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.