Me, 119 lbs. I think I am safely in the "normal" range now, with a BMI of 24.1.
I continue to be surprised that the scale keeps going down, and as fast as it has (roughly, between 1.5 and 2 pounds per week). Come to think of it, though, it's not too different from what I've seen in the past. My weight has tended to be stable at certain points (I weighed 156 for years, day in and day out), but has moved quickly between those points when I've changed my eating or exercise patterns. That, and my hated, long-ago course in chemical systems kinetics, inspired my own informal theory of metabolism (mine anyway): that people, being reactors, have multiple steady states.
Metastable steady-state reactors produce a certain output, at a certain temperature and volume, for a given set of input parameters. Change the parameters a little bit -- send in a bolus of different stuff, for example -- and if the change isn't too big, the output will change too at first, but the system will drift back to producing the output it produced before -- back to the steady state. If you change the parameters to something different enough, though, the output can change enough that it drifts to producing a different set of stable outputs, perhaps at a different temperature. Another steady state. Once it's there, it tends to keep that state, unless you give it a big enough "kick" to knock it out of that steady state and into another.
Anyway, my body is a reactor that had a very stable steady state at 156 pounds with the eating and exercise habits I had a few years ago. I might diet or exercise for a few months, or eat too much, and shift the weight up or down by a few pounds, but it always returned to 156. That was my weight before and after I had my firstborn.
After my second was born, I switched to a low-carb diet and my weight dropped almost astonishingly rapidly to 137 or so, where it stayed stubbornly. That was the second steady-state: the state of me eating low-carb. Upping my exercise got it down nearly to 130, with great effort, but when I relaxed that effort (winter came) it bobbed back up to 137. I stayed there till I got pregnant for the third time.
After that baby was born, I weighed (you guessed it) 156. I managed to find another steady state at 146 by eating low-carb again, but not as religiously as I had before, and increasing my level of exercise.
So just this past May, when I sharply changed the amount I was eating -- I think I'm eating about half to two-thirds what I was consuming before -- I knocked myself out of that steady-state, and I'm still traveling to another, wherever it is. I hope it is a fairly stable one, one that I will tend to drift back to even with normal daily variations in the input.
Congratulations! You look great!
(Time to have another baby.)
Posted by: Kelly | 22 August 2008 at 11:50 AM
You look great! This post of your just might be what motivates me to shed my "ten pounds x four kids = 40 extra pounds".
Posted by: Tracy | 22 August 2008 at 09:56 PM