We repeated the run/walk again last night with similar results – low blood sugar and faster weight loss. Now we’ll have to see if we can keep it up over the holiday weekend. Hopefully we can and the results stick!
Professor Plump, back in the blogosphere for a quick update! I’ve started a food and exercise tracker on my website that keeps a listing of everything I eat and all the exercise I get. There’s also a box that tracks my glucose, weight, height, calories I’ve eaten and calories I’ve burned (both through metabolism and exercise). If anyone is interested, you can view that at:
http://tallon.i29.net/whatyoueat/
You’ll notice I’ve been going on nightly walks for a while. My walking buddy and I are trying to add running to the mix and started it off last night with a mile run. Whew. The good news is that it dropped my blood sugar below 100 last night and stayed there thru the morning. Very exciting!
Well, I’ve done with this blog what I’ve done with every other one I’ve started. Abandoned it completely. 
So I figured it was time for an update.
The 3 fatties have gotten very busy and have not been walking as much as we used to, but we’re still going strong outside of that. I personally am down 30 lbs from my highest weight now. That’s since probably early March or so, and even included a week long trip to Vegas where the food choices were less than perfect.
The exiting thing is the clothes. I’ve droped 2 pants sizes, and a shirt size. I have to wear belts with all my old pants, and had to buy a whole new set of shorts for the vacation. I tried on one of my suit jackets the other night to see what size I need to look for in a thrift-store tux (halloween costume plans). What was once tight when I first bought it now fits loose. I was so exited I had to put a dress shirt on to see how it looked together. I think that is the first time in my life I’ve looked in the mirror and actually had no negative critique of myself. I looked damn good.
My next goals are to be 14 lbs lighter by my cousin’s wedding in early October. It’ll be fun seeing the relatives when I’m almost 50 lbs lighter than the last time I saw most of them. Then after that, it’s another 20 lbs to lose by the end of the year. I’ll have reached my goal of weighing under 200 lbs by that point, and I can see where I want to go from there.
I’ll try to keep this up a little better from now on.
Greetings again! Professor Plump here with a long overdue update. Over the last few months I’ve been very busy. Honest! In fact, I’ve been entirely preoccupied with offline things.
First a quick update on the exercise front. Half of our office started going on daily walks with us after we’d gotten in a regular schedule with them. Then the other half, mostly smokers, quit smoking and started playing hackey sack instead for something to do other than smoking. At some point a few weeks back the walkers, ourselves included, switch from walking to hackey sack. It may sound a bit hippyish but it’s a better workout than walking was since you end up twisting and bending so often. Often at the end of our 30 mins of hack I’m sweating and walking never did that to me. I also go on walks at night and have started doing all other kinds of activities I’d never done in the past. I’ve joined in soccer games, climbed a tree (!) and all sorts of other things I didn’t think I was capable of.
I’ve also been keeping a spreadsheet of my blood sugar levels and weight. The spreadsheet calculates out my BMI and some other stats as I enter them in. I add my measurements to the spreadsheet once a week on mondays. Since I started keeping it I’ve noticed that I’m losing one pound a week. The best part is, I didn’t change that much in my diet or activity to encourage this change. For the most part, I stopped eating out and started making the exact same meals at home. Somehow this change and the 30 minutes of exercise was enough to cause a pound a week loss.
The last two weeks I’ve been more aggressive with my diet and have lost 2 pounds per week. I’m very impressed and am working to keep pushing ahead. I’m pretty much off fried foods and junk food in general. I’d given myself the freedom in my diet to binge on the weekends by calling them "free days" but after a week of eating healthy it makes me so sick to eat that stuff that I’ve stopped using the free days on the weekends. I usually do one "bad" meal a week on Saturday but even that isn’t so bad now that it’s once a week (worst I’ve done yet was to get a BK veggie burger). I’d also gone to a gastric bypass meeting since my doctor said I need to lose weight one way or another and it was an option.
