Since undertaking my weight loss regimen at the beginning of the new year, there’s one thing that’s a constant: my Sunday weigh-in. If it’s Sunday, it’s weigh day. Sure, there have been occasions where I’ve opted to skip the weekly ritual, but never have I cheated and deviated with the device on a different day.
Until today. I don’t really know what possessed me to do so. If anything I had actually been thinking about skipping this coming Sunday because as I’d told Susan earlier in the week I thought that my current weight of 232 was going to be one that hung around for a while, not unlike when I was stuck at 252 for several weeks. One always hears that it’s those final few pounds that are the toughest to toss, and being just two from my first-stage goal it made sense. On top of that I’ve been “struggling” a bit these past few days, dreaming of chocolate-covered Sugar Babies and KFC, but still managing to keep things in control calorically — not as strict and low as past weeks, but still nothing beyond 2,200 per day.
But despite all the potential red flags there I was, and there the scale was and before I could stop myself I’d toed the little black button on its side that fires it up and in the next moment I was planted upon it and looking down at…
228
Two Twenty Eight!!! Hot damn, that’s a four-pound drop since Sunday for a 32-pound total loss that not only eclipses my initial goal of 230, but also has me but one pound away from being my fittest since the conclusion of my 475-mile San Francisco-to-Los Angeles bike ride that ended in October of 2003. Hallelujah!
Now that Jo “Slim” Gillis, a fine fellow blogger, American Idol-izer, and shedder of pounds, has started taking pictures of her bad self to prove her dieting success, I’m thinking I’ll need to start producing visual evidence of my ongoing evaporation sometime soon. But for now I only am willing to offer up — in memoriam — a photo taken of the 270-pound version of me in the summer of 2000 just prior to the public opening of the L.A. Zoo’s Red Ape Rain Forest (that’s my mom on the left and one of the zoo’s giraffes in the background — my guess is Kito, perhaps the most prolific male giraffe ever in captivity, who died last year):
I was provided a copy of this picture by its photographer many months later and I promptly hid it in shame. But it was just what I needed to kickstart an eating and fitness regimen that ultimately led me to get healthy and hearty enough to do that above-mentioned bike ride a couple years later.
I’m 42 pounds lighter now than I was up there. I couldn’t button those khakis then. Had to use a safety pin. And up until January I was approaching that point again. Last week, I cut up those pants for rags and used them to clean up my bike.
Never. Never again.
UPDATE (04/01):
Good gawd… back then my doppelganger was
the Bob’s Big Boy!
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