Weigh In for February 7, 2009

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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