I took a couple of days off from blogging after reaching Key West, so we’ll resume by my keeping not one but two promises.  I said here [linkie] that I would do one final trip weigh-in on the 10th in KW to give me a close the record number.  I did that, stopping at a handy Publix on the way back to the hotel from Mallory Square.  Ready?

I missed catching my feet, but you can see their reflection on the scale, to include the hole my right foot big toe wore in my bike sock.

Two eighty-five (~129 kilograms) on the nose!  As my first official weight of this whole undertaking, noted here [linkie], was 367 pounds and change/166 kg, I have lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 pounds/~37 kg over the past four months.  Now, I’ve learned that scales along the trip have not been exactly measuring atomic weight to six digits after the decimal point, but hey, I’ll take “the mid-280s” as a solid start point from which to defend The Battle of the Bulge.  Maybe I can even stay on the offensive.  Stranger things- anyone up for a 3,500 mile/5,600 kilometer bike ride?- have been known to happen.  Oh, and I think my friend Fred won the “Guess My End Weight” contest.

The second promise is a little harder to keep.  OK, OK, it’s a lot harder to keep.  But I said I’d do it here, so here goes.

You’ll remember that this trip was originally going to start in Jacksonville, Florida.  On the first day just before leaving I walked myself into a bathroom and took a selfie of my stomach flab.  I cautioned folks then that it wasn’t pretty.  I said that I would take a comparable pic at the end of the ride, and we’d see what happened [linkie].  Once again, you’ve been warned.

So, for the not-faint-of-heart, here’s what my abdominal area looked like in late July

before [linkie]

and what the same area looks like now

after [linkie].

Belly fat is not pretty.  I don’t know if what mine looks like will ever improve beyond this point, or if I’m just condemned to look like Jabba the Hutt’s third cousin down there for the rest of my life.  But my waist size in pants has gone from 56″/142 cm to 46″/117 cm.

I’ll take that.