The Percentages

Recently, my husband has been losing a little weight because he had some blood test results which were cause for some small concern. It's nothing incredibly serious, at least not yet, but even someone who is not greatly overweight can have health issues related to body fat. In particular, visceral fat, or fat around your organs which you can't necessarily see easily by looking at a person's body can cause Type 2 diabetes because this type of fat causes more issues with insulin resistance. This is likely the reason he needs to lose a little weight.

It's actually a little ironic that my husband, who has always weighed less than me by a wide margin, has had troubling blood test results while I seem to be okay. It does seem that my fat on the outside is less damaging than his fat on the inside. At any rate, my point is not to compare my fat to his fat, but rather to talk about his weight loss and mine.

As is so often the case with men, he is losing weight relatively rapidly and without much of a struggle. He has cut back on portions and cut out obvious things like sweets (and the donuts that he loves so well) and has lost 10 lbs. in about 3 weeks. He has always exercised for about 40-60 minutes on a regular basis, though he has made an effort to do so 5 days a week instead of 3 or 4 as he was doing. All in all, his changes have not been what anyone could consider radical and he hasn't chafed mentally against them much. The fact that he is not a food addict (like me) is evident in the relative emotional ease with which he has made the changes.

My husband told me that one of his work acquaintances remarked that he looked different and asked if he had lost weight. He has lost only 10 lbs. and someone has noticed already. It took me about 50 lbs. before any appreciable change was noticeable by others. I noticed in my wrists about 30 lbs. in. These differences remind me of the fact that every pound is more meaningful the smaller you become. As a percentage of his starting weight (and of the weight he needs to lose), each pound is more meaningful to him. Each pound for him is perhaps 1/30th of what he needs to lose. Even after all of my losses, each pound is 1/130th of what I still need to lose.

I try to keep in mind that when I started all of this, each pound was about 1/230th of what I needed to lose and every pound I lose makes the next one more meaningful. The percentages keep getting better and more impressive the longer I keep at this. Since I don't look much "better" in my opinion (just different - smaller fat as opposed to bigger fat), this is one more thing that can motivate me to continue when I start to feel like my success is relatively unimpressive or inconsequential.

Losing at a "healthy" rate

I read a news article late last year about a woman in England who went on an extreme diet that allowed her something like 500-600 calories per day. The diet was overseen by a doctor, and included some sort of nutritional supplements that were supposed to ensure that she got enough nutrients during rapid weight loss. The incentive for her desire to lose a lot of weight fast was a wedding, unsurprisingly. Weddings seem to be the biggest push for many women to shed weight rapidly.

Since this woman weighed quite a lot, perhaps in the 300 lb. range, she dropped about 60 lbs. or so rapidly. One day, she decided to actually eat, and she ate quite a lot relative to her highly-restricted diet, though nothing ridiculous. She may have consumed something on the order of 3500 calories at most, possibly as little as 2000 calories. The number of calories she ate is unknown because there’s no concrete report of exactly what and how much she ate because, you see, she dropped dead.

Everyone who wants to lose weight wants to lose it fast, but weight loss is a tremendous strain on your body including your heart. Your heart is a muscle, and shrinks during rapid weight loss. That means it is in a weakened state. This woman who lost so much weight under a doctors care died from heart failure because the consumption of a larger number of calories so stressed her body that her heart couldn’t deal with it.

My husband and I have talked about my weight loss and he’s pleased that I’m losing weight, but he always cautions me when I say I wish it were going faster. He has said that he believes that a more rapid loss would be unhealthy, and that a slow steady loss (around 1-2 lbs. per week) is better not only in the long run, but also in the short run for my immediate health. The news story that I read last year, while somewhat extreme, provides a good lesson in why that is so. Yes, I’m impatient to feel better about myself, stronger, and healthier, but I’d rather get there with a strong heart and a body that has burned fat to reach my goal rather than a weak heart and a body that has consumed muscle and released fluid-based pounds.

To this end, I decided to go against my assertion about not weighing myself again for a long time to see what my one-month progress tended to look like. As before, I thought very carefully before I dragged out that scale and considered what the numbers would mean to me. In particular, I was considering the effect of it not changing as much as I might hope or more than I might expect. I wasn’t going to do it if I believed the number would have an appreciable effect on my plan. In the end, I decided that I could be sanguine about it and that the value of knowing my progress after one month, something which I have never looked at before, was greater than any potential emotional consequences.

The number was 284, which is 11 lbs. lighter than when I last weighed myself on February 12. This number was not surprising and my emotional response to it was what it was last time. That is, a small amount of satisfaction. It’s really about where I expected to be in terms of monthly loss (which I hope to be around 10 lbs. per month at my present weight and possibly lasting to the 250 lb. range, at which point I expect a slow-down) and where I thought I was in terms of my losses since I started this last year (about 100 lbs. lost by now). This is a range that falls in line with what I feel to be healthy, so I’m pretty happy with it.