Fitness: Hitting the Reset Button

The ticker on the left side of the blog changed today.  It now says I have 70 pounds to lose with 125 lost already.  A few days ago, it said I'd lost 125 pounds and was five pounds below my goal weight.  Simply put, the goal weight has changed.

The ticker says I've lost 125 pounds because it's been keeping track since the first time I recorded my weight with it.  I've been telling people that I've lost about 100 pounds in the last year, but I've been fighting this back-and-forth battle for years.  My heaviest documented weight was 396 pounds, which I rounded to 395 for some reason when I first set up that ticker.  Last year, when I set up the ticker again, I set my goal weight at 275 pounds, even though that wasn't actually my final goal.  I chose 275 as an intermediate goal because I thought it would allow me to do three things:

• Take my kids to Six Flags and ride every ride, even the one or two that I'd never been able to experience because I simply could not fit into the safety restraints.
• Join the others from my gym, HIPE Fitness, in riding the Grafton Zip Lines in the hills near Grafton, IL (right on the Mississippi River, near St. Louis.)
• The real excitement: buy term life insurance.

More on that later; the short version is that the Six Flags trip was fantastic, I talked to a couple of guys about the life insurance yesterday, and the zip lines are up in the air because it's a little hard to tell what their weight limits actually are anymore.  That was frustrating before, but now that I've got this surgical wound to recover from right in the center of my core, I suppose it's moot.  They could send me a free ticket, but it would still be foolish to go riding down a zipline in the next couple of months.

Anyway, the new goal is probably not my final goal, either.  The new goal is 200 pounds.  Why that nice, round number?  Aside from its pleasant roundness, which ought to be reason enough:

• I still want to jump out of an airplane, and the two local jump schools with the best safety records require a maximum weight of 220 and 225 pounds, respectively.  At about 200 pounds, I can wear what I want, drink all the water I want on the day, and know that I'll still make weight.
• I still want to get back into BJJ, and that includes competition.  If I do, I'll roll with everyone, of course, but I don't want to compete against people 6 inches taller than I am.  I'm only a little over 6 feet tall, and at that weight, I can compete with people my own size.
• I started this thing with 220 as the goal, but the more time I spend with actual athletic people, the more I realize that even that is not necessarily my best weight.  Honestly, when I reach 200, there's a chance that I'll want to go a little lower; it'll depend on how muscular I am by that time and how low I can go without sacrificing strength.  If I can walk around at 185 pounds . . . why not?  But we'll start with 200.

My goals keep getting revised . . . but they're being scaled up, not down, and that's good news.  I've needed to reset my ideas of what is "normal" and "reasonable" for a long time; the idea that it's "unrealistic" for a man about six feet tall to weigh about 200 pounds is ridiculous.  It belongs on the ash heap with a lot of other silly things I taught myself as a young man.