This is day 67 in my Zepbound journey. but given our travel schedule, I haven’t stepped on a scale for 14 days. During that time I’ve had two Zepbound shots, the last of my 5 mg shots and the first of my 7.5 mg shots. I should note that since the Zepbound journey takes you over six months from a dose of 2.5 mg to 15 mg, I’m not even half way to the end of stage 1 of the ramp up process. I’m not certain whether that means that Zepbound is getting a bigger and bigger grip on my eating psychology or whether my system is just expected to adapt in a manner that makes the higher dosage more necessary to influence my behavior, but I somehow think that it should mean that the Zepbound mentality is not yet even halfway ingrained in my system per the schedule that Eli Lilly has established for the Zepbound onboarding process. When I left our hilltop 14 days ago, I had lost a total of 27 pounds. Using standard statistical regression analysis that should mean that I would now be 33 pounds lighter than when I started or net 6 pounds lost during these two weeks.
I’ve noticed in the last five years that when I travel, I almost always lose weight. I don’t lose a lot, but I lose anywhere from 2 to 5 pounds in a normal 2 to 3 week travel cycle. I attribute this to two things first and foremost is the fact that when I travel, I am generally more active, not less, and that activity usually takes the form of more walking, which I can track with my iPhone activity app. It tells me I was 2.5x more active than when I’m home. So, on this trip my walking step count is about twice as great as it is when I am at home, which means I have been less sedentary and more active. I should add that the reduced weight since my last travel to Malta in late May has found me much more able to deal with and even sometimes enjoy the higher activity level during travel. The second reason is that not being at home I tend to snack less and generally that’s where my eating dysfunctions tend to take on the biggest impact. I think the same holds true as with walking, I’m just better on the road. Although I clearly have had a greater difficulty finding the kind of snacks that I have been trending towards in the last few months. there were several times when I was able to find baby carrots and some crudite with hummus, but those were the exceptions rather than the rule. Instead, I have been forced to find what snacks I could and use the best option available approach to finding things that satisfy whatever snacking urge I have at minimal caloric damage.
I’ve continued to record my daily caloric intake quite religiously. That process is never 100% accurate. I suspect that while I’m at home, the familiarity of the foods enables me to be more accurate with those estimates but given that I use my AI engine, Claude, to give me caloric values, I think I’m still able to roughly estimate how much I consume. The good news is that where my normal caloric consumption has been between 1600 and 1700 cals per day when I’m at home, when I’m on the road I would say that my consumption has perhaps averaged 100 to 200 cals more but hasn’t varied significantly from that fairly low level. The worst day I recorded was 2200 cals and that was because that was a day with an extended timeframe due to the time zone changes as we flew back into New York. I will also note that I tend to do worse when I have idle sitting time Where boredom tends to drive snacking. I had 2 1/2 full days of train travel to give me that or coefficient and no I total of four airline travel days to add to that equation. Nonetheless, I think overall my food consumption and caloric value consumption over these two weeks has been pretty darn reasonable.
So here I am, waiting to fly back to San Diego after a wonderful two weeks of travel, seeing family, friends and interesting sites and I am desperately anxious for only two things about my arrival home. First and foremost is to see my good pal Buddy, but after that, it’s all about getting on my scale and finding out just how my weight has fared over these two weeks. I’ve probably mentioned to Kim a dozen times how curious I am as to whether I’ve lost or gained weight and how much. I suspect that the true range of expectation should be between not losing weight for this two weeks and losing a lot of weight over this two weeks, but I don’t want to jinx myself by presuming that because the body is a funny thing and travel is a even funnier thing when it comes to how your body respond to it. I have convinced myself that no matter what the scale says, I am pleased with how I handled this travel time and that’s especially so because I feel that most, if not all, of the lessons I have taught myself over the last two months have locked themselves in, and that I am still as serious as I ever was about continuing this program and continuing my downward trajectory in my weight level.
My plan is to resist the temptation of getting on the scale today and simply get back to my regular routine of weighing myself first thing in the morning tomorrow in addition to the uncertainty about the amount of my weight loss. During this fortnight there is the added excitement about the fact that I’m reaching a major threshold. I’ve spent my entire adult life over 300 pounds and going below 300 feels like a major personal milestone. My plan is to keep going quite a bit further down the scale, but I will take a moment to celebrate passing through that auspicious level….whenever it happens. That is the great unknown, but what isn’t unknown is that it will happen one day soon.