Milestone!

I've finally hit a milestone I've been grinding to get for literally over a year. I got on the scale this morning and it read 349.8. I am below 350 pounds for the first time since -- sometime in 2003. For those keeping track, my total weight loss for 2018 was a whopping one pound, but given the last half of the year was dealing with my sister's illness and death and spending lots of time on the road with that and helping out her family... I'm perfectly okay that it's negative at all.

But one of my goals moving into 2019 was to get back at it, and while it's slower than I'd like (for reasons), I'm now down 5 for the year and I've finally broken this barrier that has been sitting just out of reach and smirking at me for months. It means since my highest weight (415 in 2013) I'm now down 65 pounds.

That is the average weight of a 10 year old boy. Imagine carrying one of those on your back 24x7. Or get philosophical and ask yourself whether that missing 65 pounds of blubber had a soul and I'm somehow a murderer of an innocent child analogy. Or don't, it's probably safer.

I find people have a lot of trouble visualizing weight changes, and that's the reason for those bottles up and to the right. Think about when you go to the grocery store and you pick up a two liter bottle of soda. Water weights a kilogram per liter, or 2.2 pounds per liter, so each of those bottles weighs about 4.5 pounds. To imagine carrying around 65 pounds, toss 16 of those in a backpack and strap it on...

This has been a challenging year to get the weight loss going, not just because of losing Sue and all of the stress and chaos surrounding that, but there have been some health challenges getting in the way as well, with the knees getting less cooperative making it harder to walk and exercise, and with an ear problem that took us some time to sort out that caused me some issues with balance, that also made it hard to get exercise in. We switched to a different prescription for the knee, and we seem to have sorted out the ear thing, and that's made it easier to get out and get more walking in, but in the meantime, my fitness levels have gone to hell, so it's a slow grind getting them back where i want them. But I'm seeing progress, and with the new knee drug (moved from Relafin to Meloxicam, and I love the difference) I'm able to get out and get some mileage in with little or no pain again, and we were able to push out the cortisone shot over 5 weeks, and I think I can push it further next time (I hope!). We'll see.

I'm hoping I have some momentum here, but when you're on insulin, weight loss is a challenge for many reasons, and it's more of a grinding marathon to do it than something you can push quickly. But I'm hoping I can keep it going, or even accelerate it...

But whatever happens down the road, to me, this is a major milestone, and the one thing I have been able to do is once I do get the damned weight off, it doesn't come back. And that makes me and my doctor happy....

And since I had my cortisone shot thursday, I'm giving the knee one more day, and then I'll go out for a walk...