The last time I wrote I swear I weighed nearly 190 pounds. But today I was a bit stunned to find I tipped the scale just under 170 pounds! Honestly, I really wasn’t intent on a rapid weight loss, but more to get an handle on what I recognized at times as a bit of emotional eating. I almost wished I could blog about this weight loss as it was happening, but it happened so fast and sort of unintentionally. I mean almost a year ago I went on the NutriSystem program and was losing maybe 2 to 3 pounds a week and it was emotionally very tough and agonizing as I strained with huge will power to stop eating beyond the tiny allotted portions. A year ago it felt like if I cheated and ate an extra almond I’d be penalized with a small weight gain for the day.
So what happened recently, that I lost so much weight? Well I think it all started a couple weeks ago I made a conscious decision just to take a full week off from work to just stay home, cleanup, catchup, do whatever I want or do nothing at all. I remember announcing at work that I was going to take a week off for vacation. People at work asked where I was going. When I said nowhere, it almost felt everyone was looking at me wierdly and that I should have said something like: “Oh, I’m going to travel thru Europe or we are going on an exotic African Safari …” because I guess that would be so much more conversationally exciting, but no I was just hanging around home, dull as it may seem. But to me it was a wonderful prospect.
So strangely I found myself on vacation popping out of bed at sunrise, just a bit prior to 7 AM and going for short careful jogs. I remember last weekend running very gingerly on a well padded track at a local high school. And my knees were nervously sore at times so I had to adjust my pace and carefully hobble along. The key thing I focused on was on NOT getting injured as I was definitely overweight, out of shape and in my mid 40s. So maybe on a Saturday I’d jog only a mile and stop because I felt my right knee getting sore. Then on Sunday I’d do the same, being sure to slow down if needed to stay soft when my feet hit the ground. And then I don’t know what quite happened but I guess because I was on vacation with lots of spare time I sort of never took a day off from my running and started increasing the distance I ran and at times started to also get faster.
The other thing that happened was that my appetite seemed to get way dampened. I mean I’d end my early morning runs feeling this deep down exhaustion that had me still catching my breath 20 minutes later on my drive home from the high school track. And when I felt that exhaustion I was not very hungry. I mean it’s like that emotional boredom eating that naturally occurred before disappeared as a result of the post-excercise fatigue. I would sort of force myself to eat some breakfast, which happened to consist of large quantities of organic strawberries. I had a ton of organic fruit that I knew would go bad in a few days if it wasn’t eaten and so I filled myself up with fruit and felt quite full. However, there were a couple of times I ate something like an egg, leftover hamburger with cheese, a hot dog, or a sausage, and once I did that my appetite started to shoot back up. It was like certain fat laden foods, were very well capable of putting be back into that emotional state where I wanted to eat more, because it tasted good, and I couldn’t help myself.
So I remember early this week just stepping on the scale and seeing my weight at around 185, and I felt satisfied that I was doing my part to just moderately keep my body healthy. Then a couple days later I saw it drop just below 180 after a run and thought it was just mostly water loss. Last night I snacked on chips with hummus, ate a couple of big juicy ribs, some chicken nuggets, had a couple of beers and a bit of wine and a raspberry tart.
But somehow today something wierd and surprising has happened. This morning I ran for on the track, starting off very gingerly to protect my knees and ended up running 4 miles at a pace that felt faster than I’ve run in maybe ten years! I felt great. And then I stepped on the scale and it showed 169.1 pounds! Wwwah? Strangely though I don’t seem to look any thinner appearance wise.
So in retrospect I can attribute this to the impact of having the luxury of a solid week of taking time off from work so that I have the time to exercise, eat and rest at my own pace. And I guess how they say exercise has an effect of increasing your energy, well the added energy snow balled everyday to allow me to get up earlier in the morning, sleep harder during nights, and run faster and longer during my exercising and want to eat much less during the day. I had more time to take afternoon naps and just relax, breath and enjoy life quite possibly the way I would if I was retired. This is nice!
Anyway I go back to work this Monday and won’t have the time to run as long as I had been these past 10 days. There will be no afternoon naps. I wonder if I will be running at all? And then will my appetite start to rise again?