The weight loss blog of Jeff J. Snider, who won't rest
until he's half the man he used to be.
I weighed 350 on Saturday. No progress again (a vacation to New York isnt great for weight loss). But 350 is a nice round number from which to start the next wave of real weight loss. We started a Biggest Loser competition today at work, and my goal is to lose 40 pounds by July 27 when it ends.
Time to get serious again.
Wow, it’s been a while, eh? Sorry about that. I went to Texas and missed two weigh-ins because of that, and since then, my life has been just crazy enough to keep me from finding time to update you all. I have, however, found time to weigh in, and you can imagine that if I had awesome news, I would have found the time to post here.
So as you’ll recall, when I left for Texas last month, I had just weighed in at 346.8 pounds. I went down to Texas with grand plans to exercise and eat well and all that stuff that people who are trying to lose 110 more pounds plan on doing. Instead, I exercised very little and ate not very well. I expected to come home and weigh about 360, but I didn’t. I weighed 348.4. Sure, it’s up 1.6 pounds, but it was quite a relief.
The next week, I weighed in at … 348.4. No change.
Last week, I weighed in at 347.6, down a little less than a pound.
Today, I weighed in at … 348.4.
I guess if you want to look on the bright side, my body seems comfortable under 350, which it hasn’t been in a long time. If you want to be less rose-colored-glasses-wearing-ish, you might point out that after losing 45 pounds in the first few months of my efforts, I’ve now lost about eight in the last several months. So it’s time to redouble my efforts.
I’ve only been to the gym three times in the last two weeks, due to laziness and not feeling well and a couple middle-of-the-night phone calls that made me want to shoot my alarm clock at 5:00 a.m. That will change. There’s not much I can do about the phone calls, but they’re not very common anyway. I can do plenty about the laziness, and I can fight through the not feeling well. Starting now, I am back on my four-mornings-a-week schedule at the gym.
We also haven’t exercised much at home either, because our treadmill is still broken (if you’re thinking that whoever told us we have a good warranty is full of crap, you are correct), so we can’t exercise together. We have gone for some walks in the evenings after the kids go to bed (finally, SOMETHING good about having my brother living in our basement!), but we can’t do that every night. So I need to remember to call the treadmill company and get that thing fixed so we can get back in that routine.
One other thing that I have noticed is that I haven’t been eating really well at work. Not bad, really — certainly a ton better than I used to eat — but not as good as when I started this whole thing. I’ve talked with Beth about it, and we are going to work on taking healthier snacks to work with me, and making healthier lunch choices. My personal trainer comes with a free membership to a cool website that helps with meal planning, so I need to take advantage of that.
No Blubbernomics this week, because there’s nothing to report. Next week will be better. Of this I am sure (hopeful).
I am down in Texas, and I forgot to do an official weigh-in before I left yesterday morning, so I won’t be weighing in this week. I won’t be back with my scale until next Sunday, so Monday or Tuesday will be my next official weigh-in, I suppose.
I’m secure enough in my manliness to admit that I got my butt kicked by a girl this morning.
My membership at the gym comes with a free consultation and workout with a personal trainer. I did my consultation last Monday, but we didn’t have time to do the workout at that time. So today, I did my workout. Let me tell you, I have a whole new respect for the people on The Biggest Loser (well, respect for their physical efforts; the Blue Team really has me wondering about their mental capacity). I’ve always known that getting healthy will be hard work, and I’ve worked hard on my own, but nothing like this. It was really an eye-opener for me to see what I’m going to have to do to get things done.
I’m heading to Texas for a week on Friday, but starting on Monday, March 23, I will be meeting with the trainer twice a week. I’m really looking forward to learning the science behind exercise and nutrition and everything else that needs to work together for me to meet my goals. I have always been better at doing things when I understand WHY I am doing them, so I think the more I learn about how the body works and reacts to different things, the easier it will be for me to make the right choices.
So today was a big (and painful and expensive) step on my road to being Half the Man. Woohoo!
Subtitle for this week’s post:
TOP 4 REASONS I’M GLAD I ONLY GAINED 0.8 POUNDS THIS WEEK
So all things considered, I was actually relieved to step on the scale and see 346.8. It’s obviously not progress, but it could have been worse.
I am going to Texas for a week or so on the 13th, but as soon as I get back, I will begin working regularly with the trainer. I really enjoyed talking with her and learning a little bit more about the science of weight loss, and I am confident that a combination of better tracking of what I eat and a more scientific approach to exercise will get me back to losing four or five pounds a week, which is what I need to be doing at this point.
Here’s this week’s Blubbermetrics:
Okay, let’s start with the Blubbermetrics:
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?
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.
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.
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!
Now I know how the people feel on The Biggest Loser, when they work hard all week but don’t lose any weight. By all accounts, this should have been a better week. Less eating out at work, lots of good exercise, etc. But in the end, I gained a little over half a pound, weighing in this morning at 352.6. I guess this week I will need to be more vigilant about what I eat, and continue increasing my stamina so I can have better and better workouts.
I guess, on the bright side … on The Biggest Loser, they usually follow up a disappointing week with a huge week. Of course, they also have trainers and spend hours every day working out and have nutritionists telling them what to eat. But I can do it too.
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