Posted February 28th, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider
Okay, let’s start with the Blubbermetrics:
- Weight: 346 pounds
- Weight Loss Since Last Weigh-In: 1.8 pounds
- Total Weight Loss To Date: 55.8 pounds
- Left to Lose Overall: 106.0 pounds
- Percentage of Goal Lost: 34.5%
- Left to Lose for Next Mini-Goal (under 340): 6.1 pounds
- Average Weekly Loss I Need to Meet My Overall Goal Before My Daughter’s Fifth Birthday: 3.03 pounds
- Average Weekly Loss So Far: 1.74 pounds
Well, it felt good to lose some real weight (you know, something that doesn’t start with “zero-point”). It’s obviously not the five or six pounds I feel like I need to have soon as a breakthrough, but it’s real. Consistent weight loss, even if it is sometimes slower than I want, is a good thing, right?
My mom commented on last week’s weigh-in, asking if I am eating enough. She noticed, as did I, that Bob tolk Mikey on The Biggest Loser a couple weeks ago that he wasn’t eating enough, and that’s why his body wasn’t responding to the immense number of calories he was burning. I am definitely not burning 10,000 calories a day like they said Mikey was (can that be accurate), but I am burning quite a few (and for sure a lot more than I used to when I was a lazy slug). I don’t feel like I am starving myself, but I might need to analyze how many calories I am eating and where they are coming from, because maybe there’s something that needs to change there. It’s one of those things that sounds so simple: exercise regularly and eat the right amounts of the right foods, and you will lose weight. I really believe that it IS that simple most of the time. And I am doing somewhere betweeen good and great on the exercise part of the equation, so maybe the eating part still needs some work. I wish I could have someone with me at all times tracking what I eat so it would be easy to analyze (you know, without me having to do the work), and then that person could also prepare all my meals with the right amounts of the right foods. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
Anyway, the exercise this week went pretty well. I need to start doing something different on Sunday nights (probably something like going to bed at a reasonable hour), because Monday mornings are killers for me. This week, I didn’t go on Monday because I was too tired. I also skipped Thursday due to tiredness. I am thinking about having a scheduled day off each week (probably Wednesdays), but I definitely need to go at least four days each week. I did work out at home in the evening with Beth three times this week — it would have been four or five times, but our treadmill broke and we are waiting on the repairs, so we can’t exercise in the basement together. So the only time we exercised together after it broke was Thursday night, when we went for a 30-minute walk in the neighborhood after the kids went to bed. Wednesday night was when we discovered the broken treadmill, so Beth exercised without me. And then last night, neither of us exercised since we couldn’t do it together.
I am meeting with a personal trainer at the gym on Monday morning. My membership comes with a free consultation with a trainer, so I figured if nothing else, this will give me motivation to get out of bed on Monday morning, which I apparently need. Their rates are pretty ridiculous, so I doubt I will do it after the free consultation, but we’ll see.
How is everyone else doing on their own goals?
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Posted February 27th, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider
Starting now, I am going to mathematicize stuff a little bit more in my weekly weigh-ins. I don’t know if it will help anything, but it will appease my inner need just a little bit. I shall call it Blubbermetrics.
Here are some numbers as of last week’s weigh-in:
- Weight: 347.8 pounds
- Weight Loss Since Last Weigh-In: 0.4 pounds
- Total Weight Loss To Date: 54 pounds
- Left to Lose Overall: 107.8 pounds
- Percentage of Goal Lost: 33.4%
- Left to Lose for Next Mini-Goal (under 340): 7.9 pounds
- Average Weekly Loss I Need to Meet My Overall Goal Before My Daughter’s Fifth Birthday: 2.99 pounds
- Average Weekly Loss So Far: 1.74 pounds
I’m open to suggestions for other mathematical crap I should keep track of, and I welcome your calculations as well.
By the way, I just wanted to tell my friend Lindsay (who sometimes comments here as “Not Your Daughter Lindsay”) I’m proud of her. She started preparing for a half-marathon about a month or two ago, and she’s been working really hard at it. Go encourage her at her running blog. (Beth and I ran into Lindsay and her husband the other night. We’ve kept in touch, but we hadn’t seen each other in over two years. Knowing that we are both working hard on being more fit, I thought it was really funny that we happened to run into each other at … Cold Stone. But seriously, that’s the first time we’ve been out for ice cream in many months.)
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Posted February 26th, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider
So, I DID weigh myself in on Saturday morning. I just haven’t had time to post the results. So here they are:
Weight: 347.8, down 0.4 pounds from the previous week.
