End of Week 44

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 43: 234.6
End of Week 44: 234.2
Lost 69.4 lbs

Good news, everybody! After a couple of weeks off of the diet, I've maintained my weight. I've started some minor at-home workouts with my awesome wife. Nothing big, just sit-ups and some other exercises.

End of Month 10

Day 0: 303.6
End of Month 10: 234.2
Lost 69.4 lbs

After ten months, I've lost about seventy pounds. I can't really say that I've achieved my goal because I never really had one, but I'm happy with where I am.

End of Week 43

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 42: 232.6
End of Week 43: 234.6
Lost 69.0 lbs

After the first week of "maintain-your-weight", I picked up a pair of pounds. *shrug* I don't expect to stay exactly where I was. I just need to hover around where I'm at. Seems okay for now.

Day 295

What I did:

• Celebrated the end of the diet by eating a bunch of junk at Chili's. It's okay, though, because my fantastic wife was with me. I don't know how that makes it okay, but it does.

End of Week 42

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 40: 233.6
End of Week 42: 232.6
Lost 71.0 lbs

I missed last week due to a dead battery in my bathroom scale. Here we are again, though. I've decided that my weight is at a pretty good place. I feel much better about myself, both physically and emotionally. I'm going to change my calorie counter goal to maintain my current weight, rather than "lose 1.5 lbs per week".

I started running again this week. My goal for that is to be able to run all the way around my block--one-half mile--without stopping. I hope to achieve that by next Monday. So far, I can get about 0.4 miles without stopping. My whole mile takes about 12 minutes, which I think is pretty good, considering that I'm so out of shape.

Day 294

What I did:

• Walked/jogged 1 mile in about 12 minutes

Day 293

What I did:

• Had a nice Father's Day with my family

Day 292

What I did:

• Mowed the lawn in the morning

Day 291

What I did:

• Walked/jogged 1 mile in about 12 minutes

Day 290

What I did:

• Took my new deck to Commander night. I made a lot of plays that didn't actually end up doing anything. I think I need to look into some more win conditions for it.

Day 289

What I did:

• Jogged/ran 1 mile in 12 minutes

Day 288

What I did:

• Walked/jogged 1 mile in about 12 minutes

Day 287

What I did:

• Mopped the kitchen floor
• Walked/jogged 1 mile in about 12 minutes. About half of the distance was jogging, I think.
• Bought new pants. The waist is 38"!

Day 286

What I did:

• Put together a surprise for my fantastic wife. I can't get into more details, in case she reads this...

Day 285

What I did:

• Had a lazy, quiet Saturday. Not much of any importance happened. I probably shouldn't have gone to Taco Bell for dinner, though...

Day 284

What I did:

• Saw Jurassic World. I enjoyed it, but it was essentially Jurassic Park with a different cast and a slightly different story. I may have gotten some dust in my eye the first time that the classic theme song played...

Day 283

What I did:

• Took my new deck to Commander night. It has a pretty good showing, winning a four-player game and a two-player game, though I should have lost the two-player game. My opponent got greedy and was unable to deal with my stuff, so I won, quite literally out of nowhere. I attacked for over 300 damage...

Day 282

What I did:

• Survived about six hours of code reviews. Normally, I enjoy reviewing code, but this time, it wasn't really code, just updating descriptions. About 2000 times. I'm not done, yet, either... We divided the total by seven, splitting the work among several developers (yes, seven of them). Three of them have been reviewed. I'm not looking forward to tomorrow...

Day 281

What I did:

• Put my fantastic wife on a plane to Oregon. She'll be gone for a week. I miss her already...

End of Week 40

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 39: 230.8
End of Week 40: 233.6
Lost 70 lbs

Here we are, again. Another week, another weigh-in. And that's all I have to say about that.

Day 280

What I did:

• Experienced day 1 with interns. I honestly don't remember what it was like to know 0 about the company. Nor bragging or anything like that. My first day with this company was about ten years ago.

Day 279

What I did:

• Attended the wedding dinner for one of my amazing wife's childhood friends

Day 278

What I did:

• Had a bacon double cheeseburger for lunch and pepperoni pizza for dinner. I knew it was bad for the diet, but today, I just didn't care. I really wanted that cheeseburger!

Day 277

What I did:

• Went horseback riding with my beautiful wife. Horses have always been her passion, so I was excited when I found a place that had an early evening ride. It was a nice ride, even though my horse recognized my n00b status. Nothing scary happened. She was just slow and plodding.

Day 276

What I did:

• Took on a little extra responsibility at work today by helping to manage a team of interns for the next week

Day 275

What I did:

• Stared at my computer screen for about 30 minutes while it did nothing. Good times.

