Clothes do not make the man.....Look thinner?

      Hi all welcome back to my blog. Now I have said in the past that this would be a multiple posts per week kind of thing but I dont want to bore the heck out of you with, ate the same things today had my egg in the morning went to work, then had a shake for lunch and some chicken with a small amount of vegetable for dinner, went to the gym then went to bed. Kind of thing.  Unless you need help with insomnia, that would not solve a thing.
   So as a result I thought I would drag it out a bit more so we can cover highlights and lowlights all at once. Now thankfully this is an occasion of wonderment and is definitely a highlight.  So what is it you wonder ( I will bet many of you have guessed it already). Well , I will do a little backstory for you, before the big reveal. Back in mid October of last year , my surgeon Dr Anthony McCluney at Steward medical center in Brockton Mass, and I came to an agreement. We decided that it was time to push the button to launch me into my future and get the surgery done.
    There were tests to do and paperwork to undertake, but those would get done shortly thereafter. At that time we did my first official weigh in. Now prior to that, if you have followed the blog, you know not even a year earlier i had weighed in at 408 pounds, that was the big wake up moment for me. I had managed to get my weight down to 374 when i started my new job at the very end of February 2014. On this day in October, I was actually happy i had been able to lower my weight further to 362 pounds.
   So whats the big deal? Well today I walked out to my scale, stepped on it with both feet like do every morning, ( I have to do it weekly instead starting soon I know..) on this day however the display on my scale lit up and read 262 pounds. That is officially down 100 pounds since I have made a concerted effort to lose this weight.
  For me this is one small step for a man, one giant leap for Me! ( my apologies to Neil Armstrong)
Now those of you that are friends with me on facebook have seen these two pictures but those that have not will hopefully like them. The first is from a jaunt through Walmart a few days ago. Now for a lark I grabbed a suit jacket off the rack and jokingly said to my wife," heh I know this won't fit, but I'm just curious." So i tried on the suit jacket and, I was stunned. Not only did it fit, but it fit well. Now this may not seem like much  to you but it is the first time since i was maybe 8 or 9 years old that I have been able to fit into something like that off the rack.  No big and tall section, or big and tall store. No special "husky" or "portly"  this time.  This was a big event for me and a bit mind blowing.  You see, as these changes occur in me, I don't see the changes that others do, because I see myself every day and inside I am still me.
 

  Now the second picture is shortly thereafter. I went home and recently we have been sorting through old clothes to get rid of, I donated some and others went to someone who needed them. My suits and dress shirts I will post on ebay it is too nice to  just get rid of , and it helps recoup the cost from having to buy new clothes. Anyway I picked up a pair of shorts that I wore as recently as October of last year and as you can see I can basically ( checked today on a pair and Yes i can actually) fit into one leg of my old shorts. Again a bit of a blown mind. 

Now i had my 3 month visit with my nutritionist yesterday and she was very very happy with how far I have come and my eating habits etc. It is funny as she constantly reminds me that when I have days where I slip with my nutrition, to not worry about them and just get back on track and keep going.  I don't allow myself those days however, at least not yet, My worst was a small bite of a mini cupcake once, not even close to a mouthful, just enough to savor the taste and I gave the rest of that mini cupcake to my wife. I worry that if i slip once  I will continue to slip, but she wants to make sure I really don't keep that attitude so I can adjust more toward eating like a normal healthy person would, later of course, but bad habits die hard and trading a bad habit for another is not good either. So we shall see, I don't relish cheating especially since i can only eat so little that cheating is a big waste of time. 

   Now after this meeting I had to go over to the lab for some bloodwork. Now I am a baby when it comes to drawing blood, I just hate it. Just writing about it raises my anxiety levels. So I am siting in the blood drawing chair, and I am waiting and waiting for this tech  to get all this information into the computer. My tests are all entered one at a time by abbreviation and code and evidently since I am having every vitamin test under the sun done, and several vials had to be blocked from being exposed to light, several had to be placed immediately on  ice, etc this took forever. So after twenty five minutes of waiting in this chair, I am starting to sweat, my heart is racing and I am dreading this whole experience. 

  I tell this very nice lady that I do not want a warning, just do it and get it over with. Well she has to draw 10 vials of blood from me. 10? Well she comments how fast i am filling these suckers and I don't have the heart to tell her it is because my heart is pounding. Now we hit vials number seven and I am starting to really want to get up out of this chair, the anxiety is getting the best of me. I should have prefaced this by saying since this was a weigh in day at the hospital, I had had nothing to eat or drink up to that point and it was around 12:30 in the afternoon. Between the nutritionists office and the lab i was able to gulp down half a powerade zero, but that was it.  

