My yummy lunch

Today for lunch, I made the most ridiculously delicious (deliculous? ridiculicious?) smoothie in the history of mankind.  The ingredients:

1. 1 can of Low-Carb Vanilla Slim-Fast
2. About a cup of frozen strawberries
3. About a cup of a mix of frozen blueberries, raspberries, and marionberries (which are apparently a hybrid of two kinds of blackberries)
4. Five or six ice cubes
5. One Blendtec blender (not an actual ingredient)

Hit the “Smoothie” button on the blender, and 34 seconds later you have a eat-it-with-a-spoon-think smoothie that would make you think, if you didn’t know better, that you were eating ice cream or something equally bad for you.  It TOTALLY filled me up — when I make it tomorrow, I will probably put half in the freezer and eat it a couple hours later, and it will probably seem even more like ice cream — and it was wonderful.

One awesome thing about working at the office is that I don’t have to drop $400 on my own Blendtec.  Yummy.

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Weigh In for January 24, 2009

I weighed in yesterday morning as usual, but I didn’t have time to write about it until now.  And even now, I don’t have much time, so it will be short.

Weight: 352, down 1.2 pounds from last week.  Yes, it’s progress.  No, I’m not happy about it.  Between another interview and two lunches to offer jobs to two of the candidates from last week, I ate out three more times this week.  We only have one scheduled for this week (so far), so that should improve.  I also tried to steer the group towards places that I know have good salads, and I will continue that this week.  (If any of you in Utah County know of good salads, please let me know.)

Exercise went pretty well, as we did every night except Wednesday again, I think.  I can feel my endurance starting to pick up, but I still feel like there is a lot I can do to make my workouts more effective.

This week, I really felt like only stepping on the scale once a week killed my momentum.  In a long week, by the time Thursday or Friday rolls around, you can hardly remember what Saturday morning was like.  So I am leaning towards still having my official weigh-in once a week, but being free to check the scale whenever I want throughout the week.  I think I will limit myself to first-thing-in-the-morning scale checks, just so there is consistency, but I think I’ll let myself check every morning if I want to.  The challenge in that is my original reasoning for going to the weekly weigh-ins: I have a tendency to let my previous day’s progress (or lack thereof) negatively affect my diligence on any given day.  I will be trying my best to reverse that, so a positive day will serve as momentum, and a negative day will serve as a kick in the pants.

Finally, if anyone else wants to join in the weekly weigh-ins, feel free to post in the comments.  I would be happy for this site to turn into a place where a bunch of us have accountability to each other, instead of just me having accountability to you guys.

Snider out.

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Weigh In for January 17, 2009

I knew I was fighting an uphill battle this week, for three reasons:

1. Starting this past week, I am now working from the office four days a week.  This presents a challenge if for no other reason than that it is a change of routine.
2. We have been doing interviews to hire a couple new people at work, which resulted in my eating lunch in a restaurant each of the four days I was in the office this week.
3. I lost 12 pounds the previous week, at least some of it due to the apple-juice-and-water cleanse, and I knew going in that some percentage of that weight was not actual weight loss, which means some of it might want to come back the next week.

So the battle was uphill.  The results?  Could have been worse.  I gained two pounds, weighing in this morning at 353.2.  Realistically, I would guess that at least four or five of the 12 pounds I lost the previous week weren’t “real,” so perhaps my other efforts helped me lose a couple, for a net gain of two pounds.  What were those other efforts?

1. Working in the office went really well.  There is a frigdge there that is always fully stocked, but I found that the frozen burritos and all those other things that I really like didn’t pose a temptation to me at all.  I felt like I stayed focused on my goals while I was there.
2. Eating out didn’t go as smoothly as it could have, but overall I think I did a good job staying focused.  There was a time not long ago when I would have loaded up on a couple appetizers (because it’s hard to decide on just one), and then a couple entrees (because it’s even harder to decide on just one of them), and tell myself the whole time that I would only eat some of each and bring the rest home, but then I’d look down and see that I had eaten the whole feast, and then I’d feel miserable the rest of the day.  I still have work to do on my restaurant portions, but I think it was pretty successful, all things considered.
3. Exercise.  Beth and I exercised together on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and separately on Friday.  I realized that Wednesdays are going to present something of a challenge, because I have church meetings in the evening when we usually work out.  So I will either have to a) get up earlier and exercise before work; b) give up some of my time with my family to work out between when I get home from work and when I have to leave for my meetings; or c) adjust my expectations and make allowances for not exercising on Wednesdays.  I am not sure yet which one I will do (I’m open to input).  But other that Wednesday, the exercise went very well.  I noticed that in general, my legs started complaining before my lungs did, which is probably a good thing at this point (since weak legs don’t portend death and all that).

