After the 241 weigh-in a couple of weeks ago, I quickly dropped to 239 within the next couple of days, then crept up to 243, then dropped to 239 again, then crept up to 241 again this morning. Ugh.

Seems like I’ve plateaued again with 241 as the point I’m wavering around. I haven’t been aggressively attacking it, though. I even had my first beer since the SuperBowl on Saturday night. Just one, but it’s been the first time I’ve had any alcohol in nearly 5 months.

Overall, my eating habits the last couple of weeks have been far from stellar, though still significantly better than before I started this journey. Still, I have been eating refined (i.e. bad) carbs with greater frequency and in greater quantity than I have in previous weeks and there are a couple of meals where I pigged out a bit. So whether it’s a plateau or I just found my “maintenance” point is probably debatable. I think I’m going to leave myself a little wiggle room this week, with the holiday weekend coming up, and then get more serious about the bad carbs and quantities again come Monday.

Another week, another 4.5 pounds. Of course, it’s only three pounds in three weeks if you base it on weighing in at 244 three weeks ago (or 7.5 pounds in 4 weeks if you base it on the 248.5 weigh in 4 weeks ago). I’m good with averaging a pound a week. Like I’ve said, this isn’t a diet I’m itching to give up so I can claim my victory and then go right back to the terrible eating habits that got me here. This is a long-term lifestyle change. So if my new lifestyle results in healthy, gradual weight loss… woo-hoo!

I actually cheated a bit this week, trying to shake up my metabolism and keep it off its guard. It wasn’t huge, gorging meals, but definitely more crap carbs. The odd thing was that I could sort of feel it when I was particularly crap-carby in a meal. I’d just feel a little fuzzier. Not a huge fan of it.

Now it’s back to the regular mostly-good choices. We’ll see where they take me.

So, I’ve been bouncing around with primary care docs. My main guy since 2002 retired last year, then I switched to a new guy, but he moved from a relatively close office to one in downtown Seattle. Since half of the time I wanted to see the new guy, he wasn’t available for days, I’d end up going to the walk-in at another clinic nearby where my son has his pediatrician. Long story short, I figured if I’m going to their walk-in when my doc isn’t available, maybe I should switch my primary care to a doctor there. Even if he’s unavailable, the walk-in’s going to have all my records since I’m a patient at that clinic, and any notes added to my file by the walk-in will be easily available to my doc.

So, today I visited to meet the doc I’d picked there and see if I was comfortable with him. And, of course, I got weighed and had my blood pressure checked. The weight — wearing shorts, sneakers, and a t-shirt (with my Treo, wallet, and keys in my pockets) — was 248.4. I asked them to check my records and see what my weight was the last time I visited the walk-in. I weighed in at 289.5 in October. Based on that, I’ve lost 41 pounds.

As for my bathroom scale, I was a naked 243.5 right after peeing this morning, then 244 a few minutes later. So that’s somewhere between 5 to 5.5 pounds since weighing in at 249 on Saturday morning. Could I really have been retaining that much water? And what was causing it? Was it the soda, the heat, that I’d been nibbling a handful of grapes a day for a few days and my body reacted to the uptick in sugar intake? Maybe it was a combination of all three.

It wasn’t the hot sauce. That’s for sure. After dropping 4.5 pounds in a week, I was putting Sriracha or Tabasco hot sauce on at least one meal a day if not more and my weight went up. I kept using it, as things fell again. I’m thinking that low doses of hot sauce have little effect on my weight, but they do spice up a flatbread quesadilla with sliced turkey.

So, the last week was pretty rough for me. Can’t talk about all of it, but it’s just been very stressful. On top of that, it was HOT in Seattle and my reaction to that was to increase my intake of diet cola by triple (if not more), and ever since the baby started teething, he doesn’t sleep through the night, so I’ve been getting less sleep.

All of that translated to me weighing in at 249 last week. Yeah, up 5 pounds. I thought the culprit might be that I’d been nibbling grapes on occasion all through the previous week, but it hadn’t been much, maybe a handful a day. Still, I thought the sugar intake might have had something to do with it.

I cut out the grapes, but it wasn’t until the temperatures went down and I cut the soda back to the maximum of 2 cans a day that I’d been holding to earlier that the weight started coming back off. This morning I weighed in at 245.5. That’s a pound-and-a-half up from two weeks ago, but if you stretch it over the last three weeks, it averages a pound a week, and I was suspicious of that 4.5 pound drop in a week. So I’m not disappointed about being 245.5 this week, only I’m not sure that weight is accurate.

See, this morning, I got up and I was 245.5 in my underwear according to my scale. I went and checked my e-mail before getting some breakfast and got an urge to poop. I went and pooped, then decided to strip naked and weigh myself again, figuring I might knock off another half pound. The scale said 246. How could I, after shedding some waste and one last article of clothing, be heavier?

I know weights are supposed to fluctuate from scale to scale, but the same scale should be relatively consistent. Shouldn’t it?

Anyway, my watch that I got for my birthday in October is loose enough that most parts of the day I can turn it around my wrist. There’s some resistance. It’s not spinning, but it’s loose. I dropped another belt notch a couple of weeks ago, but it was a little snug and I didn’t want to crow about it. But in the midst of this craziness, it’s become less snug, so I’m having that experience of clothes fitting better while the scale acts screwy.

How much of the “weight gain” was me retaining water because of all the extra heat/soda, and how much was my scale giving me a low reading on Memorial Day that it wouldn’t likely replicate later? I don’t know. I just know that I’m back on a downward trend (I think), the average loss is still good, and I’ll start looking for a more trustworthy bathroom scale. Any recommendations of one that’s good and affordable?

Last, I’m going to the doctor tomorrow, so I’ll get a doctor’s scale weigh in. My doctor moved to a new office 15 miles farther away from my house than his old one was, and I’d only been with him a year since my long-term guy retired, so I’m switching to someone closer. Thus it will be two different scales, but still an interesting weigh-in because it’s got a multi-month gap.