Day 9 Optifast

Day 9 of the Optifast diet. So far, so good. I lost 16.5 pounds at the weigh in on Day 7, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. I still get the urge to eat, but I find if I take my shakes on time that I don't really get hungry. Energy level is good and clothes are already fitting me that previously didn't fit. For instance, today I'm wearing my Rays jersey and it's actually a little bit loose.

Starting Weight 334.5
Week 1 Weight 318.0.

Let's see what week two brings...

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It's now day five on the Optifast diet. (The picture is from Day 3- My nephew's wedding. As you may have guessed, I'm the larger one!) So far, so good. Day One was the worst- but wasn't really too bad, I was just fairly hungry throughout the day. Since then, I've only felt hungry about the time when I was due for another shake. On days two and three, I did get some abdominal pains- kind of a stitch in the side. It's been fairly smooth sailing since then.

The toughest part has been watching other people eat. For instance, at my nephew's wedding, I had to sit and watch the people on either side of me pick from a dozen trays of Spanish tapas. So far, I've been able to handle this well. But it has been only five days. Maybe 20 days from now, I'll breakdown and attack someone's french fries. I hope not...

I put on a shirt today that was too tight for me to wear before. This makes me think that maybe I'm going to weigh in Thursday with a weight loss of over 10 pounds. I'm hoping for 20 pounds, like this blogger "Optifast Loser" registered in his first weigh in, but seriously I'm already happy with how this diet is going.

Of course, many of the urges to eat are still there. Leaving Court today, I saw the 7-11 and thought about how I often hit the place for an after court snack. Later, I passed by a tamale place that I had also hit! Strange to think that if I'm successful, my next tamale is 6 months away. This really is a vacation from food. Maybe vacation is not the right word. An incarceration from food?

Day two on optifast was much better than day one. I only felt hungry when it was about time for a shake. I did get stomach cramps twice: kind of felt like that stitch in your side. That you get when you are jogging. Admittedly, it had been awhile since I've been jogging!

The first day on Optifast

I had my first shake last night after the meeting at about 9:30 PM. What can I say about the taste? Imagine the best milkshake that you've ever had. Can you taste it? Now imagine taking a teaspoon from that milkshake and mixing it with 28 ounces of water.. That's the optifast shake- kind of bland. Nothing really offensive about the taste, but really not much taste there. But it doesn't really matter much to me. I'm seeing the shakes as being just medicine. Something that I have to take every three hours or so. I had a shake at 6am, another one at 9am today. It's now 11am and I'm starting to get hungry. I'd rate my hunger at about a 6 on a ten point scale. I understand it's going to get worse. The guy from my group that was successful in losing 100 pounds said that the first 3 or 4 days are hell! Let's see...

I'm at the morning of the day when I get my optifast product and as you can see from the picture above, my belly is rebelling at the thought of a diet! This last week has been a number of meals where I think to myself that this will be the last time in 6 months that I eat this particular item (Fillipis pizza, for instance). Now, it's time to get serious about things. Soon, there really won't be anything else to eat. And, if reading other blogs is any guide, I'll have about 3 days of extreme hunger before my body gets used to getting energy directly from my fat stores. The process is called Ketosis. It sounds almost like psuedo-science to me, but this Kaiser program has a number of successes. If another man can successfully lose weight, then I can also. I have to believe this.

OPTIFAST- A NEW COMMITMENT TO BECOME HALF THE MAN I AM

I'm the "healthy sized" lawyer in the pic. The picture has me making my vows to serve as a board of director for my local bar association. This post is my commitment to loss weight through the optifast program. I wasn't always heavy. It's just been the last decade or so of my life. Optifast will be the first diet plan that I sign up for and it requires basically 20 weeks of no food other than 400 calories of shakes that they give you. It's taken awhile for me to start the program- several meetings with blood work, EKG, etc.. But my first day on the diet should be May 1st. I plan to document my experience in this blog- both the good and the bad!

Remembering things as they were...

Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes I remember things not as they happened, but as I perceived them. My emotions fill in a color and texture to the memories that make the memories not completely accurate.

Take the Black Angus restaurant, for instance. It's your run of the mill steak house complete with coupons in the Sunday paper. Yet, when I remember going there with my parents as a child, I remember it as one the fanciest restaurants imaginable- the cloth napkins, the huge steaks and all the rich people eating there. I remember thinking that I had to be on my best behavior, and, yet, being not quite successful in eating neatly! Logic tells me that the biggest steak was 6 ounces and that no one rich is likely to go there, but I still think of Black Angus with all the excitement of the seven year boy who was going to eat a steak the size of my plate.

Even today, when I take friends out for special occasions, I find myself drifting more often than not to the Black Angus.

"Forget Ruth Chris. I know a great steak place," I'll say...

The same principle probably applies to my "career" as a fighter and a boxer. One of my more vivid (and faulty memories) is that of me fighting a gang of East L.A. gang members when I was a freshman in college. I was visiting a friend in LA, when I had an altercation with her ex-boyfriend. In response to being told that I was a member of the UC Berkeley boxing club team, the ex-boyfriend and two tattoed friends decided to show me how gang initiations took place. No, the initiations did not involve milk and cookies and a secret password. Instead, they jumped me in the park and tried to beat me like a drum. It was me against the three of them, but I managed to break the ex-boyfriend's nose and his friends backed away, scared, no doubt by my prowess.

The reality was pretty different than my perception. The guys weren't gang members- just a group of relatively short and out of shape guys. And I was 6'2" and in my absolute prime. I was in the boxing club in the University, lived in the weight room and didn't have to watch my diet for another decade. So, nineteen year old me against the East LA dwarfs? Not a problem. Forty year old me against three people of any size or age? Let me get my Smith and Wesson..

It makes me wonder what things from today will become "legendary" feats by the time I'm older and remembering those glory days. No doubt it'll be some court exploit that in the retelling became a battle before the supreme court.

"They handled divorce cases in the Supreme Court?" I can hear someone in the future asking.

"Damn right, they did. Now those were the days...."