31 January 2022

Since 1 January I have lost 5.3 kg ( 11.7 lbs). I’m pretty happy with that as it keeps me on track to meet some milestones I worked out on my way towards my targets. Total weight loss since October 11th is 15.1kg (33.3lbs). I’m on the verge of dropping from a 36″ to a 34″ waist in trousers. I have an appointment with the nurse at the diabetes clinic on 14 February for blood tests, so I should know soon after that how I’m doing on the key indicators from that.

I’m happy, too, to be reclaiming shirts from my wardrobe that I haven’t been able to wear without embarassment for too long. I haven’t yet bought anything new in smaller sizes because my target is to lose more weight in the coming months. If I do have to buy new stuff, I’ll buy cheap in the first instance until I stabilise. T-shirts don’t count because baggy T-shirts are always OK.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to find any of my old notes from when I was last going to the gym regularly and running in 2006-2009. I think most of them were destroyed in a clearout some time ago, but I found one or two things that surprised me. As far as I can see, for most of the time I was running, my weight wasn’t too far below where I am now, including when I ran a half marathon in September 2009. I looked thinner, but that was entirely down to exercise, not diet – I was running 3x10Ks a week at one point.

To put that into context, the lowest record I can find from 2008 is only 4.3kg less than my weight this morning, and I’m well on track to get back to it again before the end of February at my current rate of weight loss. Having said that, I do remember that I was consistently puzzled why my BMI reading was classified as ‘overweight’ at the time, and I still have a bit to go to transition from obese to merely overweight according to that indicator.

That gives me a lot of hope. I said in my last update that I’d set myself the challenge of getting down to my old teenage weight from nearly 50 years ago. It seems to me that, if I can get my legs working again – and if my knees decide to co-operate – AND if I maintain my approach to dieting, then that challenge becomes more realistic. And the approach to diet I’m taking ought to have a major impact over time on how and where my body stores and burns fat, which in turn reduces the risks of me encountering some of the acute diseases associated with ageing.

That last point has been on my mind for some time, though I haven’t explored it to any degree in public here on the blog. I wrote here on 3 December 2017 of some thoughts on approaching the age at which Dad died. In fact that milestone had quite an impact on me – more than I let on at the time, though some of it crept into a post a year ago in my Covid Diary (The World Has Changed) and in an earlier entry in this sequence (Diagnosis and Motivations).

If you know me well, or have been a long-term reader of my blogs, you’ll know that I’ve often spoken or written of the need to reinvent myself every decade or so. This isn’t a new thing for me. My earliest memory of this was when one of my fellow students at Coates Hall, John Hamilton, called me a ‘dark horse’ when I said in 1980 that I was moving out of the college and into a flat, changing the focus of my first degree from vocational to academic. I’d realised that I’d set myself on the wrong path and was taking steps to change it – reinvention. Johnny died in September 2016, aged 59, younger than I am now. My former boss at Scottish Government didn’t live to enjoy the retirement years he hoped for with his family.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the blog that I want to get back to running, long-distance walking and wild camping, and it’s no secret that I’ve spent a lot of my ‘retirement’ years so far writing fiction. Bluntly, I’d like to be able to do those things, and enjoy them, for as long as my body will let me. Family is at the heart of my future, but within that I need, as they say, to be my best self. So shifting body fat, paring away baggage and refocusing on what matters to me now are a positive things. The push for weightloss and fitness, triggered by the diabetes diagnosis, is therefore about much more than getting my HbA1c number down below 48 – it’s about how I want to live out however many years I have left to me which, if I have Mum’s genetics, ought to be plenty. I don’t mean that in any morbid way, but as an affirmation of life.