ex150ish: Starting Conditions
Where am I? Where would I like to be? What would count as success?
It seemed wise to taper into this, and I already had a pot of everlasting stew on the go, although it had some potatoes and vegetables in it.
So I simply stopped buying anything that wasn't on the list, hid anything forbidden that would keep in a forbidden cupboard, and ate the last of my fruit and vegetables, allowing the proportion of potatoes in my stew to decay exponentially as new stuff went in.
On Saturday 27/05/23, feeling most intrepid, I ate the last of my fruit, and judged my stew to be at least largely potato, swede, and yam-free.
So I'll date ex150ish start there.
Here are my weight measurements for the week running up to that:
27/05/23 98.8
26/05/23 98.5
25/05/23 98.8
24/05/23 98.6
23/05/23 98.6
22/05/23 100.3
21/05/23 99
That's an average of 98.9, and a bit noisy but seemingly stable.
And I'm roughly 5'10" or 177cm
Giving me a BMI of 98.9/1.77/1.77 ~ 31.5
Or in the more usual way of putting it, I am beginning to attract moons.
I'm not really sure what my healthy weight was, but I've dug up an old scheme program from 2006 that I used for calculating power-to-weight for my rowing crew, and apparently I was 86kg in 2006. I was thirty-six and in excellent health, training like a lunatic, so I'll take that as my happy weight.
Giving me a happy BMI of 86/1.77/1.77 ~ 27.5
According to standard interpretations of BMI, that's half way between overweight and obese.
I was in the best condition of my life, and I certainly don't look fat in old photos.
I hadn't seen a doctor for years, and when I finally had to re-register with my GP in around 2010 and had a half-hour check-up as part of that, he said he thought I was one of the healthiest people he'd ever met.
For a small framed person of indeterminate gender it probably would be too heavy, but I was a strong and heavily-built man and it suited me perfectly.
I probably do want to weigh less than that now, because I'm old, out of condition, and a lot of the muscles have gone. But if I was anywhere near that weight I wouldn't be worrying about my weight at all.
As mentioned in previous posts, Mum managed to stick 3/4 of a kilo on me in three weeks at home by means of overfeeding, so I'm actually expecting to lose roughly that over the next few weeks anyway.
And that's obviously going to confound my experiment, so in a desperate attempt to compensate for that:
Let's say that my 'true' weight at this point is 98.2 + 0.75 temporary gain
And a second obvious confounder is the recent sulphites thing. But I've no idea whether regularly poisoning myself would make my weight go down or up. Intuition is for down, but who can say?
So if ex150ish can't take me unambiguously below 98.2 then it's a failure.
For clarity, my success criterion for this experiment is :
Weight unambiguously below 98.2 once I've stopped ex150ish, gone back to my usual heart-attack diet (No PUFAs, no sulphites, lots of salt) and regained the water weight and everything's gone stable.
While you're on the subject of numbers and numbers-that-don't-mean-anything, I submit that none of the numbers mean anything. More on this in a sec, but first re: the BMI.
BMI is known garbage, but the basic instinct was good -- weight alone isn't useful but what if we plot weight against height and sex? Given that the scale is the most precise of easily-available measures (tape is too finicky and you'll unconsciously cinch yourself in half trying to get a smaller number), why not plot it against rowing power, or against deadlift, or something else?
As for numbers, they're arbitrary but they do have a psychological effect. For instance, a largely-built american who even as a college athlete never got below 210 pounds and now weighs 315 knows he can get to the nice round number of 300, but never to 200. Why shouldn't he aim instead for 100 kilos? In your case, you're already 100 kilos, but I can't imagine you find 98.2 or 86 very aspirational. If you want to dust off some of your historical britishness, we could say that you're now 16 stone and can certainly get to 15. A nice stretch goal might be 14 (though it's not as 'round' as 15). You're more likely to get to two hundredweight than 14 stone, though. Perhaps that sounds less bastard-american than '200 pounds'.
"allowing the proportion of potatoes in my stew to decay exponentially"
spoken like a true nerd lol
Below 98.2kg ever? Or within e.g. 30 days? Cause that's not even 1 full kg from where you're at, so I'd bet a lot of money that it'll get you below 98.2kg in less than a week.. maybe 2-3 days. Just in water weight.