De-lardification hits some milestones

It was partly dehydration. I know this. But so what, you take your wins and your milestones where you can. And I did not weaken and allow myself the reward of a veggie fry-up. That sucker is still 700 grammes away. Maybe Thursday, maybe next week. It will be, in Paul Keating’s 1993 words, the sweetest victory.

Today, after a 10 lap yomp of Alexandra Park (that’s about 21km in the old money) I stepped on the scales and was pleasantly surprised – 125.7kg. Yes, that is a lot but a) I am tall and b) it’s a hell of a lot less than the 150kg I was at in October 2019, and even the 141-ish I was at in mid-December 2020. Progress is being made. Look, here’s a graph to prove it.

The milestones? There were three. One, 50lbs lighter than at my lardiest. Two, under the old BMI, am no longer classifiable as “morbidly obese”, even if I were sick (which my blood tests, recent HR/BPs suggest I’m not, touch wood). Three, under 20 stone. Whoop!

Fwiw, the yomps involve me strapping on a backpack stuffed with bricks and steel plates, grabbing the wife’s voice recorder (the old mobile only recorded in a proprietary format, stopped talking to my computer and then stopped even uploading the files to gdrive) and going out and talking to myself for the odd-numbered laps, and also the even ones if I have anything useful to say (I don’t).
No, nobody has ever said I am a bit odd. Why do you ask?

Now that I am under 130kg I have started running too. The first couple of times were pitiful – about 400m and 700m, but last Saturday I managed 4k at a pace that would keep me safe from George Romero zombies (I’d be toast against the new breed, for sure).

What am I learning? That I really let myself go. That endorphin highs are cool. That if you aren’t stupid about beer, pizza, ice creams, snackage, then weight loss can happen AND that you can start to see the results in resting heart rate and blood pressure.

Back in another life, I was a health care professional. I have seen what can happen to you if you have a stroke, etc. I think there is a serious shitstorm coming – economic, political, cultural etc- because of the unmitigated disaster that is climate change. I’m not prepping to be the guy in the leather jacket, but I am also trying to lower my likelihood of needing medical care ten years from now, when everything is getting stormy.

Every-so-often I’ll blog about de-lardification, and what else I am doing, and why (involves weighted jackets, running up hills, setting ridiculous speed and stamina goals for 400m, 5k, 10k and half-marathons. Also upper-body strength goals). The “short-term” goal is to get down to a nice round number (100kg) and the longer-term goal is to stay there, while also sustaining the speed and stamina targets (improving on them meaningfully is… well… it’s not the years honey, it’s the mileage).

Bet. You. Cannot. Weight.