17,500

What is 17,500 calories? 17,500 calories is the amount of fuel hiding in about 30 Big Macs. You don’t like Big Mac? 17,500 calories is also about the same as 66 candy bars. Or how about 70 Pepsis (20oz bottles). 1,200 cups of coffee, 400 apples, 165 bananas... they all equal about 17,500 calories. Now don’t forget, 3,500 un-burned calories amounts to 1 pound of added body fat. Simple math tells us that 17,500 calories equals 5 pounds of body fat. The good news is that 17,500 extra calories burned equals 5 pounds of fat lost. That, my friends, is exactly what I have finally accomplished.

Yeah! Sweet! Woot! (I had to throw that one in for my web friends).

I am a bit skeptical about what the scale tells me. So, I only weight myself when conditions are as close to my set of rules as possible. Here are my rules:

- I only weight myself in the morning. I wake up and go through my normal ‘self-maintenance routine’. As soon as I have toweled off I step on the scale, in nothing other than what God sent me here in.
- I never weight myself if I have had anything to eat or drink within the last 6 hours.
- I always weight myself after ‘taking a ride on the porcelain bus’.
- I never weight myself unless it is a typical morning, and I got up at my usual time of 6:30.
- I always re-zero the scale before each use.
- Once a week I put a ‘test weight’ on the scale to check for accuracy.

Why go through all that trouble? I don’t like inconsistent or inaccurate data. I want to remove as many variables out of the equation as possible. I know that is impossible to do, but sticking to my little routine above, I feel a lot better about the results. As a final precaution, I average my weight over a running-3 days, and use that number as my ‘official current weight’. I know I may be going to far, but I don’t want to get excited about weight loss that is not real, or part of a normal fluctuation. Anyway, I've gone from 240lbs to 235. My wife claims to be able to see a difference in my face. I don’t yet. If not for the scale, I wouldn’t believe that I had lost anything at all.

5 pounds down, 35 to go.