30 pounds

I'm celebrating having lost 30 pounds over the past 7 months.


Me, today, holding 2 15-pound weights

I read today that Michael Moore has also lost 30 pounds. More power to him. More power to me. He'll get down to where I started and I'll get down to where I want to be. There are many more pounds to go before we get there.

To give myself a better idea of how my body has changed, I've thought of those 30 pounds in a lot of different ways.

I like to visualize fat in terms of pounds of butter. Here's what 30 pounds of butter looks like on display in the refrigerator section of the grocery store:


32 pounds of butter

And here's another way to look at what I'm not lugging around any more:


30 pounds of potatoes

I'm not slowing myself down by toting the weight of 6 bags of flour all the time:


30 pounds of flour

And I'm not lugging around the weight in this much water:


30 pints of water

A pint is a pound the world around.

In order to lose these 30 pounds, I had to cut or burn 105,000 calories, which is about the number of calories in 62 pounds of sugar:


My calorie deficit, measured in sugar

When I first thought about doing this photo essay to celebrate my weight loss, I imagined that I would use things around the house to illustrate the surplus avoirdupois that I'd dropped. When I decided to use sugar to represent the calories I've burnt, however, I realized that I needed a different strategy.

Thanks to Ben Lomond Market for the foods used in these shots. A couple of employees looked at me twice when they saw me arranging the stock and photographing it, but no one said anything.