Weigh-In for March 7, 2009

Posted March 8th, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider

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

1 Comment | Post a Comment

Setbacks, New Years Resolutions, and other crap

Posted January 2nd, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider

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!

4 Comments | Post a Comment

Frustrating injury

Posted October 30th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider

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.

6 Comments | Post a Comment

Stagnation

Posted October 19th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider

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?

3 Comments | Post a Comment