a wonderful day to celebrate with my family. I had brunch with my daughter and went out to dinner with my wife and daughter. We wrapped up the night with dessert at Menchie's, which had a sugar-free German Chocolate and a low-carb butterscotch tonight. I had a little of both, 4 oz. total. One of the highlights of my day was introducing my little one to Back to the Future , one of my all-time favorite movies. It quickly turned into a double feature when, at the end, she asked if we could watch the rest of the trilogy. Part II wrapped tonight, Part III will come tomorrow. Today's my birthday. I'll blog more tomorrow, including a summary of Project 43, but I will leave you with a comprehensive picture for now: Mission 44 has seen a successful start. See you tomorrow for the beginning of phase two!

After the 42-hour fast ended yesterday I was certain that the results would be short lived. The plateau had been stubborn at 324.0 and to finally break through and get to 319.6 was a huge deal for me. This morning I woke up and nervously approached the scale in the hopes that maybe the number would only move up by a pound or two, leaving me with something to work with in these last two days of Project 43. What?!? Two more down ? It's hard to explain the joy I felt at seeing this morning's number. I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner after the fast and still made progress. One of the goals of Project 43 was to learn more about my body and find the most effective ways to lose weight. This result was not something I was expecting to see. Fasting was something I was going to begin experimenting with in phase two, and I'm going to continue to test it and possibly implement it on a regular basis, but to see what it did to my phase one plateau is intriguing. Aside from the s...

What a beautiful sight. After waking up to 324.0 three days in a row, this number was a joy to behold. I know it came at the end of a 42-hour fast, and I know that it could skyrocket back up after a few meals, but for the moment I am very happy to be back on track. I am still learning how my body responds to all of these extreme measures that I'm experimenting with, so I'm hoping that I can maintain something close to this number until Thursday morning. I've since broken the fast and feel very full after two eggs, two sausage links and a cup of coffee. It was all so delicious. I have planned a lunch of fresh broccoli with dill dip, then a dinner of snapper with pesto, edamame, and zoodles. The sodium's relatively low, the carbs are low, and the calories are right on target. Tomorrow will be a field trip to Kennedy Space Center with my daughter and I have a meal plan for the day. I will not allow myself to blow this goal right at the end. The fast wasn't all ...

Today I woke up and got on the scale. 324.0 again. Plateau . It was time to go nuclear. I wasn't expecting to do a fast until phase two, but it's time to give it a shot. 27 hours in and I don't feel like writing a very detailed blog tonight. Full details tomorrow. ********************* General disclaimers:  In my posts I describe things that I am doing to reclaim my health based on what I know about myself. Please don't emulate my actions. I'm not a doctor, and when you read things in my blog they are not meant as advice to you or anyone else. They are simply a record of my own experience. Things like abandoning prescribed medicines and walking for miles while dealing with morbid obesity are bad ideas, but I'm an idiot and do them anyway. Don't be like me. Talk to your doctor before making major lifestyle changes,  please . Also, if I write about a product, service or book and provide a link to it, you should assume that I'm part of a related a...

Today I woke up to heavy rain and an even heavier me. 324.0 on the scale again . I started thinking where I could have gone wrong yesterday. Maybe I went too hard for too long on my walk and my exercise became anaerobic. Maybe I didn't eat enough calories to keep my metabolism going. Maybe it was both of these things, or maybe it was sodium. Again. I reviewed my journal and thought about where the sodium was hiding in my meal plan. Sausage patties, check . Soy sauce in my tuna salad recipe, check . The Fritos with the chili last night, check . It was everywhere, and it was driving my progress toward a plateau. Time to walk it off, one more time. I dug around in the garage and found a camping poncho that I bought a few years ago and never opened. I was a little nervous about the size on the label, though: I've been down this road before. "One size fits most" typically doesn't include me. But I opened the poncho and tried it on, and wouldn't you know i...

Yesterday I published a very short post about eating a piece of cake. Today I get to publish a long post about the consequences. Food-wise, Day 25 wasn't supposed to go the way it did. It started out really well, to be honest. I went on a four mile walk and then weighed in at 321.4, a new low for Project 43. This is the first time I've posted a photo of my tracking chart. As long as I stay below the green line, I'm on track to meet my goal. Yesterday 321.4 kept me under that green line. Today, however, I stepped on the scale to see this: No. To own this weight today would mean crossing the green line. I would be off track for the first time since starting Project 43. That was not going to happen. 324.0?! How on Earth did I get here? Probably this: And this helped: Like I said yesterday, it was my wife's birthday. So I took her out for sushi. It was an indulgence that was well planned. The ramen, however, was not. My daughter and I found ourselves in ...

Today is my wife's birthday. I had a piece of cake. My daughter made it so there was no refusing. It was good. Back to the plan tomorrow.

This journey is Mission 44. It's thirteen months long and will end on my 44th birthday, January 31, 2020. It has several phases, each with their own goals, which I will outline in a future post. The phase I am completing now is called Project 43, a one-month kickstarter phase that began on January 1 and will end on my 43rd birthday, one week from today. The goal of Project 43 is to lose 25 pounds and reduce my average blood sugar. I'm almost there. This journey had a beginning, and that beginning was December 5 of last year. It was my most recent doctor appointment, the fourth of four yearly visits that I've been requested to do since my doctor told me that I had type Type-2 diabetes back in 2015. Mission 44 wouldn't begin for several weeks, but my doctor told me something that started the wheels turning: "Your A1C is terrible. I'm going to put you on another medicine." At this point I was already on four: Metformin and Januvia to control blood suga...

I'm on a low-carb, high-fat diet and this is in my living room right now: Wish me luck!

I started blogging again yesterday, January 22, 2019. My intent was to begin a new blog about my nascent journey to fitness. I don't want a new blog, though. I already have this blog, and I like it. It's been around a while, and it's about something that's important to me. So now this blog will be about reclaiming my health and building my writing career. I haven't posted on this blog since June 2014. I had just self-published a YA novel called Speed of Light . I was confident that self-publishing was the road I would take with my writing career, and I turned up my nose at anything outside of complete independence. But I got bored with blogging and left. And after a few more self-published titles I became disillusioned and stopped writing. And after my twenty-somethingth attempt to lose weight and get fit and seeing yet another failure, I gave up. This year, though, I made three promises to myself. I don't believe in resolutions because I can't keep the...