My relationship with the scale

The intent of this blog is to share the experiences and growth I have had as a result of my relationship with food during the course of my life.  

I was overweight as a young boy and remember a time when my grandmother said to me that I would likely always be fat because she had always been fat.  She was wrong.  I have been fat for periods of my life and have also been lean and athletic for periods.

By the time I was a teenager; I ended up at Weight Watchers and through their guidance lost a fairly significant amount of weight. During this first trip to Weight Watchers I learned enough about food and calories to find several foods and meals that worked for me. I found that if I stuck with the foods and meals that worked for me fairly carefully, I would usually lose a bit of weight every week.  This is a pretty effective strategy that I still use to some extent even today. I continued with Weight Watchers until I got to a weight I was fairly comfortable with at that time.

I married at age 20 and gained a little weight each year until at age 25 I found myself back at Weight Watchers. This time I lost a larger amount of weight, enough so that I qualified for lifetime membership. At some point about this time I realized that my current eating habits were not working and that I needed to learn some better ones. I attended weekly meetings long enough during this time, almost a year, that I actually changed some of my eating habits.

After the loss of a significant amount of weight in my mid 20’s, I found that I was able to participate in running events of almost any distance and derived much pleasure from setting goals and training for various events. Currently, you can keep up with my running program through my “Allan Running” blog.

As life happens, invariable, other commitments or priorities somehow push to the front over time and slowly, the physical activity I was enjoying was pushed to the side and my weight slowly began to rise.  When my weight had risen to the point that I was uncomfortable enough that I knew I had to take action, I headed back to Weight Watchers.  I had been away from the program long enough and it had changed enough that for some reason I was not connecting with the program and finding success.

At this point I took some things from the Weight Watcher program that I believed were crucial for success, weekly weigh-ins and keeping a meticulous log of all food eaten, and through increased physical activity and calorie restriction, returned my weight to a level I was comfortable with.  

You would think that after these three periods in my life, over a period of approximately 20 years, when I found it necessary to make lifestyle changes to control my body weight that I would be ever vigilant about the possibility of my weight increasing.  Unfortunately, that was not the case.

A few years ago, my doctor had been warning me that my blood cholesterol ratio was going in the wrong direction.  When he finally wrote me a prescription for a cholesterol lowering medication I decided to take him seriously. I told him to keep his prescription and that I would take care of it by myself.  In 7 months I lowered my total cholesterol 40 points simply by lowering my body weight.

So the deal with this blog is this, when I weigh myself on the Tanita BF 683W body composition scale, usually once a week, undressed and at the same time of day, I will report my body weight and percentage of body fat reading.  In each post I will try to include some tip that I have found helpful during my relationship with the scale over the past 30 years. 

My message today is very simple, over the past 30 years, the amount of weight I have lost easily exceeds my current body weight.  If I can do it, you can do it. I endorse no specific method of losing weight. I do say to find what works for you and stick with it until you are at a healthy body weight.  You can do it.