While the procedure itself strikes me as barbaric, I did pick up some great tips on eating differently. Essentially the bypass forces you to eat differently to lose weight. People who get a bypass have to chew their food more to it will pass through their new, smaller stomach. They also have to eat much less at a time and spread it out through the day. The goal is to get to a "green zone" where you are losing weight but now malnurished. I think I have the willpower to do all of those things on my own without a surgery to force me to do it – I just didn’t know how to find that balance until I went to the meeting. So, I’m chewing my food more (sometimes up to 3 mins before swallowing), eating my food in a different order (protein first, then veggies and fruit, then maybe carbs if still hungry), and limiting my intake. It also helps to go overboard in cutting things up before you eat them. Cutting my food into little bites and chewing it slowly can add 30 mins to mealtime but it makes me full faster and I enjoy the food more. So from here on out, I’m trying the "not really a gastric bypass" diet 
To touch one more time on the diabetes front, I’ve met with my doctor and he’s taken me off one of the diabetes pills. Now he’s concerned with keeping my cholesterol and blood pressure low since diabetics are at a higher risk of heart disease. I am borderline risky right now but should be getting better now that I’m losing weight, off of fast foods, and exercising regularly. I plan to see him again in a month and I’ll have him recheck me them to see how I’ve changed.
Greetings, everyone! Professor Plump here with my first update. But first, some backstory. One of my main reasons for joining the "fatties" group in the beginning was that I was diagnosed with diabetes about a year ago. It’s not so bad – I just have to take two types of pills each day. The doctors said that losing weight and eating better would lessen my dependency on the pills, possibly to the point where I don’t need them anymore. Conversely, gaining weight and eating poorly could result in needing shots.
In the beginning my irrational fear of needles kept me going with eating better than I had been but somewhere last fall I gave up and went back to my old habits. When a co-worker said he wanted to start these walks and eat better to lose some weight, I jumped at the chance to feel better again and so here I am.
We’ve been doing the walk breaks and better lunches for a few weeks now and I’ve been feeling a lot better. I ran out of the one type of pills (the expensive ones) a little while back and had been waiting for payday to pick up another supply. This happens often and I usually see my blood-sugar levels rise a little until I start taking them again. Well, this time my blood-sugar levels didn’t change… and didn’t change… and still haven’t changed. I’m going to check with the doctor to be sure nothing else is up but I think I might not need both pills anymore! If that’s the case, this walk and diet will be saving me around $3 a day in pills. All the more motivation to keep it up!
Well, it’s time for a walk break. Later!
Well, I had a breakthrough this morning. The scale showed 249.5 lbs. I haven’t been under 250 lbs for a couple years now, and was hovering in the 256-262 range for the past year. This is great, and shows a loss of almost 10 lbs in the 2-3 weeks we’ve been doing the healthy thing.
My goal right now is to try and make it to 230 lbs. by July 19th, when my wife and I take off to Vegas for a week long vacation. A much needed vacation, since we haven’t been on a REAL vacation since we went to Vegas in 2002. Five years is far too long to go without a good vacation. All of our other "vacations" have been to see family or just to Minneapolis for the weekend, so I don’t consider those vacations. To me, it’s only a vacation if you only have obligations that you make for yourself. No family or friends that will guilt you if you don’t stop by to see them. Just the things you plan to do yourself.
It may seem like a I rambled a bit there, but the vacation is a key part to my healthy lifestyle change. I need to start taking the time off from work to de-stress. I need to work on my mental health as well as my physical health.
Well, it’s time to sign off. My reminder for our morning walk just popped up. Next post I’ll talk about some great places to go where eating healthy is easy and appetizing!
So the weeks is fine. Short walks, reasonable lunches, etc…
The weekend is a different story. All bets are off… ice cream, pans of cookies, hot dog and sausage sandwiches @ 10pm — thats the short list. 
At least this weekend I was able to do a lot outside. Mowing the lawn, teaching the kids to ride bike without training wheels, walking the dog and even a late night walk around the block because I felt guilty after eating the kids cookies. All an all I think it was a wash thanks to the good weather.
Thanks to the previous comments and words of encouragement.
But count calories? No sir — too much like a weight-loss program. This is all about self control. I do read labels but mostly because I have a unreasonable thing against High Fructose Corn Syrup.
I’m overweight. If you’re on the interent you probably are too — fatty!
My goal:
I’d like to be able to take a drink of coffee, spill some and have it not land on belly.
No weigh-ins. No body mass index. No counting calories. No gimmicks.The first two things I’ve started doing:
1) walking with the other two fatties in the office and
2) not eating junk food for lunch… if i go out for lunch I eat healthier.
Simple.
So here starts our shared blog about our aims to get healthy. It all started with me realizing I was too stressed out, and I decided to take my 15 minute breaks everyday and go for a walk. I invited two co-workers, and it’s now two weeks later and a staple of our day.
We’re less stressed, I’ve lost 8 pounds, and we’re all being much healthier and feeling good. This blog is our motivation to keep on, and for us to keep a record of our progress. Hopefully the other guys post as well.
fatty