1 Year of Fatness

I realized tonight that tomorrow morning, March 22nd, is the one year anniversary of my first posting on this little monstrosity.  Tonight, I'm setting up a "Then and Now" bit of things.

Weight: 367 lbs

I started this blog weighing in at 367 lbs, as of today, a few weeks before I'd started the blog, I'd weighed in at about 380, but had decided to put off starting the blog for a short period as a result.  Without sorting through the fossil records, I achieved a low weight in the last year of about 287 lbs, and today, I weigh:

Weight:     295.4 lbs
Body Fat: 40.5%
Water:      45.6%

I'm down about 72 lbs from this time last year.  Most of that weight was lost in the first 3 months of the program, but I mostly kept it off, with an up-down of around 20-30 lbs during the worst period, and more recently a fluctuation ranging around 8-10 lbs, but trending downwards.  Nutrisystem's a good program that has worked for me, and I intend to keep using it to finish what I've started.


I would like to have lost more weight last year, obviously, but I'm not unhappy with being able to lose that much and pretty much keep it off.  I'm especially happy with the fact that my fluctuations when I go off the rails are decreasing.  If I can have a repeat performance of last year this year, I may very well  be able to enter the 3rd year of this part of my life saying that I just need to maintain my weight until I die.


Of course, one would be remiss to discuss the last year without mentioning the worst part: the 6 months of unemployment (preceded by 3+2 months of WARN time where I wasn't working the previous year) without a serious prospect of a new job.  It wasn't until late June of last year that I even had a callback from an employer, and by the end of July, I had a job I was going to start in the early fall.  As you know, I spent most of my day every day (10+ hours) looking for work online or calling whatever contacts I could scrounge up.  There are quite literally thousands of engineers right now with my skillset and experience or better looking for the same jobs I was looking for.  It's become a much better climate for my kind, the rare wild AE, but thousands are still unemployed, underemployed, or dead.


You find meaning in some banal activity like trying to improve yourself and bragging about it on the internet, and you muddle through your days.  We waste what little cash reserve we might have on trifles and trips where we sleep in our cars.  I learned quite a bit about myself, went a little bit more crazy than I was before, and made some minor improvements in myself during that period, so I'm OK with calling it a wash.  My career's back on track, I like my car and my apartment, and I love the city I'm in.



It's been a good year, Fatheads, and this next year should be much better.

Fatass, out.