Hey! Quickly popping in with a tale o' the tape -- more precisely a printout from the hospital dietitian's fancy Tanita scale today.

I meet with the dietitian every couple months to go over my eating, make any adjustments to my plan, and step on the high-tech scale. I have a pretty high-tech home scale in my Withings/Nokia/Withings Again Body Cardio scale, but this one is hospital grade, so I tend to trust it a bit more. 

I've been kicking butt in fat loss -- my April reading showed that out of the 17 total pounds I lost from February to April, 11.4 pounds was pure fat, 1 pound was total body water, and only 1 pound was fat-free mass. I know that doesn't completely add up, but I'm going by what the printout says. Apparently the more fat you lose, the more accurate the scale readings get.

Today's reading -- from April 10 to June 13 -- showed that out of the 17.8 total pounds I lost, 17 pounds was fat with just under a pound of fat-free mass lost.

All this to say ...

via GIPHY

 I am burnin' the butter, which is a phrase Denise Austin used to say in her exercise videos. I used to cringe when she said it, but now that I am burning actual human butter, I'm kinda digging it.

I have been exercising more (but am totally behind on it this week), but I'm not going nuts or anything. I make sure my meals are protein-forward, but not every meal is stellar.

I mention this because THIS is exactly why I had weight-loss surgery. The times when I could pound off a few pounds I was making myself absolutely NUTS, doing workouts I hated, obsessively and neurotically tracking my food and watching the scale slowly creep down, bounce back up or flatline. Now I can exercise and eat without making myself crazy, and the scale moves down. 

My waistline is moving down, too. That's the only measurement I'm taking. At the beginning of the year my waist was around 42 inches. Today it was right around 35, a number that I've kept in my head ever since Dr. Oz used 35 inches as a marker for increased chronic diseases. So you can say I passed a big milestone this week.

Other notes from today

• She's really happy with my weight loss, even though I intentionally slowed it in May to try out new foods and calorie levels. According to her scale I'm at 203.8, which is tantalizingly close to Onederland.
• She wants me to increase my daily protein from 60 grams a day to 80 grams, so I'll be throwing protein powder in everything and chugging protein shakes until I can tolerate more solid proteins (STILL having an issue with chicken!).
• She'd like me to keep my total calories to around 900 a day. I wasn't really sure how much to increase it from the initial 600-ish but I knew I had to once I started exercising. 
• And I really need to do better with water. According to my Tanita printout, I'm on the low end of the hydration scale, so I'm breaking out the big Hydro Flask again and making sure I drink two of those a day. When you can't eat and drink at the same time it can get frustrating to get both your water and your protein in when your stomach is the size of an egg.

Y'know all those motivational platitudes about moving out of your comfort zone, or living life outside of your comfort zone?

FIND YOUR COMFORT ZONE - THEN LEAVE IT!

LIFE BEGINS AT THE END OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE!

GREAT THINGS NEVER CAME FROM COMFORT ZONES!

Etc.

Lemme give you a different way to look at the phrase.

Pretty much all my life I have felt uncomfortable. 

Chosen last at kickball, made to wear the matronly ballet costume because it was bigger than all the other ones, being the youngest kid in the "teen" Weight Watchers meeting.

Being called Gail the Whale.

That's a pretty uncomfortable childhood. 

The discomfort shifted as an adult. 

Having the armrests dig into your hips at a theater, having a theme park employee shove the safety bar into your gut until it clicked, getting stupid "atta girls" from people at the gym because they thought I had never worked out before ("I'm a regular and I can squat you under the table, old man!").

Postponing routine bloodwork because if I give it a couple more months I can turn it all around with extra fish oil and walking and kale.

So I've been out of my comfort zone for quite awhile now, always feeling bigger or slower or lumpier or somehow "less than" while being "more than."

* * *

A couple weeks ago we went to a baseball game and I realized that I could stick my purse next to me on the set. 

Next to me on the seat!

I wasn't hip-checking my neighbor or having the armrests nudge into my sides. I was comfortably sitting in the seat, bumping into nothing and no one.

I didn't feel the dread of intruding on someone else's space. My space was my own.

Comfortable in my comfort zone.

And now, some updates!

I deliberately added in more calories and carbs in May because I had been walking around lightheaded all the time, and I didn't like the feeling that I was going to fall over at the gym. I also have been trying and retrying foods to test my tolerance, and chicken and tomatoes are still on the naughty list. I just can't stomach them - literally. But some prepackaged protein shakes are back on the nice list, which is great because I have a lot of them. I had read that your tastes will evolve, and they really have. Stevia-sweetened things are still WAY too "aftertasty," but monkfruit sweetener is kinda nice. Overall, though, I do better with unsweetened stuff or just a touch of the real thing, like honey or agave. 

Here's my progression from Feb. 1 of this year to June 1. The front view doesn't really show a lot of change in my eyes, but the side view really has me stoked. I'm a lot flatter in the midsection, and my upper arms have deflated a lot (but holy jiggles, Batman! Those things are wobbly!). Total weight dropped from the beginning of the year is 59 pounds. I am around 6 pounds away from Onederland.

And now, a song for the weekend!