HMR Diet - Day 40; Will I hit my initial goal weight?

Still cruising along but getting hungrier and craving solid food with more flavors more and more.  Last week I lost another 6 pounds even though I felt as if I lost nothing.  Home scale seems to be confirming this but it did the same last week.  I would love to lose another 6 pounds again this week.  I have a meeting with the doctor on Wednesday.  I think they are going to start transitioning me.  What that means is that I get to have 1 serving a fruits or vegetables a week and one if their entrees a week, adding one of each each week.  At least that's what I think it is.  Should be interesting.  Seriously, I would do just about anything for a big bowl of broccoli.  Heck I would dip it in mustard just so I could get more flavors in my mouth.  I tried making the chicken soup into chips last night and they weren't bad but for some reason the chicken soup mix just messes with my palate and stomach.

At the moment I'm averaging 6-7 shakes a day, 8 if it's a day I lift weights, almost 75 ounces of water, and around 600 calories of physical activity a day.

Right now I'm afraid that I will not hit my initial goal weight.  It was actually a respectable goal that could have been achieved without too much hard work.  As of last weeks weigh-in I'm roughly 26 pounds away from that goal.  That's 5 weeks to lost 26 pounds.  I must average a hair more than 5 pounds a week.  In looking at the scale at home I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to hit that.  I really want to so that will mean I will need to pick things up a bit, especially if I'm going to be transitioning to "real" food.  As of last week I'm already working out 7 days a week and lifting nights a week.  So I should be getting enough exercise but if that's not enough, like I said, I'll have to start pushing my cardio based workouts more.  But if that's what I have to do to hit my initial target weight then that's what I'll have to do.  I'll have to be smart about pushing myself though as I don't want to get an injury one month out from my wedding/honeymoon.  One good thing though is that I can definitely tell my upper body is getting stronger, especially my shoulders which have always given me problems.

HMR Diet - Day 29

I will admit it, I didn't post anything last week after my weigh in because I was upset.  I dropped an unimpressive 3 pounds (unimpressive to me anyway) last week.  I realize now that I was a bit hard on myself.  First off it was a stressful week, I had to lay 2 people off on Monday and I had that weighing on me all weekend.  I also didn't do as good of a job as I should have with my water intake.  Both of those things individually can have a serious impact on your weight loss but both of them together and be really bad.  So for me to actually lose 3 pounds, looking back, was actually pretty good.

This past week was a lot less stressful and I made sure I got more than enough water in my system each day, so much in fact that my sleep has been impacted as I'm up 2 times a night to go to the rest room.  That's something I'm going to have to fix because not getting enough sleep can also impact weight loss in a major way.  I upped the intensity of both my cardio and weight lifting this past week.  I'm almost completely done with the elliptical machine as I'm spending most of my time on a treadmill with a decent incline.  To be honest it seems to be a little easier on my knees, I feel like I'm pushing myself a little harder, and it's getting me closer to being able to jog/run.

Anyway, at yesterday's weigh in I lost another 8 pounds.  That brings me up to 28 pounds in 4 weeks with the fast.  With the additional 12 pounds I lost from my 2 week Healthy Solutions stint that puts me at an even 40 pounds in 6 weeks.  I've noticed that it's getting increasingly more difficult to consume more than 6 shakes in a day.  I almost have to force myself to do so.  Right now 6 seems to be the sweet spot for me though on some days 5 is all I can do.  Two last pieces of info...  According to the scale at the hospital I officially weigh what I did when I graduated HS and according to the scale at home I weigh less than when I graduated HS.  From here on out I'll be happy if I lose 5 pounds a week.  I think they are going to start my transition to food again in 4 weeks.  So in order for me to hit my modest target weight 5 pounds a week would do it because mentally I'm preparing myself to stay the same if not gain a pound or two the second or 3rd week of the transition.

HMR Diet - Day 20; nothing new

Not a whole heck of a lot is new right now.  I'm averaging 1 oatmeal cereal and 6 shakes a day.  I've been a little sore because of the weight training that I added last week so I skipped a day yesterday but will go at it again tonight since tomorrow is my off day.  Last week I didn't feel like I lost all that much weight but ended up losing 8 pounds.  This week I feel the same so I'm curious to see what the scale says tomorrow.  The home scale has me down 8 from what the hospital scale said last week but I'm not quite sure of the difference between the two as I know my home scale is much more favorable.  I would be pretty happy if I did 8+ pounds 3 weeks in a row.  Unfortunately I've been sleeping for garbage the past couple of days so I hope to get a decent nights rest.  I've been tired and had a mild headache all day.  I'm sure part of that is stress as I had to layoff 2 people yesterday at work.

I'm guessing I have another 4 weeks of the fast and then another 3 weeks of the Healthy Solutions before the wedding.  If I average 5 pounds a week from now until then I would hit my target weight.

I'll be looking for a new belt soon

Today when I got home from work, I stripped down and put on some moisturizing lotion before I went to tan.  Well when I got dressed and cinched my belt I noticed that I'm officially on the last notch of my current belt.  I think I have one belt that's just a little bit smaller than this belt so that may last me another week but regardless I'll be needing a new one.