Progress is progress, but let’s face it: if I lose less than half a pound every week, it is going to take me four years to get down to my target weight. That ain’t gonna cut it.
The week leading up to the weigh-in on the 21st was my second “full” week of gym-going, and I made it four mornings. My evening exercise sessions could be numbered on one finger due to a busy schedule, so I was glad I was going in the mornings.
Overall, I was a little frustrated to have lost so little. I am eating pretty well (MUCH better than I used to, that’s for sure), and I am exercising a lot. I know these plateaus sometimes happen no matter what we do, but I need a big five-pound loss one of these weeks.
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Posted February 13th, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider
It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, and Beth and I are going up to Salt Lake to stay in a fancy hotel tonight, so I won’t be around for a weigh-in tomorrow morning, so I did it today. This will be short.
Weight: 348.4 (a loss of 0.2 pounds)
Goals:
Eating well: I did okay. We had some important business visitors this week, so I ended up going out to lunch two days in a row, and neither place had any good salads.
Exercising: I went to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. I skipped Tuesday because I was sick, and I skipped today because I was taking the day off work and had some things I needed to take care of. I also exercised with Beth on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.
Not a great week, but a tiny weight loss is better than a gain, so we’ll call it a victory and do better this coming week.
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Posted February 7th, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider
Finally, some progress! It’s not a huge amount, but it’s more in line with what I think should be happening every week. As of this morning, I weigh 348, down 4.6 pounds from last week and 1.2 pounds less than my lowest recorded weight during this process. (We’ll not focus on the fact that it took me two months to lose 1.2 pounds, because this is a celebratory post, dang it!)
I started something BIG this week. I didn’t do it long enough to really see the results yet, but I started it. Starting yesterday morning, I am going to the gym every weekday morning before work. My good friend Flavio, who lives two doors down from me and works with me, has been doing it, so I’ve been driving to the gym at 7:00 every morning and meeting up with him to carpool to work. My brain has known all along that it was silly for one of us to leave a car in the gym parking lot when I could just ride with him from home at 5:30, ESPECIALLY when, you know, I could sort of use the workout. I was watching The Biggest Loser this week, and when I saw them lifting weights, it just sealed the deal for me. I’m not sure why seeing them lifting weights this week did it when it hasn’t in the past; maybe I just needed to exercise at home for a while to get back in the swing of things before I felt ready to go to a gym. But whatever it was, I knew it was the right thing, and Beth was very supportive of the idea even though it means we won’t get to see each other in the morning before I leave.
So I will be doing an hour at the gym five mornings a week, and still doing my 30 minutes in the home gym every day except Wednesday and Sunday. (And to be honest, Saturday doesn’t always work, so this will help me not feel guilty if I miss Saturday.)
We didn’t go to lunch at all this week. We did have lunch brought in three days, but I did a nice salad twice and a Subway roasted chicken sandwich the other day (first time I ever got a Subway with no cheese or mayo, and it was still wicked good). The other two days I did my yummy Slim-Fast fruit smoothies (I tried it with chocolate this week, and it was good, too).
One last thing about The Biggest Loser. I love that show, but it made me mad this week. I hate talk radio because people have to have XTREME opinions or else they will just be boring. That means in order to not be boring, you have to say things that no sane person actually agrees with. Well, this week on TBL, Jillian and Bob tore into Aubrey for saying she only lost two pounds in her month at home because she put on some muscle. Now, I fully admit that in Aubrey’s case, it was an excuse (she later admitted that she hadn’t eaten well). But in a little side interview, Jillian screamed about people who use gaining muscle as an excuse for not losing weight and about when people say they didn’t lose weight, but they lost inches.
Here’s the deal, Jillian: the goal is to be healthy. The way to be healthy is to reduce the amount of fat on your body. This is an extreme example, but let’s look at Barry Bonds (and pretend he got his physique naturally). He is 6′1″ and weighs about 250 pounds. That gives him a BMI of 33, which makes him “obese.” For real? Is Barry Bonds obese? Now, someone you see on the street who is 6′1″, 250, yeah, he’s probably obese. But what if he worked hard and transformed his body into Barry Bonds’ body. Same height, same weight, but with about one-tenth the body fat. And he will have lost ten or twelve inches off his waist. Are you telling me he would have failed because he didn’t lose any weight? For real?
Sidenote: while I was just calculating Barry Bonds’ BMI, I decided to do mine. I am currently at 43.5. But more interestingly, I will have to get down to 239 (one pound less than my ultimate goal) to get out of the “obese” category and into the “overweight” category. That is why I completely disregard BMI. It may be useful in some situations, but I find it completely useless.
Here’s to another good week!
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