Week 44 - 75 pounds lost! (with pictures)

Well it has been another great week of taking up the intensity of my workouts, and I am continuing to see great results.

Last week I stepped up the weights from 4 pound weights to 6 pound weights, and took the sets down to 2 from 3 (for now).

This week I added another 5 minutes of cardio on the elliptical, for 45 minutes x 6 days a week.  If I remember correctly, 45 minutes is the maximum cardio I ever did at one time when I was working out back in 2000.  For some reason, it doesn't feel as oppressive now as it did then - - I suspect that the difference is that now I am doing the cardio on the elliptical, while back then I did cardio on the recumbent bike and Nordictrac ski machine.  The elliptical is much more fun, and easy on the joints.

So what are the results?  I lost a further 2.2 (!) pounds this week, for a total of 75 pounds lost overall (!!).  My BMI has gone down to 38.2, from a starting BMI of 49.3 (for a change of -11.1).  I have lost 22.5% of my original body weight so far, or 44% of my total target weight.  I am, as you would expect, very pleased with all of these numbers.

I still have 93.9 pounds to lose, which is a huge number in itself, but give it another year and a half, and I will make it.  I have fewer than 10 pounds to go to reach the halfway point of my weight loss, and as they say, "it's all downhill from there...".

I was concerned that once I hit 270 pounds, I would stall a little bit.  I had made that target out to be such a big deal in my head, what with it putting me into Obese Class II (from Obese Class III), breaking 40 BMI, and being the weight that allowed me to register to be a bone marrow donor, that I was worried that I would get complacent and backslide a bit.  But so far, that hasn't happened.  I have religiously stuck to the 6-days a week workout plan, and have kept working on healthy eating every day.

The key to my success has always been consistency - - I have not missed a workout in 26 weeks.   And I haven't really plateaued in a while yet, either.  I think my last plateau occurred before I got the elliptical machine (in July 2012), in fact.  I can attribute part of my progress that to the fact that I keep dialing up the workouts - - adding weights, then adding sets, then adding time on the elliptical, then adding more weight ... repeated as required. 

I am constantly amazed at the things my body is able to do now.  For example, this morning my elliptical workout felt great.  I felt strong and it was almost effortless to increase my stride rate here and there.  I did 45 minutes non-stop, at a tension of between 8 and 10 (40% - 50%) most of the time.  I remember when I first got the elliptical machine and I could not go for 20 minutes without stopping for a rest.  And eventually working at a tension of 2 (10%) seemed like a big deal.  Let's not even think about when I first began working out, and could only manage 7 minutes of cardio.  On the recumbent bike. 

Those days are long gone, but I still look at the things I have accomplished and the things I can do without thinking now (like walk to the office), and I see how far I have progressed.  And when you think that I am only 44% of the way along this path, there are so many more good things still to come.

So today, in the spirit of celebrating milestones, I went and got my hair did.  I am never able to replicate the smoothness of what the hairdresser does, so don't get attached to photos of me with straight hair.  I am a curly girl at heart, but it's fun to play "manageable hair girl" for a day. For the record, the March photo was taken when I had lost about 18 pounds or so, and weighed about 315 pounds.  Today's photo obviously shows me down 75 pounds, at 258.9 pounds.

I am pretty pleased with the haircut, and with the photo.  I have been getting compliments all day.  Yay, me!