So overall, it was a week that could have been worse, and it actually leaves me very hopeful for the coming week, since only #1 in my first list above will apply this week.  See you next Saturday (if not sooner)!

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Weigh In for January 10, 2009

This was a weird week in a lot of ways.  I had a lot of stress on a personal level, which might have led to overeating … if I had had that choice.  Tuesday morning, I started a gall bladder cleanse — not because I have any gall bladder issues, but because I’ve heard that it is good for your health and your energy/stamina levels.  So from Tuesday through yesterday, I didn’t eat any solid foods, just drank a gallon of water and a gallon of organic apple juice every day.  I don’t like apple juice very much to begin with, but I can say I probably won’t touch the stuff for a long time now.

But the cleanse went well.  I do feel pretty good (excited to have a nice salad at Mimi’s Cafe tonight), and I am proud of myself for being able to do it.  The downside of it is that I wasn’t able to work out, because there’s not a whole lot of excess energy when all your calories are coming from apple juice.  So the exercise part of my master plan will begin this week.

The upside (besides the feeling better stuff)?  I weighed in this morning at 351.2, which is 11.8 pounds less than last week and only two pounds more than my previous low point.

This week will be an interesting new challenge.  I’ve been working from home, but I will be going into the office four days a week from now on.  That will obviously change the pattern Beth and I have gotten into regarding our weight goals, but I think I am up to the challenge.  I’ll keep you posted.

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Weigh In for January 3, 2009

Well, as of this morning, I weigh 363 pounds.  That is 11 pounds more than the last time I put my weight on the little graph over to the right, and 14 more than I was about a month ago.  Time to get back to work!

EDIT: I went in and added the 349.2 from December 2, since I had blogged about it anyway.  So part of that first paragraph is now a lie.

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Setbacks, New Years Resolutions, and other crap

I hate New Years Resolutions.  A few reasons:

1. If you know in December that you will have a particular New Years Resolution (like, say, for instance, losing weight), it makes it really easy to spend the holiday season rationalizing and living it up.
2. It has basically become a cliche to be good at your New Years Resolutions for a week or a month or whatever, and then throw it out the window.  It’s almost as if the best way to guarantee you WON’T do something is to set a New Years Resolution to do it.
3. New Years Resolutions rarely have the specificity necessary to give even a chance of success.  They are generally things like, “Lose weight,” or “Read more,” or “Be a better mom,” or whatever.  Those are really nice desires, but unless there’s a plan involved, they just ain’t gonna happen.

Unfortunately, I fell into the trap in number 1.  I ate way too much over the Christmas season, and I gained weight.  This is the first significant weight gain I’ve had since I started, and I plan to do everything I can to ensure that it is the last.  To help me avoid the problems in 2 and 3, I will not be setting New Years Resolutions this year.  But I will be doing something better: setting New Years Goals, along with a plan of action for achieving each one.

Here on this blog, I will only focus on one of my goals: get down to 240 pounds.  With my sub-goal of losing three pounds a week, I plan to achieve this goal in 2009, probably around early- or mid-fall.  What are the steps I will take to get there?  I’m glad I pretended you asked…

1. I will weigh in every Saturday morning (no more or less often), and I will report my progress here on the blog every week.  I’ve been weighing myself almost every morning, and I think looking at things too closely has been a detriment.  If I lost a pound or two the previous day, I get complacent.  If I gained a pound or two, I get frustrated.  Either way, it will be more effective for me to weigh in only once a week, where any gain or loss will be more real.
2. I will exercise in some form every day except Sundays when it is too cold to walk to church.  At least five times a week, I will do a workout of 30 minutes or more.  We have many thousands of dollars worth of exercise equipment in our basement, with a nice HDTV mounted on the wall right in front of it, so there is absolutely no excuse for me to not be using it.  My weekly weigh-ins will include a report on my exercise activity.
3. I will work on my other New Years Goals that have nothing to do with weight, because I firmly believe that I will be more effective at living a healthy life if I feel good about myself in other aspects.  The other goals are relatively personal, but they focus on my mental, spiritual, and emotional health, and they all have concrete plans attached to them too.
4. I will take extra care when eating out.  That means avoiding fast food and choosing healthy options when we go to restaurants.  It also means Beth and I will share meals when we eat out.  And of course, it means cutting down on the overall number of times I eat out.
5. Finally, I will re-commit to eating healthy here at home.  That includes three things: a) eating smaller portions at mealtimes; b) eating healthier foods for meals and snacks; and c) not eating anything late at night, and limiting any after-dinner snacks to light, healthy options like fruit or veggies.

