At the end of February, I stepped onto the scale in the bathroom for the first time in forever and discovered that I weighed 195 pounds: about twenty pounds heavier than I had ever been in my life. A bit horrified at my recent surge towards 200 (likely an unpleasant side effect of quitting smoking, perhaps) and battling with a minor recurrence of Chuck-like symptoms, I decided to change a couple of aspects of my diet in a half-assed effort to keep things from getting any worse and kinda left it at that.Over the last couple of months, two or three different people at work have asked me if I'd been losing weight. As far as I could tell (based on facing myself half-clothed in the bathroom mirror every day while shaving or brushing my teeth), I looked pretty much the same, so I didn't pay them a lot of mind. It was only when Sarah mentioned that I was looking thinner through the middle a couple of weeks back that I finally stepped on the scale again and was pretty shocked to see that I weighed 177: a loss of eighteen pounds in seven months.
Aside from the unsolicited comments, this new information also explained why some of my t-shirts had been feeling a bit roomier and why my pairs of 34'' x 36'' relaxed-fit jeans had become a bit too-relaxed (necessitating me buying a belt back in June or so). I honestly figured that these clothes were simply getting worn-in and loose, but it turns out that I'd dropped a couple of inches of circumference instead. Now I'm trying to relocate my old pairs of 32" x 36" jeans that had become waaay too tight last year and shelving the 34s until some later date.
Now, what exactly did I do to cause all of these pounds to melt away? I'm not really sure, to be honest. I merely intended to stop gaining weight back in February: losing a bunch of it instead was a completely unforeseen event, especially since I didn't join the gym or start jogging or anything. Thus, it might be a bit before I can figure out if it was just the not-that-drastic dietary adjustment (dropped most of the beef and red meat for chicken and salads, upped my ratio of water-to-pop, started getting bare bones ham-n-cheese sammiches instead of the meat-n-mayo heavy "club" subs at Tommy's), some kind of seasonal swing (we do pack on extra tonnage when it's cold out, after all), simply standing up more at work instead of sitting, the Cleveland Indians playing like absolute crap, my month-long bout of insomnia over the summer, my use of nasal strips to relieve snoring, or some as-yet-unknown factor. Whatever the case, I'll be watching this closely over the coming weeks to make sure this is nothing to end up getting worried about: Goat knows I've had enough of that kind of thing over the last couple of years.
