Chimeras

The numbers you get at the end of a fast are chimeras, of course: they're mostly about lost water, not about lost fat. I knew they would bounce back, and they have; and they may not yet be done rebounding. Still, it was agreeable to see two long-awaited numbers heave in sight: the 32" waist, and the waist-hip ratio of 0.900. 

The 32" waist is not a serious goal: I don't really care what my standalone waist measurement is, so long as it's under 34". But it has long been the purely theoretic number that lodged in my head as the size my waist ought to be: I think it may have been my waist measurement when I was a teenager. Or I may have thought it was: possibly it was the size of my Levis, which would have been total non-information. Who knows. I didn't learn to measure and record with real discipline until decades later. So it's not really what I'm aiming at -- just as 160 lbs wasn't ever really what I was aiming at -- but it eases my adolescent heart to see it.

My weight dropped to 150.9, and bounced back to 152.5 today. This is the least I have weighed in my adult life. When I did my initial big weight loss, I got down to 152 for a few days. I deliberately gained back to 160. At that point I felt like I was too damn little. But I've had a few years to adjust my mind to the fact that I'm actually an average-sized guy: no longer "beefy," or "husky," or "stocky." Maybe 150 or so is where I land: I can live with that. But weight, while it's easy to measure with (spurious) accuracy, is not a serious measure of what I'm really driving at, which is metabolic health. My best number for that is my waist-hip ratio: that is, my waist measurement divided by my hip measurement. I've been aiming at getting that number down to 0.900, and keeping it there.

I got there at the end of the fast yesterday: 0.889. I'm still there today, at 0.896. Since I have a nice data set now, four years of numbers, I know exactly how this graph behaves, so I know that keeping a 7-day rolling average around 0.900 means having that average wander back and forth in the region between 0.890 to 0.910. So it's business as usual until the 7-day average falls to 0.890: it's currently at 0.901. At that point I will cautiously lift my foot from the pedal.

So -- God willing and the creek don't rise -- I'm in the end game, now. It's been a long savage fight, but I think I'm winning this thing.