One of the things I had always wanted to use this blog for was to shame myself into losing weight. More specifically, to declare in a very public (and yet anonymous) forum the things I was doing to lose weight. And now is the time for that. Last night I began a very severe weight loss program that involves a medically-monitored fast. If my estimates are correct, I should be on it for between three and four months in order to make weight. Some background about me, courtesy of ActiveBody.org:
note - the only reason there is no body fat % is that I'm using the official weight from the program weigh in last night.My intent is to post either a picture like that, or a graph of my progress to date every Wednesday, along with a running total of my progress at the very start of the post. Since this is the first one, and I have no progress, I'll stick to background.
I am, as the picture indicates, 5'9.5" and currently weigh 292.2 pounds. That gives a BMI (if you're the sort who thinks there's any validity to BMI - I'm not) of 42.5, which is well past "obese" My issue with BMI is that even if I hit my goal weight - 215, which would be around 15% BF - I will have a BMI of 31.5, still obese, although I don't think anyone would consider 15% BF "obese".
I got into this predicament through a couple of things:
- Bad meds - I'm epileptic and the med I take to control it leads to weight gain. Since I started on the meds, about the time I graduated college, I went from 220 to 290. I give this about 7% of the responsibility.
- Bad timing - I tend to miss lunch, often breakfast and lunch, and that leads to super-hunger at the end of the day. Too much food all at one time leads to more storage as fat. I give this another 7% of the blame.
- Bad habits - Not only do I tend to skip meals, but I've gotten really lazy about preparing food. That would be why I miss lunch most of the time. More often than not (let's say 95% of the time) I just pick up something on the way home form work, as opposed to cooking. I give this 80% of the blame.
- Who knows - Math majors will notice that my blame adds up to 95%. That's because I don't feel like counting out all of the tiny little things I do.
- Me - At the end of the day, all of this comes down to ME. I knew there was research showing that my meds complicated weight loss (it's only more-recent studies that go so far as to call them a causative agent), I knew skipping meals was bad, and I knew not cooking was dumb.
