Hooray for urine!

The three of you who occasionally check in on the Wood family blog probably don't expect a discussion of bodily fluids, but here goes anyway. (Boy, am I ever going to catch some flak from Stace when she gets around to reading this entry four or five months from now . . . .)

Recall the good old days twenty years ago or so when I was quite a bit larger than I am now. Over the period of a few years, I managed to take off about 45 pounds. Unfortunately, as happens with most people, my advancing age has made it harder and harder to keep those pounds off, and a few of them have crept back over the years. I've decided that it's time for them to go away again. My approach is to do this very gradually. The goal I've set is to lose one pound every two weeks. So far, I'm down about seven pounds with seventeen more to go. (Of course, as many of you know from personal experience, the next seven pounds will be about ten times as tough as the first seven were, and then the last ten will be about ten times as hard again. That's just how it goes.)

Weight can vary quite a bit from day to day depending on how much water you drink, how much fluid you're retaining, how excessively you overindulged at dinner last night, and things like that. My method for tracking my weight is to set a target weight that I need to hit every second Friday, and then I try never to exceed that weight again. So, for instance, my target for two Fridays ago was one hundred something-eight pounds, which I'll write as 1x8. I made my target that day, and from that day on, I try never to exceed that weight again. I may spike above it on a day or two, but I try to keep it under that ceiling. Two Fridays later, my target is 1x7 pounds. If I hit my target on one of the given Fridays, my reward is a hot chocolate at Starbucks, which in Switzerland costs about the same that you would pay for a small car in the Czech Republic.

My target for this morning was 1x7 pounds. Vacations can make weight loss difficult, so I was a little nervous this morning as I stepped on the scale for my official biweekly weigh-in because we just got back from Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I weighed in at 1x7.7 pounds, a few ounces over my goal. Motivated by my strong desire for a hot chocolate because it's unseasonably cold here right now, I decided to call upon my bladder to help me reach my goal. I drained every last drop of fluid I could manage (Stace will really be flipping out at this point when she reads this), weighed myself again, and presto! I weighed in at 1x6.7, a few ounces underneath today's ceiling. My hot chocolate was really good.