That 60 pounds of cat liter represents what I was carrying around with me before. It was very heavy and I can’t believe I used to carry that!
There’s no denying I’ve been very happy about the changes my body has gone through and I’m about to brag about some of those changes. Just a few days ago I was lying in bed with my arm at my side and I noticed I could feel my hip. I hadn’t felt my hip in years!
Here are just a few other changes that excite me:
- My wife and I can get our arms a lot further around each other when we hug. It’s partly because there’s no longer a baby in the way and it’s mostly because I’ve lost over 60 pounds since last May and she’s nearly 20 pounds below her pre-pregnancy weight.
- When I hold my hands together in a praying fashion, my fingers feel much smaller now.
- That pile of clothes that sat in the back of our closet for years because someday… Yeah, I’m wearing them now!
Signs like these are what inspire me to keep going and to use my diet to make myself as healthy as I can be. Just as l slowly got myself to the biggest weight I ever was last February, I have been gradually losing it and making my body healthy in the process. Any goal needs a way to track it. I can track my weight at home and while it’s a great indicator, it’s good to know that lowering my weight and eating healthy are changing more than just my appearance.
A month after going on a plant-based diet last May, my wife and I paid to have our cholesterol levels checked at our pharmacy and we saw how great our results were in just a short time. Then in September we took advantage of the university’s free screening for employees and saw that my cholesterol numbers were even greater and my body fat had come down 11 points from a year ago! It was 39.3% in September of 2011 and 28.0% in September of 2012.
My total cholesterol has always been below 200 and was even as low as 134 back in 2011 before I started eating healthy, so that’s never been an issue for me. However, I hear so many older men say how it’s going to go up and there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t want to accept that. I want it below 150 and I want my HDL and LDL to be at amazing levels too.
Today I visited my employee wellness coordinator to get even more verification of my transformation. We didn’t do a lipid profile, but my body fat went down two more percentage points to 25.9% and my waist circumference went from 44 inches to 42.
I’m a numbers guy. I do sports statistics in my job as the assistant sports information director at Washburn University and I love to keep track of things and get interesting nuggets of information from the numbers.
Me and my barely two-week-old son. Me, very tied! He, very jaundiced still… He’s perfect now!
These numbers I got today verified that the changes I am noticing are real. When I looked closer at the numbers, I realized something even more amazing. My fat mass in September of 2011 was 100 pounds. It was 56 pounds today. I have 45 less pounds of fat in me than I did 16 months ago! I wish I had stood on a body fat machine last February when I maxed out at 277 pounds of total weight, my highest weight ever. Conservatively estimated at 40 percent body fat, that would have been 110 pounds of fat on me!
My BMI recently shifted from obese to overweight but my body fat percentage is still well over the desired max of 20 percent. Even so, I am making awesome progress from my plant-based diet. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing and we’ll check it again after a few months!
What are some of the ways you measure your success so you can track your goals and brag about your results?
Press Box Lunch 
awesome, that baby sure is little!!! sure sucks to have weight problems doesn’t it?it is like a curse or something.
Our son is growing quickly now and turns a year old tomorrow! Weight problems suck, but I think it takes personal responsibility and the realization that only you can change things to make it better.