We inaugurated the new grill last night. I must say I think it was a wild success. Lorena and I split the steak in the picture (3 oz. each) so I even stayed on track with the diet. Jon and I have both been in stasis on our diet for the last month due to (speaking for myself, not for Jon) a total lack of discipline in the face of ham dinners with scalloped potatoes and angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries for dessert. Nevertheless, we are both back in the saddle and ready to engage the battle one more time.
I am seventy percent of the way to where I need to be and it is actually getting easier because I have upped my calorie intake to something a little more reasonable (600/day to 1100/day) and I am still losing weight. The thing I have at the forefront of my mind is that when I actually get to a weight I want to sustain, I can kick my calories up a few hundred more per day.
I committed to Jon to stick out our tracking plan through at least the end of this year, but I think the thing to do might be to just start a new graph when we get to the end of the year.
I am stuck. Over the last week and a half, I have either stayed at the same place or actually even gained weight. I talked to the Physician’s Assistant at my annual checkup last week about it. She said that after losing this weight over an extended period my metabolism has slowed down and I am going to have to change things up to keep going down. She also said (and this was my original plan) that I have about twenty pounds to go. I have been averaging a good chunk under 700 calories per day for several months now so I really do not want to reduce the amount I eat any more. I think what I would like to do is actually increase my caloric intake up to 900-1000 calories and start exercising more. There are so many things on which I want to work that I use the idea that I don’t have enough time to get to the gym, but that is completely bogus. I have identified a program that looks like it might work for me and purchased the (e)book. We will see what happens.
Trisha rightly the, shall we say, more cavalier and less histrionic, mothering methods of my upbringing as related to health issues. The advice tended toward the “toughen up and quit whining” variety of sympathetic mothering (see 
Kelly got all four wisdom teeth removed today. After weeks of histrionics, it turned out to be about a 40 minute affair where they actually gave her the same kind of anesthetic given to guys my age who go in for what used to be quite an uncomfortable procedure, but these days, because of the wonders of modern drugs, is actually quite pleasant and restful. At any rate, Kelly’s Mexican mother is up in Seattle doing the Mexican mother thing (you have to see it to truly understand the magnitude of it all) while I remain safely in Centralia safely away from it all.
Lorena and I are back from Burnaby. Somehow, I managed to stay on my diet while on the road and actually lost a little weight. When I got back, I had dropped enough weight that I passed one of my important thresholds and am now over 40 lbs. lighter and two thirds of the way to my stated goal. The picture here is of me now with Kiwi in the picture for comparison. Now than I am down a bit, it is getting obvious I need to drop an additional 10-15 lbs. more than my original plan. I just do not have as much muscle mass as I did when I was in my thirties. All good. Hopefully, I will be able to get back into weight lifting again before too long and build a little of that back. For now, I will have to continue to relegate myself to walking.
Yesterday, Lorena’s Valentine’s Day gift to me was this jar of Vlasick mini-pickles. Christian and I LOVE those things and they are perfect for my diet. Lorena pulled my pickle fork and holster out of storage and installed it on the jar–two of the very best gifts I have ever received. To make things even better, the scale showed 200.0 lbs. when I weighed myself this morning. That is exactly half way to my stated goal. That means I have lost 31 pounds since I started and have 31 to go. I am not sure I will stop there, but will weight to see how I feel when I get to that point, God willing.
Lorena drove up to Seattle to get our very sick daughter on Friday. We have been vegging out all weekend long. Notice all the medication on the bookshelf. Kiwi the surviving twin cat sister even got in on the act, devoting almost the entire time to sleeping on the hide-a-bed with Kelly. I preached the benefits of building one’s immune system by fighting one’s way through a case of the flu every now and then, but that is pretty weak broth when your right in the middle of it. Kelly’s face is not normally that pale. There is something else going on there.
Lorena drove down to Oregon Health Sciences University this morning to start the final stages of what started with some impacted and infected wisdom teeth, followed up by jaw surgery at Duke University Hospital in North Carolina that included cadaver bone and titanium. This final pass is the installation of her new teeth to accompany the other new stuff in her mouth. Hopefully, she will only have a couple of follow-up appointments just to assure everything is OK and then she is done!
The other thing that arrived today is my new diet Logitech H800 Bluetooth/Wireless headset. It allows me to connect it to my computer with their little custom wireless dongle and to my telephone via Bluetooth. The reason it is a diet headset is that it allows me to not be tethered to my desk while I am talking on the phone or via skype. That is a FINE thing because I get in extra steps and it allows me to either eat more or drop weight more or both.
After a month of upheaval, we have to admit we spent most of the weekend just trying to catch our breath and start in again. Now, though, Lorena is back in the game with her rowing. I think this has to be her personal best on the Concept II rowing machine down at Anytime Fitness. Only 400 more meters and she will have hit the goal she has worked on for over seven years now–12,000 meters in one hour. Kelly is on her game, too. She ran five miles on Saturday with plans to run six next Saturday on the way to a half marathon sometime in February. Last night, we called Christian, but he could not talk because he was at the gym. This is all good and well, but it is making me look pretty bad. I am still typing furiously most of the day, but have not lifted a finger to do anything other than to go on some medium distance (4-5 mile) walks and even that is awhile ago. I still have about 15 lbs. to lose on my current trajectory, but hope to be in the gym again before spring.
Life is getting back to normal in the Chapman household. I guess I should make the caveat that it is about as normal as is possible based on adherence to the recently adopted New Year’s resolution to which I hope to stick. Lorena does not really have that first of the year resolution life modification thing because she sticks to what she is doing through thick and thin. Nevertheless, after one pretty big fall from the wagon and a brief smaller one, both due to visits and special circumstances, I am back in the game and hit a new “this diet” low in my quest to lose over sixty pounds.
Lorena has had a long term goal of rowing 12k meters in an hour on a Concept II rowing machine. She is very close to meeting that goal. This is the snapshot she took at the end of her workout on January first. She thinks she should be able to make it within a month or so. She continues to row faithfully and has done so for over ten years now. It took her several years to get to the point where she could row for sixty minutes without stopping, but she does that two or three times per week these days and then works the elliptical machine for one or two additional days. She puts me to shame. We are going to celebrate when she hits 12k.
After a few days of experimentation (and actual usage), I finally have the treadmill set up in a way that works for me. Bob helped me move the treadmill downstairs, then I futzed with a way to read my Kindle for three days before I got something that actually works. I used a suction pad from the base of a cell phone holder to hold the Kindle in exactly the right place to read when I walk. Now all I need is some decent new books to read. I am about a quarter of the way through a good one and I have another good one coming in January, but I am going to need a lot more if I stick to this. It is helping my weight-loss plan quite a lot, too. This combined with the Fitbit allows me to keep my calorie output well above my calorie intake by quite a bit.