7 Week Assessment - My Health Journey

Hi everyone.
It’s Sunday and I am now seven full weeks into my health journey so I thought I would do a post about how it’s going so far.
Let’s start with weight. On January 1st I weighed in at 318.3 pounds. This morning I weighed in at 302 pounds. That is 16.3 pounds lost over a span of seven weeks, and I feel very good about that. It’s an average of about 2.4 pounds a week, which is a good speed to lose weight at. If I were to average that weight loss over a full year, it would result in 125 pounds lost. Obviously I don’t expect to maintain that speed the whole time, but it bodes well for my actual goal of losing 68.3 total pounds this year. I’ve already lost 16.3, so that leaves me with 52 to go and over 300 days to get there. While I know weight isn’t the only way to measure progress, it is the one most people think of right away so it’s good to have some results there.
The next thing to look at is inches. I started the year with measurements of 19 inches at the neck, 56 inches at the waist, and 47 inches at the hips. As of today, my measurements are 18 inches at the neck, 53 inches at the waist, and 45 inches at the hips. That’s a drop of an inch in the neck, 3 inches at the waist, and 2 inches at the hips. When you run these numbers and my weight through a Body Fat calculator, you get a fat percentage of 37.8. My fat percentage at the beginning of the year was 39.7, so I’ve lost almost two percentage points of my fat. To put that into pounds. My fat mass on January 1st was 127.6 pounds, and my fat mass now is 114.2 pounds. That’s a loss of 13.4 pounds of fat. That does leave 2.8 pounds of lean mass lost, which I would prefer not to have happen, but my fat loss is still vastly higher than my lean loss.
While I’m not a big believer in BMI, it is worth tracking. My BMI began at 43. My current BMI is 40. That’s a solid drop as well.
Now to go over just a few of the labs. I did more detail on this a couple days back, but I did want to note some drops and raises.
My A1C dropped from 10.3 to 6.9. That was measured on the 3rd of January and again on the 9th of February, so it tracks just under six weeks of exercise and diet control. I’m still well into the diabetic range there, but it is a huge drop for just 6 weeks and is encouraging.
My Total Cholesterol also dropped from a low of 79 to an even lower 73, while my good cholesterol rose from 23 to 29, bringing my ratio down from an already good 3.43 to about 2.5, which is a fantastic reading.
I also wanted to track my average fasting blood sugar. This isn’t something I can point to on a day to day basis, but I can say the my average fasting blood sugar in January was 115. My average fasting blood sugar so far in February is 113. It isn’t a huge drop, but it is a drop and that makes me happy.
So from a scale of one to ten, how to I rate my progress so far? I’m gonna give it a solid 9. I am making progress in all of my key categories. There’s a little room for improvement, but not much.
Over the next few weeks, as my eating strategies start to change because of Virta, it will be interesting to see how those numbers evolve. I’ll be happy as long as they continue to trend downward. Right now I am very much looking forward to dropping enough weight to safely leave the 300 pound club and return to the 200s. While it isn’t an end goal, as mile markers go, it’s an exciting one.
Before I go, I should cover my daily numbers. As I mentioned earlier, I weighed in at 302 pounds. My blood sugar was 113. I managed 1043 active calories yesterday with a total step count of 13,697. My resting heart rate average inched back up to 62, which is still quite good, and my walking heart rate average worked it’s way back up to 102 as I get more and more of my steps outside again. The weather outlook for Tucson in the next ten days is pretty much non-stop sun and mild temperatures, so I expect my walking to primarily be outside where I can get my heart rate up a bit. Finally, my calories consumed was 2125. I’m staying near the 2000 mark and I don’t mind being a little above that considering my size and the amount of active calories I’ve been accumulating on a day to day basis.
That’s enough numbers. I’ll try to tackle some other topics in the next few days.
Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with my Sir Terry Pratchett quote of the day. This one is from Small Gods.
“The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.”
Thanks everyone. Please like. Please subscribe. Please comment. I’ll see you tomorrow.