I’m on a count down to surgery now – in fact an 8 week countdown at time of writing – so it’s either a case that iv’e done the work that I need to do or I haven’t and there’s not much that I could do even if I really went at it. Even as I write I will have seen the surgeon (whom i have already met and says my knee needs replacing) and by the time this post is scheduled I will have also made the return trip so that the anaesthetist either approves me for anaesthesia or doesn’t so once again there’s not much I can do to affect that. Personally I can’t see a problem because iv’e got my weight down to 20 Kg less than when I started out, i’m down to a quarter or less of the anti hypertensives that I was on in December and my fitness enough to walk some 7500 steps per day.
What I thought it might be useful to talk about today is that iv’e gradually settled into an OMAD routine and it might be useful to explain my thinking around that. I have to admit that I had a week of dietary wobbles when we seemed to a revolving door at the A&E department and at the day clinic that looks after patients having chemotherapy and deals with problems like Jackie has had during normal working hours. As I write I seem to be back on the Zero rule for biscuits and sticking pretty well to just having one meal per day with no treats or additions just because i’m having a bad time with the driving ; a couple of my trips in and out having been super stressful, maybe because I don’t drive much and there are certain times of day when getting to and from the hospital (plus parking) are a total ballache.
My countdown begins with a weekly weigh in : I was 91 Kg as I measured this morning so that’s 19 Kg (42 pounds down) from where I started last December. Iv’e long had it as my primary goal that I would get to below 90 Kg before surgery and aside from some recent wobbles I think i’ll get there. Long term i’m aiming at something around 82-85 Kg : although I regard weight as being not that important compared with other metrics it is so when it comes to knee surgery as my new knee will only last long term if there’s less mechanical load on it and weight is perhaps the best way of expressing that given that orthodaedic surgeons don’t think in terms of load or force expressed in Newtons*.
One of my more recent observations was that my knee is obviously getting worse but paradoxically my actual walking has become easier once I dropped to 91 Kg and what I take from that is that less weight would be even better which is why my eventual goal is somewhere closer to 80 kg for long term function of my new knee joint.
Anyone that follows this thread will also know that I had a long weight loss stall which I couldn’t fully explain and then it dropped by at least 3 Kg just as inexplicably. Although I said that my attitude during the long stall was to ‘trust the process’ I also thought it best to have a complete rethink at the useful halfway point of my planned 20 month total project time. One thing that I didn’t talk about much is that I had a major shift in my thinking from very goal orientated – with a specific number in mind – to being focused on the process itself and fine tuning that such that initial weight loss would be inevtitable, as it is proving to be, and that one day there would be a natural end point to my weight loss by natural means.
Although frustrating at the time my long weight loss stall made me review everything that I thought I knew about nutrition, metabolic health and weight loss and it also made me look more closely at what I was actually doing rather than what I thought I was doing or simply choosing not to see. One thing that my personal review showed me is that I was having far too many snacks and that each one would have been ‘throwing the switch’ in terms of fat storage or fat metabolism.
Another thing that I decided was that it was unwise to ignore anything that has been said or written (about metabolic health and weight loss) in good faith even when I had previously ignored that model. My best example for this is the CICO (calories in calories out) model – in fact calories generally. Instead I turned back to something that Dr Peter Attia said about weight loss and simply put that there are the three levers we can pull on to affect weight loss but we need to pull on two of them together – whichever ones we choose.
What I decided was to make my process such that I pulled on all three control levers – in terms of what Dr Attia talked about. The simplest and most effective model I could come up was to adopt the OMAD (one main meal per day) as the best solution to reducing calories, changing my food quality (macronutrients) and using food timing (intermittent fasting) more effectively. I can’t prove that it’s the long fasting window I have each day now, coupled with small changes in what I eat plus the overall natural reduction in caloric intake that are doing what I intend ; but it does cover the bases so i’m saying now that that’s the process and my job now is to stick with that up until surgery (2 months) and see what the results are.
My best wishes to anyone on any form of weight loss journey.
