Update on my goals
Near the end of July I created a couple of 12-week plans to reach a couple of goals:
- Write or collect first drafts of essays about epilepsy for a planned book
- Weight loss
I'm near the end of that plan. Actually I am in my 2nd last week - the plans both end Sunday October 15, 2023. I don't think I've really looked at any of it in the last few weeks so this seems as good a time as any to review my progress.
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Epilepsy Essays
This plan started out with a final goal of having a first draft of a manuscript done. It was very ambitious, and assumed I could have everything I needed written and edited in the first half of the plan. 6 weeks! That's not a lot of time, and I had quite a few essays to write.
I revised the plan and changed the goal simply to have the first drafts written. Many of the essays were already done, and I did some cursory edit passes over them and marked them up. My plan morphed then into writing about specific topics over the next 6 weeks.
A few weeks ago I lost steam, and decided that the essays I had written were enough. Partly because I felt like I was forcing essays out about topics - they weren't flowing naturally as they had been before. To me that meant they weren't topics I was interested in, so I stopped writing. I think I have 9 essays written, a mix of 1st to 3rd drafts, which is really good!
I had the idea in my head that I needed to have a "substantial amount" - whatever that amount is, I don't know. But what I had didn't seem to be "enough". And as we all know, perfect is the enemy of the good. I feel good about this pivot.
I'm going to leave the essays alone for a little bit, and come back to it in early 2024 to finish up the drafts. I will probably draw up a new, shorter plan (because I don't need to take as long to write them in the first place). We'll see how it goes.
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Weight Loss
This was the easiest plan to measure, though probably it was the most difficult. I had the goal of losing 6 pounds over 12 weeks - 1/2 a pound per week. My starting weight was 240.3, meaning my final weight by October 15th would be, ideally, 234.3.
Things started out very well but around the middle mark of my plan my weight started to creep back up. Currently I am at 238.1, which is very good, all things considered.
I know I'm not going to get to 234 pounds, but I was never going to be disappointed with losing fewer than 6 pounds. I'm at a point where losing a large amount of weight is very difficult because I've already lost a ton of weight. When I was closer to 300 pounds, I only needed to make small changes to see the numbers drop. Now, the changes need to be bigger while the numbers are slower to change.
But I can see the change in my body from even 4 years ago, so as I said - I'm not disappointed. Yes I would like to get closer to my ideal weight according to BMI or whatever, but that's a long way off.
So that's the update. I think I'm doing well on both fronts, and I'll do a final update after October 15th.