Weigh-In for March 7, 2009

Subtitle for this week’s post:

TOP 4 REASONS I’M GLAD I ONLY GAINED 0.8 POUNDS THIS WEEK

1. I only really went to the gym twice.  Monday was my consultation with the trainer, so it was mostly talking and only a couple minutes of exercising.  I wasn’t feeling well on Tuesday or Friday, so Wednesday and Thursday were my only gym days.
2. Our treadmill is broken, so we didn’t do any exercising together here at home.  We went for a couple walks, but nothing very intense.
3. Logan’s birthday was on Monday, and we bought a Costco cake.  Long story about my own personal weaknesses short, I ate multiple pieces of cake throughout the week.
4. One of the things I discussed with the trainer was that your body needs regular fuel to burn fat throughout the day, so she recommended that I eat small amounts every two or three hours.  I did a lot better at the “eating every two or three hours” than I did at “eating small amounts.”

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:

• Weight: 346.8 pounds
• Weight Loss Since Last Weigh-In: -0.8 pounds
• Total Weight Loss To Date: 55.0 pounds
• Left to Lose Overall: 106.8 pounds
• Percentage of Goal Lost: 33.99%
• Left to Lose for Next Mini-Goal (under 340): 6.9 pounds
• Average Weekly Loss I Need to Meet My Overall Goal Before My Daughter’s Fifth Birthday: 3.14 pounds
• Average Weekly Loss So Far: 1.67 pounds

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Weigh-In for February 28, 2009

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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Getting Mathy

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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Weigh In for February 7, 2009

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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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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Quick weigh-in

As of this morning, I was 349.2 pounds. That’s 52.6 pounds total that I have lost, and 109.2 left to go. But only 14.2 to meet my goal for this month.

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The Gas Challenge: Pounds vs. Pennies

Guess what, Gas Prices? I’m callin’ you out! A couple months ago, I was about 400 pounds, and you were about 400 pennies a gallon. Now, I am 352 pounds, and you are 337 pennies a gallon (here in Eagle Mountain as of this afternoon). Do you have what it takes to beat me in the long term? Bring it on!

I’m not stopping until I get down to 240. Can you, Gas Prices, get down to $2.40 a gallon? I’m watching you. First one to 240 gets an ice cream cone!

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Another weigh-in, and talk of goals

Well, now that I have actually given out the URL to this place, it’s time for me to start keeping up over here. I’ve felt myself stall lately, so I need that extra motivation anyway.

As of this morning’s weigh-in, I am at 365.6, for a total of 36.2 pounds lost. After dropping 19 pounds in the first two weeks or so, it’s been 17 in the last five weeks. Obviously, it’s not healthy to consistently lose 10 pounds a week, and I think at my size 3-4 pounds a week is a realistic, healthy goal. As I get closer to the ultimate goal, it will slow down, of course; I just need to get into as many healthy habits as possible, so that even slow weight loss at that point will still be real progress.

Speaking of goals, one thing I thought of is that I need intermediate goals. My ultimate goal is to get to 240 pounds, but that is far away, so it’s not the proper motivation at this point. Especially because the lightest I’ve ever really been at this height is 280 (and that was when I was still a 17-year-old kid, when my bones and everything were still growing), so I don’t have any idea what I will look like at 280, let alone 240. I may get to 250 and realize that THAT is my perfect weight, or I may get to 240 and decide to keep going to 220. All I really know is that “only 125 more pounds!” isn’t the right motivation for me at this point.

The first goal I can really think of is to get down below 300. I’ve never in my life weighed less than my drivers license said, so that will be a big deal. But even that might be too far out for a preliminary goal.

I could just do goals in 20-pound increments, but that seems to fabricated to me. I want my goals to actually mean something. I think I will go with 329 as my next goal, because back before Lindsay was born, Bethy and I were doing really well working out and stuff, and I got down into the 330s, but never into the 320s. So when I get there, this will officially be the most successful weight-loss effort I have ever had, which will reinforce the fact that THIS is the one that’s actually going to work. So my next goal, I guess, is 329.

Anyone out there have any feedback on goals and how I should go about setting them? Is 36 pounds still too far away for a preliminary goal? What think ye?

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