I was talking with my fiance last night about getting new clothes.  My thoughts are why get new clothes that fit now when they won't fit 4 weeks from now?  I'm currently going through old bags of clothes that I held on to from many years ago to see if anything fits.  Luckily there are quite a few things that now fit again so that's cool.  For Valentines day my fiance gave me $100 to go towards new clothes.  I'll probably wait until after we get back from Cancun before I start doing any serious wardrobe replacement.

HMR Diet - Day 16; coasting

Not to say that this whole thing is easy but man it feels like I'm just coasting along.  At the last weigh in on Wednesday I lost another 8 pounds which equates 17 pounds in 2 weeks.  The dizziness is basically gone now.  The heart medication I'm on is also used to treat people with high blood pressure.  Well because my weight has dropped so dramatically in the past 9 weeks, 40 pounds, he's cut my heart medication in half.  Last night I started lifting weights again.  I will continue to do this every other workout; full cardio workout then a 20 minute resistance training session directly afterward.  I'm debating whether or not I want to do my legs at all when lifting.  The reason being is if my legs are weakened during the weight training it will seriously impact my cardio workouts later in the week.  I'm a little fortunate because in the past when I was in shape my legs grew quite easily, it's my upper body that has always been slow to respond.  I'm going to do a shoulder exercise every time I lift because my shoulders have always seemed under developed.

HMR Diet - Day 13; much better

Things are much better right now as I discovered that my normally mild lactose intolerance is no match for these shakes.  So yesterday I started taking Lactaid before my shakes and my issues are much more mild now.  I think part of what cause caused the massive discomfort is because I've been doing double shakes for the past week.  I absolutely am not hungry at all anymore.  I was told that my dizziness may be corrected by having more shakes but so far that hasn't been the case.  There are days that I struggle to get 7 shakes in but right now I'm averaging 6-7.  I'm kind burned out on the chicken soup.  I mixed it with low sodium V8 juice last night and it was a little better. 

For some reason I don't feel like I've lost that much weight yet.  There are some visible cues but I guess I thought I'd start looking different by now.  Granted I've only been doing this for a month now (2 weeks on Healthy Solutions and as of tomorrow it will be 2 weeks on the No Decision liquid fast) but according to the scale at home I've lost 37 lbs since New Years.  I only have one more notch left on my current belt but a lot of that depends on my comfort level but for the most part I'm fine on the second to last notch.  I  usually like my pants a little on the baggy side, they are just more comfortable that way to me.  Now my existing jeans are very baggy.  I can probably hold out another week or two if I can average 7-8 pounds a week but I need to go through some old clothes that I have stored in bags to see if I have any jeans that will fit.  I really don't want to go out and spend a lot especially if I continue to lose a significant amount of weight in the next 10 weeks.

Another sign of weight loss is that the wedding ring that we picked out last summer no longer fits me.  It's much too big and easily comes off.  It's made of Tungsten and cannot be resized but the place we bought it from is going to let us exchange it.  We have until mid April to go in and get sized again so we can get the new one back in time.

Right now I'm debating when I should start weightlifting again.  I know I will need to do that eventually but because of the low calories I'm afraid that my body will cannibalize it's own muscle to support the protein needs by breaking down muscle fibers from the resistance training.

HMR Diet - First Week Complete

Well the first week of the HMR No Decision diet (liquid fast) is complete.  According to the hospital scale I've lost 9 pounds in 6 days.  I would say that's pretty good. Has it been more difficult than the Healthy Solutions where I could eat?  Yes.  Has it really been all that difficult?  Definitely no.  One of the ladies in the class was upset that she only lost 2 pounds and I do understand her frustration.  She too had done the Healthy Solutions prior and was losing more weight than she lost this week.  I'm sure she will have a better number next week.  We also picked up 1 new person and another transferred from a different class.

My goal for this week is to increase my intake of shakes.  I'm going to be shooting for 7-8 in a day to hopefully boost my metabolism a bit.  Today I'm on pace for 8.  It will  help me though because usually each day around 4-5 pm I start to get a little hungry so having a double there will help.  In all honesty I haven't been hungry at all today.  Another thing I'm going to try to do is an extra 5-10 mins of exercise when I work out. 

Using the HMR logic for how many calories I burned using my target weight and a medium effort level I burned 2205 calories for the week.  Using my real numbers I was at 2835 calories burned.  Later tonight I'm going to try to use my "diet math" to see if my pounds lost matches up.  I'm guessing I lost more than the math will indicate.  I had 36 meal replacements over 6 days.  Three of those were the oatmeal cereals at 210 calories each.  With that said my caloric intake for those 6 days is 3930 calories.  So if you take that and subtract how many calories I burned just through exercise I would have netted between 1095 and 1725 calories... for 6 days.  Crazy.  Oh yeah, my dizziness isn't as bad today so maybe things are getting better.