The Numbers Are In & They’re Not Pretty.

Bit like my belly fat then !

At the end of this week – week twelve in my accounting – iv’e taken as accurate a body weight as our bathroom scales will allow and at the same time already started on the second cycle of dietary change and exercise of my long term plan. Today I found that my overall weight is 3.2 Kg less than when I took an accurate weight just before I launched into my regular exercise routine but after a couple of weeks of dietary change. I didn’t take great notice of my weight immediately before that as I obviously lost some weight in water and that always skews the numbers. What that means is that my average weight loss over 3 months (12 weeks) has been 266 Grams per week – not much to shout home about.

At the end of week 10 I did an interim weigh in and found that I had lost a fairly paltry 2.2 Kg thus an average weight loss of 220 grams per week and I felt that I had to be content to live with that but only so long as I could keep it going consistently. Just to say that I ignored the difference between my pre start weight and my weight at week ten as I was sure that it included significant fluid loss. One problem I have is that I sense that my daily fluid balance fluctuates enough to make a daily check pointless and even a weekly weight check unreliable in the first few weeks. At the end of week 11 I was a kilo lighter than the previous week which, if I had used that to calculate from I would have assumed an average weight loss of 290 Grams per week but I suspect that the sudden drop at end of week 11 suggests something I hadn’t accounted for.

One of my current medical problems is that my GP diagnosed me with acute prostatitis some 9 months ago and it’s still ongoing. I think what happens with me is that I often get incomplete bladder emptying – I would call that a degree of pseudo retention. What might be happening, and I hope that it is, is that the inflammation of non bacterial (idiopathic) prostatitis is slowly fading and I may have simply had an emptier bladder when I took the week 11 weight.

The big however at week twelve is that iv’e almost completely changed my priorities and, as I write, i’m already going into week 3 of the next cycle although this time with much more dietary changes and a different approach to my daily exercise. The short version is that iv’e persuaded myself to dump the white bread toast in the morning and always have a poached egg on thick wholemeal toast instead. I regularly have a protein snack in the middle of the day, have a relatively normal dinner although I try to eat as early as I can in the evening to create a long eating window – a bit like what I used to do when I played around with intermittent fasting except that I try to do all of my eating within an 8 hour window and give my body a food break for the other 16 hours. The exercise change is that I usually walk with a pedometer now, do several short walks of around 1500 steps during the day and aim for a daily total of 7500 steps which seems to be the sweet spot for cardiac health. I only aim to complete one weighted walk of 3000 steps at cardio pace daily but have tried to add a squat session each day,

What I didn’t do but should have done early on was an accurate waist circumference as I had chosen to rely on what my waist belt was doing. Hilariously, at week 10, my daily wear which is a pair of 42′ cargo shorts, just slipped off completely before I fed the waist belt through it’s retaining loops. That the belt went in at least one notch (around 1 inch) was as good an indication as any that some positive change was happening. The shocker is that I was actually a huge 47 inches when I took an accurate measurement of my waist circumference. Given that my height is just over 6′ 1″ then I should ideally be around 36″ to be in the safe zone and that means I have 11 inches of actual waist to lose : I could say that that’s depressing but is what I was expecting and I guess that’s the clearest indication I have of the presence of visceral fat.

Iv’e written a companion post that goes with this one and in that I explain why I feel it safe to assume that i’m metabolically quite unwell – with high visceral fat, high BMI and we already know about the strokes. One thing that changes is that i’m less concerned about chasing my weight numbers and concentrating instead on measuring visceral fat loss via the simple expedient of measuring my waist circumference fortnightly – I get the impression from my everyday waist belt that it’s already decreased by a couple of notches.

Within those changes iv’e had to make significant changes of detail but more importantly big changes to my lifelong bad eating habits. This week it’s almost been a bit overwhelming having to remember and effect so much new thinking and not only was I sleeping badly night after night but I made one change that caused me to have such a long and heavy sleep that I woke up groggy and feeling utterly out of sorts. That one change is the obvious one for the combination of poor sleep and the discomfort of prostatitis in that the end of my eating day is also the end of my coffee day so i’m probably in withdrawl a bit as well. That i’m physically a bit beat up is obvious to me and i’m having to be a bit more careful with my squats as I tried to increase the plate weight (I normally squat with a weight plate held at chest height) I had an almost immediately painful knee.

While I joke about the bathroom scales my measuring tape certainly doesn’t lie although what clearly is a bit free and easy with reality is the sizes as given by supermarket sold and mass produced clothes : my working shorts claim to be a size 42 and that’s a whopping 5 inches out – even I don’t make measurement errors that bad. I will continue to take a fortnightly weight as it’s a crude way of keeping score although i’m much happier when I see my waist circumference reduce. Overall I still think that this is a long term project and that it will be at least a year until my waist circumference is anywhere near where it should be and at that point I will have to consider finding some really accurate way of finding out what my percentage of visceral fat actually is.