Posted February 28th, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider
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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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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Posted October 9th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider
As promised yesterday, I thought I’d post a little visual evidence of the progress so far. I can’t really see the difference day-to-day, because I see myself in the mirror all the time. But there’s already a noticeable difference.
This is us in Cancun at the end of June:
And this is us in the canyon yesterday:
Obviously, I still have plenty to go. I hope you weren’t expecting me to be ridiculously skinny (I did mention that I still weigh 350, right?). But I love being able to see actual progress, and I see it, especially in my face. Take a look at this comparison, with two photos from Cancun and one from yesterday:
I tried to get the faces on the same scale, based on the position of the hairline, the eyes, the nose, and the chin (the main chin, that is). Looking at those pictures from Cancun, I look terribly unhealthy. I remind myself of the fat guy in “Remember the Titans,” the guy who plays Randy on “My Name Is Earl” but before he lost 200 pounds or whatever, with the deep shadows on the eyes and stuff. And look at those chins! My face almost had no shape at 400 pounds, but that shape is starting to return.
Things like this make me happy and motivate me to keep going. Thanks for all your support.
P.S. — By the way, doesn’t Bethy look great? She’s been SO supportive of me, and it’s been benefiting her too. She’s lost 18 pounds, and while she obviously looked great before and didn’t have nearly as much to lose as I did, she looks great in these pictures from yesterday. I didn’t know you could improve on perfection, but there you have it.
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Posted October 9th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider
I wore my jeans to our photo shoot today, the first time I’d worn them in a couple months. As I put them on, I realized that they were the only pants I hadn’t worn recently. Then I realized something else: I now officially own ZERO pairs of pants or shorts that I have to unbutton to put on or take off.
Know what I love? Belts. Know who oughtta love belts? Anyone walking behind me.
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Posted September 22nd, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider
First of all, I have finally finished writing up our New York experience over on our family blog. It took two posts, which you can find here and here.
I finally weighed myself after New York, and I was right — no gain, no loss. Pretty successful vacation, all things considered. But that was a week ago. As of Saturday night, I am sitting at 359.2 pounds. That’s right, I’m below 360! That’s a total of 42.6 pounds, which is quite the accomplishment for me, and I am pretty pleased with the way things are going. I’ve been amazed at how much self-control I’ve had — at times when I used to would have slapped together some nachos or made some mac & cheese or something, I’ve instead had a small bowl of healthy cereal or a banana or a low-carb Slim-Fast or — most groundbreaking — nothing at all. Of course, it also helps your self-control when you don’t keep the crap around the house, because life’s easier when nachos aren’t an option. But I have two small kids, so there is ALWAYS mac & cheese available to be made, and I’ve been very good about not making it. (I did make it once this week for lunch, but I used whole-wheat pasta and fat-free cheese and made a very small serving, which is still an improvement.)
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Posted September 12th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider
Well, we’re in New York, and today we headed over to Times Square, among other places. For some crazy reason, we ended up spending quite a while in both the M&M store and the Hershey’s store. I guess we’re gluttons for punishment — which is better than other kinds of gluttony the situation could have inspired, I guess. We walked out with only the three little sample chocolates they gave us for buying a t-shirt, so I guess that’s a little victory.
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Posted September 11th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider
Vacations are hard when you’re trying to eat right. (They’re a lot of fun when you don’t care what you eat.) Beth, the kids, and I spent a little over a week on vacation last month, with five days at a family reunion in Arizona and a few days in California for my cousin’s wedding. Generally, when we go on vacation for a week or more, we both come back significantly heavier than when we left — usually around 7-10 pounds for me and 4-5 pounds for Beth. We like to eat out when we’re on vacation, because we don’t have Jack in the Box or In-N-Out here in Utah. We eat to alleviate the boredom that comes from sitting around houses that aren’t our own. We eat because there are NO RULES when you’re on vacation!
So this last vacation, coming as it did only ten days or so after we started this current endeavor, had us both worried. Would we stick to our goals, or would the vacation kill our momentum and be a setback for us?
Without our scale, neither of us knew for sure how we were doing. We bought a lot of healthy food to snack on. But we didn’t exercise much (treadmills are kind of bulky to take on vacation). But we resisted the urge to eat pizza when it was readily available. But I did have half of a Coldstone ice cream at a Diamondbacks game. But I didn’t even touch the ice cream at my parents’ house. So by the time we got home, we weren’t sure what to expect. Did the good outweigh (I never get tired of that pun!) the bad?
Yes, yes it did. When we stood on the scale upon our return, we were pleased to see that we had each lost a little over a pound. Sure it’s not much, especially when I had lost nearly twenty pounds in the two weeks before the vacation. But when the usual result is a gain of ten pounds, I will take a loss of one any day. It reinforced my confidence that I really can do whatever I set my mind to.
Why am I writing this now, three weeks after the fact? Because in 14 hours, Beth and I are getting on an airplane and flying to New York for a fun little weekend trip. We’ll be sitting in Yankee Stadium on Friday night — which means temptation of nachos and hot dogs. We’ll be on Broadway on Saturday to see “Wicked” — which probably means eating out at a nice restaurant. And we’ll be spending three nights in a hotel, which means cooking healthy meals won’t really be an option.
I’m not really nervous, necessarily, but I am definitely realistic enough to recognize that I need all the extra motivation I can get. So I’m posting it here, for all the world to see, and when I get back on Sunday, I will have to be accountable for what I have done over the weekend. This blog is my own personal WWJD bracelet, except it’s WWASGD (What Would A Skinny Guy Do?).
Wish me luck!
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Posted September 8th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider
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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Posted August 4th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider
I’ve got a great life. I grew up in a very happy home with awesome parents and five wonderful siblings with whom I got along just fine. When I was 26, I married the most wonderful girl in the whole wide world, and five years later she inexplicably still loves me like crazy. We have a beautiful daughter and an adorable son, to go along with countless good friends and just enough great ones. I can’t imagine being happier.
But I sure can imagine being healthier, and while that in and of itself wouldn’t make me happier … well, let’s just say the peace of mind that comes from knowing you won’t leave your wife a young widow will be a wonderful thing.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted August 3rd, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider
We are in Arizona for a family reunion, and when we got back to the condo tonight, the whole family was eating pizza. I think I should immediately lose ten extra pounds just for not having any, right?
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