Wednesday weigh-in: Week 0

I've been away for a while, and have been itching to get back at it. The time off has been good, and helped me move away from being so annoyed by some of the more strident "cars and the people who drive them are evil" writing that I was seeing and get back to just enjoying riding.

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.

Hopefully I'll learn my lesson this time.