107

I'm down to 107 kg (235.9 lbs.). I haven't been that weight since senior year in college. To put that in perspective: when I got back from Switzerland, having lived there my entire junior year, I weighed 200 pounds (90.72 kg), the result of lots of hiking. Switzerland is where I discovered my love of walking and exploring. When I got back, my mother said she almost didn't recognize me. Alas, I regained a lot of the weight I had lost over the course of senior year, bringing me up to 230-ish pounds. And I thought that was bad at the time. Little did I know that I would later balloon up to 300 pounds (136.1 kg) well after college. I weighed that much right before my 2008 hike, but three months of walking with a 60-pound pack on my back brought me back down (down!) to around 255 pounds (115.7 kg).

So now here I am, back to my senior-year weight. I suppose this is a good thing—much better than my pre-stroke high of 128 kg (282.2 lbs.). I still have 7 kg to go to reach the psychologically significant weight goal of 100 kg (220.4 lbs.), then another 10 kg after that to reach my Switzerland-era weight of 90.72 kg (200 lbs.). Do I want to drop lower than that? Well, we'll see how greedy I am once I reach 90 kg. Will I reach 90 kg on the Newcastle Diet? Not likely. I'm going to have to keep working at the weight loss long after Newcastle is over, and I'm hoping that Dr. Jason Fung's intensive version of intermittent fasting (which involves 24-hour fasts as well as regular intermittent fasting) will get me there. Anyway, 107 kg is cause for celebration. Let's see whether I can lose any more weight over the coming week.

ADDENDUM: I used a BMI calculator to see how far I'd need to drop to reach the Newcastle Diet's goal of losing 10 BMI points in two months. According to the calculator, I need to drop down to about 80 kg. This is, frankly, below where I want to be, and at the rate I'm losing weight, I don't think I can make that goal by mid-August, anyway. But I guess I'll try. Strength training may be key, here, because built-up muscles increase your metabolism, and my metabolism, left to its own devices, is notoriously slow.

To be clear: a BMI over 30 puts you in the "obese" category. Between 25 and 30 is "overweight." A BMI of 24 is considered on the heavy end of "normal."