Me and the mastiff

Read a great post today from another guy on a liquid diet. He'd just passed the 250lbs mark, and was feeling justifiably proud of himself, and he chose to put this photo on his blog:

Why? Because the average black bear weighs 250kg apparently! So it got me thinking that I could rate my weekly success by which animal I weighed the same as (to be honest, much as I'm LOVING doing my little Excel graph which documents my weightloss (this is of course slightly unreliable now after the 'wrongly callibrated scales' debacle, which has RUINED my beautiful downwards curve!), and I thought that a beautiful chart which had a photo of a different animal each week would be something else that I could waste time on. (I lie, beautifully colour coded graphs are never a waste of time, just so long as the line goes downwards!)

Anyway, turns out it's harder than I expected to find out the average weight of animals. I google-d it, I wikipedia-ed it, I even encycolpedia-ed it, and all I got was a bunch of nutters worried that their poodle might be pregnant. But during my highly unsuccessful attempt to visualise my journey from hippo to ...hamster (alliteration won out over making sense there I'm afraid) I did find out some fascinating facts to share with you.

• An average African elephant will eat AT LEAST my weight everyday in food, and drink 113litres of water (I'm struggling to get through my required 4!)
• A mastiff (biiiiiig type of dog) averages 170-220 lbs. (That's the closest I could get to an animal that weighs the same as me.)
• Americans stop eating when they're full, whereas Europeans stop eating when they're no longer hungry. Big difference if you ask me, and it's the main thing I'm going to put in to practise when I'm back on regular food.

I went to the gym yesterday. Normally, when I was on diets before, I went first thing in the morning before anyone got there so that I could exercise without anyone worrying about the structural damage to the building. And although I've not lost a really noticeable amount yet, although I'm still obese, I didn't feel the need to hide today. I felt like people were staring at me, but somehow those glances and little smirks didn't seem the same today, they seemed positive, encouraging almost. I don't know if that's a difference in perception, or a difference in confidence, but I really noticed it today and I did the longest workout I've ever done because of it.

Maybe people just suddenly woke up nicer! Guess we'll wait to see the girls at work on Monday to find out how long it lasts!!!