   So finally the blood draw is finished and another tech come in and I am now dizzy as all get out, and my vision is very very blurry and all three of us are thinking I am going to pass out. I manage to get out of that blood drawing chair ( against the techs wishes) and make it to a reclining chair away from the blood drawing equipment. Thankfully after one of the techs went and grabbed me an ice cold orange juice, i started to feel human again, but it was a close call. lol it has got to be something right? So all in all a good few days, 100 pounds down officially and about 90 to go to hit my goal. This is one of my major goals now that I have hit and I could not be happier about it. I want to thank everyone, all my friends, coworkers, and yes my blog readers. Everyone has played a part in helping me stay on track. Whether it is friends saying how good I look, or coworkers asking how I am doing, those comments really help. Thank you all. 

   Here is this posts comic.

...Who You Calling Petite??

Hello Everyone, welcome back to the blog.

First let me apologize for having made you all wait so long without keeping in touch. 
 Things get so hectic sometimes that it is tough to keep up.  Things are going great here with my weight i've almost reached the tipping point where I have actually lost  more  than I have left to lose. 
I have discovered several things as well. The first being how to guarantee that I cause a stall in my weight loss. Now just in case you wanted to know, A stall is when your weight fails to change or changes so slowly it becomes hardly noticeable. 
   Well stalls are common when you lose a lot of weight and there are several infamous ones. The most infamous is the dreaded three week stall, which as you guessed occurs around three works from surgery. Thankfully mine only lasted a few days, but some people will incur a much longer stall lasting even a few weeks. Now there is a scientific explanation for a stal, having to do with water and a sugar by-product called glucagon, basically it has to do with water moving in and filling in empty spaces left by the fat that has been burned by the body. You have to work through the stalls moving that water out of those spaces and then you lose weight. Now one thing  I have mentioned before is that I measured myself prior to surgery, and then again on my 6 week appointment. Well  i will be measuring myself soon so that I can see the results, although i can tell you this. 
  With my body undergoing so many changes I have now gone from a size 5xl shirt to wearing some nice new 2x shirts, and my pants went from a size 4xl to an xl,  the changes have been dramatic. My boss even made the remark to me that i was a very petite man. lol That is the first time in my life I have been called petite, and boy did I love it.  
   Soon soon I will post new measurements, I'm intrigued to find out for myself what the numbers are as well. So I know you are wondering well where are you now with your weight? Well let me say this as a reminder, In mid october of last year my surgeon told me it was time to start my weight loss, and at my official weigh in I weighed 362 pounds. 
   This morning I weighed in at 270 pounds , 92 pounds down. Now with my target weight being 170, i have currently lost 92 pounds with 100 pounds left to go and as I said earlier in 4 pounds I will have lost 96 pounds with 96 left to go. Thats my tipping point, and I will enjoy it as well. 
  Now with all the snow and problems around i missed the gym for over a week, but we restarted a few days back and things are right back on track. One amazing thing is just one month before my surgery I was given a cardiac stress test and after 8 minutes of exercise my heart rate was over 160+ beats per minute. 
   Yesterday just for example, I rode for about 5 miles on the bike and  my heart rate never got above 131 bpm. Thats a tremendously lower load on my heart than just a few months ago. That's the best reinforcement of why to have this surgery I could get.  
   I  know that in the past I have told you all how little i eat well I want to share a picture of an actual meal, now this is a picture of a typical dinner for me. It consists of three small pieces of chicken  ( breaded yes but i have to have a few carbs everyday and these are it), and to make it even funnier i was only able to eat one of them. The little cup is a new product by libby's. They are little individual cups of veggies you can microwave, its a nice fit for me. 
So here'

is what i have for dinner, again keep in mind i could only eat one of the chicken pieces.  To give you a little perspective each piece of chicken is the size of one of those little lollipops, as a matter of fact these are called chicken pops, or about the size of a quarter each. 
   This is one of those really small plates, because yes, putting your food on a small plate does indeed help your mind get past the psychological hunger. Now one of the things I want to discuss, is this. You may or may not have heard or watched a TV program called the The Biggest Loser. Well in this weight loss show the contestants , all obese people, compete to lose the most weight. Now they get literally 24 hour a day care, trainers on call at all times, medical staff, nutritionists, chefs and exercise physiologists all ready to make sure they get all the help possible. Plus they workout all day long, no employment or life responsibilities. Then over the course of 16 weeks they find out who lost the most. Well on this seasons finale thier head doctor, knowns as Dr H, ( doctor Wayne Huizenga.) said that the contestants lost weight the "right way" without that distasteful and bad weight loss surgery.
  The man totally insulted people who have weight loss surgery, dealing a blow to people out there who would think about surgery but are now told not to. Well of course it is all money motivated as this doctor runs the Biggest Loser weight loss camp, where people pay 3 thousand dollars per week to lose weight. It infuriated me, and many others. Unfortunately he never said that like 60% of The Biggest loser contestants gain back all their weight because they aren't taught to change their lifestyle. I use this surgery as a tool to teach me how to eat forever, losing the weight is one part but keeping it off is the most important. over 80% of gastric sleeve patients keep  a large portion of their initial lost weight off for more than ten years. 
  Well thank you for coming back again, and there will be another blog post very soon, a special Milestone post at that. 

See you all soon, and here is this entry's cartoon: