This post may be a bit personal, though I’m proud of my progress thus far, and felt like talking about it in this space might be interesting to you and/or useful to me.

As I’ve alluded to a few times over the last month or so, I’ve been working on dropping some weight. Although my doctor tells me I’m mostly healthy in spite of the extra pounds I’ve put on over the last couple of years thanks mostly to my sedentary office job and elevated stress and anxiety levels (I’ve found that my body’s reaction to stress is to go into “starvation mode”, holding on to every last calorie I put into it, even if I’m not eating all that much. I wish I was one of those people who lost weight when anxiety kicks in!), and we’ve agreed that dropping a few pounds would be a good thing. Thanks to a slight re-adjustment to my antidepressants, jumping back into my biking habit, and the temporary inclusion of a medication that assists in weight loss efforts through the magic of brain chemistry (it depresses the hunger center, reducing appetite, and the reward system, which kills the impulse for stress eating and cravings), I’m down 15 pounds over the last month or so.

One of the things I’m doing to monitor my progress is playing around with the free membership to the weight loss support system that came along with the prescription. Basically, I get a free, internet-enabled scale that tracks my progress and sends text messages to me regarding progress and offering advice for reducing caloric intake and adjusting behavior to lose weight.

The advice itself is kind of simplistic; I quickly realized it’s not designed for somebody like me who understands the chemistry and biological processes at work. I get things like “eat more vegetables” and “have the restaurant make your sandwich open-faced”, and I immediately know it’s telling me to increase fiber intake and reduce refined carbohydrates; I’m out-thinking the machine. It was also pretty creepy getting text messages from the scale at first (it’s in my phone contacts as “Creepy Nagging Scale”), but it’s gotten less weird over time.

I wasn’t originally sold on weighing in every day, though doing so does feed the part of this program I do find terribly useful and fascinating; the online tracking of daily weight and the ability to derive trends and such from the daily data points. And those of you who know me know that I appreciate data to play with.

At first, things plotted all over the place, but eventually I’m starting to see the patterns and how adjustments to diet and exercise affect things. And, so far, it’s working, and I’m not experiencing any of the side effects (other than a serious reduction in appetite overall) some folks have experienced. The program’s helping me focus, and it’s helping to modify my behavior, including increasing my exercise regimen (I’ve added my hike/bike mileage to the left-hand column again – I’m on track for over 30 miles this week).

Here’s my chart from this morning:

Over the last week or so, it looks like I’ve settled into a good groove with things, and the trend overall is definitely going in the right direction. Having the data to watch actually does help; it helps me anyway, since I tend toward the analytic side of things. I’ve also plugged this data into excel spreadsheets where I can calculate trend lines and averages and such, because why the hell not.

Of course, I’m not seeing any physical appearance changes yet – I’m hoping that’ll come soon. My weird aspirational goal is to be able to button the vest I’m wearing in this photo again; then I’ll really know it’s working.

Again, apologies for any overshare!