My Weight Journal

Okay, yesterday I started on my personal weight loss program. I have done this before, so I’m confident that I can do it again.

If you read my earlier post, you read about me losing a lot of weight in 2006. You also read that I intentionally stopped for 2007. Let me tell you a little more about that.

When I started losing weight in 2006, I was 62 years old and I was 145 kilos. That’s well over 300 pounds (almost 320 lbs).

I have been overweight all that I remember of my life. I was chubby as a kid, and I was chubby as a young adult. When I joined the US Navy at 18 years old, I was 6′ 2″ and almost 200 pounds. When I left the Navy, 4 years later, I was 6′4″ and 235 pounds.

For the next 3 decades, my weight slowly increased. By the time I was 50 years old, I was 275 pounds. And then in 2006, when I was 62 years old and well over 300 pounds, a friend came over to give me an intervention.

Larry has been my friend for 25 years, and we talk about things which affect our lives. He has been diabetic for over 45 years, so he knows all about it. He brought over a glucose meter and asked me to take the test of my blood sugar. He was concerned that I might be diabetic. He is my friend, so I took the test.

The ‘normal’ range for blood sugar is 80-120. My result was over 180. He explained what this meant in my body, my biology. I was shocked about this. Larry told me he was confident that if I lost weight, my body would probably start operating correctly and my blood sugar would get back in control. He left the glucose meter with me as a gift.

Well, this was pretty heavy. I was quite concerned, not only for the consequences of what Larry had told me. Larry was in a wheel-chair because of a wound on his foot that has not healed in years as a result of his diabetes. Larry was clearly serious when he told me that with my blood sugar levels, I would be in similar condition in very few more years.

So I started a weight loss program that very day.