This is basically an improvement on the formula that helped me to lose four or five pounds a week this past summer, so I have no doubt that I will be able to average three pounds a week.  (I actually expect to be closer to that four or five number at first, but I also expect that the progress will naturally slow down as I get closer to my optimum weight.)

So I will have my first official weigh-in tomorrow morning.  It will be disappointing — between two more weeks of prednisone and Christmas yummies, I have gained about 12 or 13 pounds, probably.  But it will be the kickstart I need to make 2009 a truly life-changing year for me.

Thank you all for your support, and I look forward to sharing this process with you here.  You can look forward to more frequent post, because I know it is important for me to report everything here, whether it’s good or bad.  It will help give me the sense of accountability I need.

Happy New Year!

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A long-awaited update

Wow, it’s been too long.  I guess I went the entire month of November without an update, and for that I apologize.  Here’s what’s been going on:

–Injury Update: I finally went to the doctor about a week into November, and he prescribed Prednisone (a steroid) to calm the inflammation. It helped some, but it also caused me to gain about five pounds in the five days I was on it. So I am probably about 85% pain free, but it’s still a challenge.

–Thanksgiving: In addition to the injury, of course there was Thanksgiving. We had great food, but I think I was relatively good at keeping control of my portions. I didn’t deny myself anything, but I limited the volume, and I was satisfied with my effort.

–Exercise: Due to a combination of the injury and my laziness, I have only used the thousands of dollars worth of exercise equipment once in the past six weeks. The good news is, that one time was tonight, and I am not feeling any pain from the injury (yet). I am ready to get (back?) into a regular exercise routine.

–Overall: Considering the injury, the weight-gain-causing medicine, and the fattest holiday of the year, I think it’s an accomplishment that I weigh less than I did at my last weigh-in. It’s only a couple pounds (in almost two months), but I guess it’s still progress. I will do an official weigh-in post tomorrow morning when I have weighed myself, but I think I am in the high 340s. I weight 340 when I got home from my mission almost 11 years ago, and I have only dipped below that once (I got to about 338 sometime in mid-2004). So 335-ish will be a big number for me, and I plan to be there before the end of the month.

Oh yeah, and remember that challenge I issued to gas prices a couple months ago? Yeah, well, in that time, I have lost a couple pounds, while gas has lost about 180 pennies. The race to 240? I got my butt handed to me on that. But I made the challenge, and I am now changing it:

Let’s see who can get to 240 and keep it off for a year, Mr. Gas Prices! Bring it on!

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Frustrating injury

About a week ago, I noticed that my hip was hurting. I assumed it was just natural soreness from exercising (I’d just done some pretty steep incline stuff on the treadmill, which I haven’t done much before). But over the next couple days, it got worse instead of better. By Saturday, I was in a lot of pain from my hip all the way down to behind my knee. I had a lot of brief theories about what had happened — maybe a pulled hamstring, maybe a pinched nerve, I dunno.

I finally went to the chiropractor yesterday morning, and he said I have an inflamed SI joint, and the swelling is pressing on the sciatic nerve, which is causing the pain to shoot down the leg. Not fun. He did some adjusting and a little bit of electrocution, and it felt better for a brief period of time. Unfortunately, by early afternoon, the pain was back with a vengeance. It hurt a ton to walk, and it’s even getting to the point where it hurts to sit.

There was a time not too long ago where an injury like this would have embarrassed me, knowing that I only got hurt because I was carrying too much weight around. I would put off going to the doctor or the chiropractor or the doctor because I didn’t want to hear them tell me it was my fault. But now, even though I know it probably wouldn’t have happened if I weighed less, I also know that I am working on the problem and making some great progress, so I wasn’t embarrassed at all. (And for that matter, my chiropractor is one of the nicest guys in the world and hasn’t ever lectured me about my weight in the nine years I’ve known him. AND he has read this website and is therefore aware of my efforts.)

So hopefully I will recover from this injury quickly, and I really hope it doesn’t become a chronic thing. Besides the throbbing pain, it’s frustrating to not be able to exercise and speed up the weight loss.

