One month weight loss

It is one month since I began the intermittent fasting regime.

My weight this morning is 81 kg, which is a loss of 5 kg over the month.

I'm feeling better for it, even if this is much faster than I expected.

Running is becoming easier and 10 km is now my standard distance, with a time of one hour - not fast, but my focus has been on finishing and not hurting myself, rather than speed. The calories burned by running three or four times a week has also been having an impact on my calorie deficit, of course.

Low calorie days have been easy to fit into my routine so far, and no great hardship. Half my usual breakfast leaves me feeling hungry by 6 pm, which a light snack is enough to take off. Fruit teas, an afternoon coffee (to stop me getting a caffeine withdrawal headache) and possibly an apple, keeps me within the 600 calories limit.

On non-fasting days I eat well, lots of fresh fruit and vegetables and a bit more meat, fish and cheese than normal as I think I need to keep protein intake up.

For the next week we are staying with my parents before leaving to visit my wife's country and I've been eating particularly well since I've been here. How much that will impact on the downward trend remains to be seen.

This puts my BMI onto 23.4, at the upper end of the green on this calculator from the UK's NHS:
http://www.nhs.uk/tools/pages/healthyweightcalculator.aspx

I want to lose a further 5 kg and then stabilise. How that will work out remains to be seen.

Reminiscing

We closed the door on the flat we have rented for the past 9 months on 27 September 2012 for the last time.

It was a poignant moment. After a busy and somewhat stressful time of packing, we paused for a minute or two in the living room before leaving.

On the drive to my folks, where we stay for 10 days before heading to my wife's country, we reminisced about our time there.

Instead of casting around for disjointed memories, I was able to go through the sequence, sometimes by the day, other times by the weekend, when life had been a little more mundane.

The visitors. The milestones. Days of extreme weather.

On our last morning I had taken my last 10 km run, a distance that has now become my standard. Over the course of the hour I went over every day, pulling the images from my mental calendar. Sometimes there was a particular resonance - it was on 15 July that I pulled a muscle in my calf on this same track and had to hobble home, for example.

Much has happened.

There is something deeply satisfying about being able to remember every day of it.

The boy who can't forget

This documentary on youtube was broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. It investigates several people with hyperthymesia, including British student, Aurelien, and American, Jill Price.

I thought I was doing well being able to manage every day of the past 9 months since I began this process, but these people are amazing. Perhaps if I had began at four years old I would have developed the ability fully too. Or perhaps it is something inate. Certainly at present, I am more like the memory champion interviewed who can remember past dates, but it takes some effort to tag and review each day.

Weight going down, balance going up

I began my intermittent fasting routine on 30 August 2012 and have aimed to eat below 600 Calories on at least two days per week.

Sometimes these days coincide with runs of up to 10 km, which would consume around this number of calories, meaning a full deficit of the guideline daily amount of 2200 - 2770 Calories.

Here are my figures, with the baseline results from 30 August in brackets.

Weight: 82.5 kg (86.0 kg)

BMI: 24 (25)

Body Fat: 23.8% (24.7% - measured on the same local chemist's balance)

Balance: 22 seconds (12 seconds - standing on left leg holding right ankle, with eyes closed, average of three times)

Pace over 5 km: 5:00 min/km (during a race on 9 September 2012. Was 5.31 min/km on 2 September)

Days of future passed

The title, of course, alludes to an album by the Moody Blues. I bought it half a lifetime ago. It has their most famous song: Nights in White Satin.

Looking back over the nearly 11 months spent in my country gives me the strong sense of future days passing.

There was so much we had planned to do that has now been done.

People we have visited. Vacations we have taken. Our visit to the Olympics and Paralympics in London. A trip with my parents. A series of work events: planned, delivered, history.

There have been surprises, of course. Unexpected pleasures, as well as problems to be handled.

I try to keep feeling the wonder and gratitude for each new day.

But sometimes in my reviews of long-planned days that are now in the past, I am unsettled by the knowledge that my internal calendar stretches both forwards and back. As I stand on each day that is today, I am just filling in the details.

Which reminds me of something written by Thomas Hardy in one of his novels.

We mark the day of our birth each passing year. But, unbeknown to us, each year we also pass the date of our future death. So best not to be complacent.

Every day is a gift and one day will be my last on this Earth.

Ground rush

Soon we will be departing for my wife's country.

I am experiencing the ground rush of a far off event suddenly arriving, the months turning to weeks and now to days. We leave on 7 October.

I wonder how my memory of the days spent here will feel when I am in that alien environment.

Usually when we visit her country, very soon it is as if we had never been away.

I wrote about the same experience about coming here back in February in my post: Here we are again.

Already one foot has crossed the ocean as that foreign land pulls me back, uprooting me once again.

I'm a little nervous that it will become harder to recall the memory tags pinned to my mental calendar when now seems a distant place.

At the same time I feel excited at the prospect that I will be able to remember and be able to say: "This time last year we were...."

Body reboot

I've been practising intermittent fasting for just two weeks - that's a total of four low-calorie days - and have lost an impossible amount of weight.

According to my standard set of bathroom scales, weighing at the same time (immediately after getting up), I have lost 3 kg (down to 83 kg), which doesn't make sense.

A kilo of fat is equivalent to about 7000 kcalories (compare it with butter). Four low-calorie days is a deficit of, at most, 8000 kcalories, which doesn't add up to 3 kg loss.

I'm not measuring my IGF-1 level - the hormone that determines whether cells are in go, go, go division mode or repair mode - but perhaps it is dropping already and that is moving my body towards a new equilibrium.