Weight Changes (part 1)

Over the past 5 months I have lost over 3 stone in weight (intentionally I should add).

I should be feeling good about myself, however there are times when it feels like I’ve never been so fat in my life. Part of the problem lies in the fact that I’ve never been so bloody obsessed about it for such a long period of time.

Where the height-weight charts are concerned, I’ve been overweight all my adult life, even though I can look back at pictures of myself in my late teens/early twenties and think how thin I am then.

However, at the moment, I have lost 3 stone since February. This is the largest amount of weight I have ever shed. But despite this loss I am still a middle-aged fat man with a beard. And if I were to lose another 3 stone, I would still be a middle-aged fat man with a beard. In fact I would have to lose a further 3 stone beyond that before I would get down to the appropriate weight for my height.

Somehow this seems ridiculous. I mean, yes, I knew I was overweight; I knew that I’d outgrown clothes that could be purchased in high-street shops, but I still functioned. I could still walk, talk, watch TV, play with the kids, get in and out of the car with ease, and run a business. It’s not like I was disabled.
And yet, after 5 months of eating healthily, and losing 3 stone, I am still a fat man. I am not just obese, or grossly obese: I am still in the morbidly obese category. So when I began my healthy eating regime (or I should say cutting out my unhealthy food regime, as I basically ate quite a good diet, with a lot of crap on top), at 19 stone and 9 pounds I must have been I-can’t-believe-you’re-still-alive obese.

Introduction

Since February 2005, I have been steadily losing weight. When I started I was 19 stone 9 pounds, or 275 pounds for those without a calculator. At somewhere around 5' 7" tall, this is not the healthiest weight to be.

However, despite the title of this blog, weight loss hasn’t been the main purpose, rather the aim has been to eat more healthily, and the weight loss has been a by-product of this. At the point of writing this introduction (August 2005) I have lost around 56 lbs, and if I lose that much again, I will still be overweight, but will have lost the hundredweight of the title (that's 112 lbs, 8 stone, 51 kilos or 5% of one ton).

I have had several people ask how I’m doing it, where I get the willpower from, how much I intend to lose and so on. Setting up this blog seemed a good way to answer these questions, and to keep a track of my own progress without it filling up the pages on my main blog (kimayres.blogspot.com/).

For me, this is one aspect of my life, not the only one, nor even the prime motivator; however, it does count for something and if anyone else benefits from this in any way, then that can only be for the good.

At this point, I should put in a disclaimer that I am not a nutritionist, doctor or health professional. All I am writing about is my own experience.

I haven’t yet figured out if I can use blogger.com to archive postings in any way other than by date, so I’ve set this introduction into the future so that it remains at the top.

Over on the right you will find links to postings which are not date specific, and can be commented on at any time. There are other postings which have been imported from my main blog which are observations about my journey towards healthier living.

Please feel free to add comments. I am more than happy to debate causes, motives and solutions.

UPDATE
By the end of March 2007, just over 2 years after I started the changes in my eating habits, I had lost 100lbs. Since then I have been in maintenance mode, and have fluctuated no more than 7lbs either side of this figure. Any further weight loss I might have will be a bonus and continued side effect of eating more healthily, rather than my main focus.