Day 274

What I did:

• Made up something really clever to write here, but forgot what it was

End of Week 39

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 38: 235.4
End of Week 39: 230.8
Lost 72.8 lbs

I don't have much to say about today's weigh-in, since I just did it yesterday.  This one is mostly just to keep up the habit.  Yay for weigh-in!

Day 273

What I did:

• Remembered that I have a four-pound bucket of Red Vines in my desk drawer, then spent 0 minutes at my desk for the rest of the day

End of Month 9

Day 0: 303.6
End of Month 9: 230.6
Lost 73.0 lbs

That's an awfully fine way to end Month 9, if I do say so myself.  And since I'm writing this, I do say so.  Those before & after shots are so different that it's incredible.  My fantastic wife thinks that it's time to stop thinking about losing weight and start thinking about moving weight around to where it should be, i.e., muscle rather than that root beer belly.  She's probably right.  She usually is.

Day 272

What I did:

• Played some Magic with my oldest son. He seems to like it. Hard to say with that boy, though.

Day 271

What I did:

• Took a short walk to the local basketball court and shot some hoops with my son's. Nothing strenuous. Just a thing.
• Busted out my old HeroQuest board game and had a nice afternoon with it

Day 270

What I did:

• Played a game, Ultima VII, for a few hours, only to have it freeze. Saving? What's that? Sad panda...

Day 269

What I did:

• Played my new(ish) deck at Commander night. I've decided that I don't really like it... Not sure what to do with that. Probably going to take it apart.

Day 268

What I did:

• Added another pair of letters to my missionary letter blog, Postage from Paraguay.  The letters included the first photos sent home, so I had to figure out how to get those into the PDF file.  It turned out to be as simple as scanning them in and cropping out the non-photo parts.  I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Day 267

What I did:

• Went to the awards banquet at my kids' school.  All three of them were in the top five of their grades for the crazy-big math test.  My younger son (8) was also in the top five of his grade for two different reading tests.

End of Week 38

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 37: 233.2
End of Week 38: 235.4
Lost 68.2 lbs

I gained 2 lbs this week. My level of confused is slightly over 9000. Usually, I can explain why a setback occurs, but not this week. I thought that I behaved myself pretty well. It seems that the numbers disagree.

Day 266

What I did:

• Took my family to play mini golf. I lost. My eight-year-old got a hole-in-one on the loop-the-loop course.

Day 265

What I did:

• Went to church and tried to learn something, but I'm not sure that I was able to. The kids were all very off today.

Day 264

What I did:

• Mowed the lawn: 60 minutes. Fixed the broken sprinkler head: 75 minutes. Blech. Pulling that stupid broken bit of pipe out took waaaaaaay longer than it should have.
• Went to see Tomorrowland. It's been awhile since I had experienced such child-like wonder.

Day 263

What I did:

• Went to work, worked for a while, wanted to go home from work, stayed at work, worked a while longer, still wanted to go home from work, work some more, left from work at the appropriate time. In other words, today was blech.

Day 262

What I did:

• Took a new deck to Commander night. It did what it was supposed to do, but I didn't win any games. The trouble is that I'm not sure that I'm not sure that the game was the kind of game that I want to play. I'll probably give it another run next week to see what I think.

Day 261

What I did:

• Ate a bunch of junk. Well, not junk, but I wasn't careful at all. Well, my meals were done. I was just very free with snacks. Not bad snacks, just too many of them.

Day 260

What I did:

• Wasted an entire morning on a database installation. Not my fault. My computer at work just kinda sucks.

End of Week 37

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 36: 234.2
End of Week 37: 233.2
Lost 70.4 lbs

Only 1 pound this week, but it was enough to put me over the 70-lb mark! I'm really proud of this achievement. My wonderful wife asked me tonight what my goal weight is, and I didn't have an answer. I've never really set a goal. I just knew I was overweight, and I needed to fix that. I guess it's about time to figure out what my goal is.

Day 259

What I did:

• Created a new blog, http://postagefromparaguay.blogspot.com, in which I'm transcribing the letters that I wrote when I was serving as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's mostly a way for me to read those letters, but I thought that others might be interested, too.

Day 258

What I did:

• Was treated to lunch at Chili's by my fantastic wife. I had the chicken tacos, which were quite yummy. I had all kinds of problems with gravity, though.

Day 257

What I did:

• Had a picnic lunch in the backyard with my kids. I indulged in a PB&J sandwich. It was heavenly.

Day 256

What I did:

• Thought for a while about what to put here, didn't come up with anything, gave up

Day 255

What I did:

• Won two of the three games of Commander that I played tonight. The other one was kind of crazy, but very entertaining. Well, it is, now that I can reflect on it. It was pretty miserable while we were playing.