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Unforeseen side effect

As you all know, drinking water is healthy. It helps keep your body cleansed, it helps fill you up so you don’t eat as much at meals, etc., etc. I’ve always liked drinking a lot of water, but as part of my effort to get healthy, I noticed that I didn’t drink much water during the work day, which obviously meant I drank less water overall. So I bought a water bottle a month or so ago, and I keep it here on my desk so I can drink as much as I need to. It’s a one-liter bottle (about 34 ounces), and I probably empty it about eight times a day. So that’s over 250 ounces of water, which is a lot, but it’s also probably about right for my weight.

But you know what the experts don’t tell you? It’s a simple little formula:

Water + bladder = gotta pee a lot

Gotta pee a lot = gotta wash your hands a lot

Gotta wash your hands a lot + cold, dry Utah autumn air = extremely chapped hands

Extremely chapped hands = gotta put on lotion like a blasted girl about a hundred times a day

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Stagnation

Sometimes you just hit a lull, ya know? For the last week or two, my weight has been hanging out right in the 351-353 range. I’m not gaining anything, but if I’m losing anything, it’s coming off VERY slowly. There are a couple things I think might be contributing to that:

1. Coming down off the emotional high. I am still committed to losing the weight, but the raw emotion of when I originally got fired up is gone. I don’t think that’s a bad thing — it’s hard to live a balanced life if you are too focused on one particular thing — but it’s definitely something I will need to overcome.
2. My body is demanding more effort. In the three months I have been losing weight, I’ve also been facing a lot of medical problems. Nothing major, just a couple sinus infections and some very severe allergies. As a result, I haven’t been able to exercise much. A couple treadmill sessions, one weightlifting session with a friend, and that’s about it for formal exercise. It’s just hard to get motivated to get on the treadmill or the elliptical when you can’t breathe.

   So anyway, the vast majority of the weight I have lost has been due to eating better, and I think my body has reached the point where it’s like, “Okay, dude, that’s great, but it’s time to get off your butt and get healthy!” Just eating right may not be enough anymore.

So I have a couple things to overcome. The second one is easy — just start exercising. I worked out last night after Beth went to bed, and it felt really good. Back when I used to make excuses for myself, I used to say, “It’s hard to exercise when I feel so unhealthy, but I’ll never feel healthy until I lose weight, and I won’t lose weight until I exercise. Wo is me!” Now that I HAVE lost some weight — and no matter how big you start, 50 pounds is significant enough to feel it — exercising is starting to get easier. I feel about a million times better than I did at 400 pounds. It’s actually really encouraging to feel so good right now, considering that I am still unhealthily large — I can only imagine how good I will feel at 300, and 275, and 240. Last night, I actually got bored before I got tired, which means I just need to get some better stuff on the DVR down here in the exercise room.

The first issue is not quite so easy to tackle. (One thing I’ve noticed in this endeavor: like most things, the physical parts are SO much easier than the mental parts.) I don’t know if that initial emotion will ever come back, and like I said, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. What I need to do is find little things that supply a bit of that emotion, a little extra motivation.

One thing we have found it “The Biggest Loser: Families.” We had never watched the show before, but we thought that since we are working as a couple to become healthier, it would be a good show to watch. If you haven’t watched it, the basic premise is this: it’s a reality show where whoever loses the most weight wins a crapload of money. This season, everyone came on in pairs — some are husbands and wifes, and others are mother/father and son/daughter combos. People get eliminated based on a combination of weight and voting (depending on the week). But what I REALLY like is that even after you’ve been eliminated, you still have a chance to win, because the biggest loser of the losers wins a slighty smaller crapload of money!

And the best part for me — the part that inspires me the most — is that, since the show was filmed several months ago, they can show us real-time-ish updates on the people right after they get eliminated. A couple weeks ago, an old man named Jerry went home, leaving his daughter behind to continue the competition. Jerry was old, fat, and near death when he came on the show. When he left, he was a little bit older, a little bit thinner, and a little bit further from death. But then they showed us the update, and he has lost like 80 pounds, and he runs a couple miles a day, and he is off almost all the medications he had been taking. He looks GREAT. And when I see him, I think, “Wow, if he can fight through all this adversity, I can definitely take my body that still works far better than I deserve it to and do at least as well as he has.”

Last week, a guy named Ed went home. I liked Ed (other than the fact that he sounds like Forrest Gump), because he reminded me the most of myself (in size, athleticism, etc.). So I was very excited to see his update, and I was extremely pleased to see that he has lost 85 pounds and looks absolutely great. Seeing him thin made it much easier for me to visualize myself thin, which is something I’ve had a hard time doing because I’ve never actually been thin before.

So that show is helping me get re-inspired. Bethy is, of course, a huge support for me. And I am always on the lookout for other ways to get inspired. Anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

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