Today I was at work and had reason to go to another base that I'd not visited in a while. I was with one person who has seen me regularly during my weight loss (and knows about the surgery), and another person came up to us while we were talking - a doctor who I speak with very regularly on the phone but in hindsight I can't remember when I last saw him in person - probably late last year when I was only early days post-surgery.

Anyway, he said 'hi' to my colleague, and I smiled ...

I completed my super-sprint triathlon today. Don't be fooled by the fact it's called 'super-sprint' - I didn't sprint. Sprint distance is roughly a half of normal triathlon, and super-sprint is about a quarter. The race I did was 400m swim, 8.5km (5.5mile) cycle, 2.5km (1.5 mile) run. Nice short-ish distances of each. Unthinkable even a few months ago. It was a lot of fun, and I didn't come last, and I didn't have to stop running in the run (which is the last leg, and which was my fear). ...

Tomorrow morning I'm doing a super-sprint triathlon (400m open water swim, 8.5km ride, 2.5km run). I did one of these short triathlons about 7 years ago when I was about 30lb heavier than I am now. I got very nervous before the event, so much that I couldn't control my breathing effectively during the swim - my best discipline. I ended up having to stop doing crawl and do breaststroke instead. It was really frustrating.

Anyway, here I am many years later, pinching myself that I'm ...

For the UK folk, I'm 7 stone down (98lb). Quite the achievement.

Funny thing, I'm below my goal weight and think my body looks good in terms of my weight, excess fat. I'm the lightest I've been since my mid twenties. And yet, at 98lb down, some little part of me wants to lose another two just so I can say I've lost 100lb. And the stupid thing is that I actually think and weigh myself on the scale in kilos, so what's that about?! If I didn't hang out on this site, I don't think ...

I work in countywide mental health services, so I travel around a bit with my job and there are lots of people I don't know at all, and lots of people I only see occasionally (we have a couple of thousand employees). I was at one of our bases the other day for some meetings, and someone I hadn't seen for quite a few months said to me "you've lost a lot of weight. I realised you were losing last time I saw you, but you've lost more now - you're looking great". And I said, thanks, yes ...