Met with my primary care doctor

I'm doing fairly well on the >100g protein (using shakes/supplements) and <100g carbs plan that my doctor outlined for me. I'm down somewhere between 4-9 pounds in 2 months of trying. I have a pretty wide day-to-day fluctuation so I can't give it an exact number.

I had a follow up appointment with my primary care doctor today. I had been to the surgical weight loss seminar a couple weeks ago, and hoped to get a referral from my doctor to at least start the 6 month process to get it approved. Not to necessarily go through with it, but to have it as an option.

My doctor wouldn't refer me. He wants me to give it at least a year of medical management with him before I consider surgery seriously. I showed him my graphs of weight over the last 15 years, and the yo-yo-ing. His plan for me is the protein diet, then metformin, then possibly phentermine. I've already been on metformin before, for about 8 years. I don't feel like it helped me with my weight loss. My weight yo-yo-ed during that time just as it did during others, and it gave me GI distress. Phentermine I haven't been on before, but stimulants kind of scare me. He also mentioned trying Topamax. I remember my mom being on Topamax "for migraines," but really for weight loss back in 2005 or so. It made her very verbally slow and very forgetful. I don't think I could stand that, in my professional or personal life.

Going to take this one step at a time but disappointed that he wouldn't help me get the other process started.

Time to take the reins again (2011 Week 12)

I have gotten really off track in the last few weeks. My calories have been ever-increasing, my mood has been down, I haven't been getting any real exercise. And the scale has been showing it. I'm up to 338.8 today, not the direction I intended to be moving in.

But I am determined to get back on track now. I managed to stay under my calorie budget today for the first time in at least a week. I'm back using the whey protein supplement again. And I'm drinking lots of water. I'm going to start hitting the gym more regularly again, and aim for variety, not just doing treadmill all the time, maybe even try a few classes.

I geeked it up a little bit yesterday, trying to figure out what was going on with my body; I figure, I have amassed a decent amount of data now, why not take a look. I only looked at the 10 most recent weeks from my loseit data, partly because it was taking a long time to get the data in the right format, and partly because I wanted the graph below to reflect about the same weight (+/- 10 lbs). Here's what I found:

There is no obvious pattern between avg net (after exercise) calories for a given week and my change in weight for that week:

I also looked at number of calories burned exercising, grams of sugar consumed that week, grams of carbs consumed that week, and grams of protein consumed that week. The only variable that had any hint of a relationship with my weekly change in weight was protein consumed:

So I'm going to try to refocus my efforts on protein. And it looks like 800 grams of protein per week is a good goal to aim toward. I realize that I'm only looking at 10 data points, there are lot of other factors I'm not looking at, my data may be inaccurate, etc, etc. But this is all I have to go on right now, so I'm going with it.