Weigh in week 2

Starting (01/11/10)	336lbs
Last Time (01/18/10)	331.8lbs
Today’s Weight (01/25/10)	327lbs
Total Weight lost	9lbs

From 4.2 up to 4.8 lbs this week. I definitely did much better with my caloric intake. After seeing these results I’m tempted to want to ramp it up even more with cutting more calories etc but I need to balance myself and keep the diet going (maybe with a little more fruit and a little less crackers/cookies) while picking up my activity.

My plan for this week is to walk the dog around the neighborhood (about 3/4 miles) every night (usually she gets that twice a week) and see what difference that makes.

Some potential stumbling points I see is having some family come in to town this weekend and I’m sure we’ll be out to eat for every meal and thursday or friday we have a “welcome” lunch for me and the other new guy at a bbq place down the street from our offices. I should be just fine as long as I balance out my calories elsewhere.

The other trick will be once I start to meet some people down here and make friends the booze calories can quickly get out of control.

So… 2 things to focus on this week

1. Replace snacky foods (chips/crackers/cookies) with fruit & nuts

2. Get out and be more active

With those 2 things I’ll hopefully reach the goal of losing at least another 2lbs by next Monday morning.

Some motivation for the next few months

Well it’s been a little over 2 weeks since I packed up and moved down to Kansas and the mixture of having a decent paying job and not knowing anyone could honestly create a lot of trouble for me if I let it. I’m prone to overeat out of boredom and, in moments of weakness, can be prone to impulse purchases. When you mix those two things with the fact that I live catercorner from one of my favorite bbq places and can get to Chipotle without even having to get on a main road it spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

The good news is I have some motivation for not over indulging too much on the good eats. Besides the fact that I just want to be healthy and a normal weight there are 2 big things that are driving me right now…

1. Back home – besides a few family members and possibly my best friend coming to visit there’s a good chance I won’t be seeing anyone from back home until the last weekend of May. By my calculations that’s a little over 4 months away. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to go back up north knowing that I’ve lost enough weight for everyone with seeing eyes to notice?
2. Clothes – a friend of mine gave me a nice flannel shirt. She originally intended it for her brother but it was the wrong size (XL instead of the L she wanted) so she gave it to me (even though I wear a XXL and sometimes don’t even fit into those). That shirt a long with about another half dozen shirts in the closet in my office, along with a pair of jeans, don’t fit me. They’re in the closet that is right next to the mirror and scale, just sitting there and taunting me.

So even though there are larger factors for getting healthy (wanting to live a full life, taking care of the body God gave me and wanting to know my weight isn’t getting in my way (personally or professionally)) those are a couple minor things that are majorly driving me right now.

How cool would it be to be able to wear that shirt comfortably when I go home next?

Weigh in week 1

Starting (01/11/10)	336lbs
Last Time (01/11/10)	336lbs
Today’s Weight (01/18/10)	331.8lbs
Total Weight lost	4.2lbs

Since it’s a new year and a fresh start I’m counting this as the beginning…

I got so wrapped up in setting up my new office/music room/guest room yesterday that I totally spaced on posting this week’s weigh in and good news.

I stuck to my calorie counts for being on track to lose 2lbs a week through last week until the weekend. Over the weekend I went way over and ended up being 2500 calories over for the week (about .7lbs) so I was just hoping to have lost the other 1.3lbs. I guess I must have been moving around a lot more last week as I am down 4.2lbs even with the slip up.

This is good news because even though I’ll continue to not have those breakdowns where I’m over by hundreds or thousands of calories per day/week it’s good to know that I can eat well during the week and still see results with some “slip ups”

Consider the wagon train officially back on track.

2010 Goals

During the month of December while I was preparing for my big move I knew that I’d have a chance at a fresh start so for the first time in a long time I decided to make some new goals for the new year. Though I came up with about 10 I’ll list a few of the most important ones here… These 3 are very big goals but also very realistic in my eyes.

• Lose 100 lbs – This is for obvious reasons but with 52 weeks in a year I know it’s more than realistic to lose 2 lbs per week if I stick to a half way decent diet and move around a bit.
• Read through the entire bible – Over the years I’ve read a lot of the bible but over the past couple years I’ve really not invested as much time into God’s word as I probably should have so I’m on a plan to chronologically go through the entire bible in a year.
• Pay off 2 different loans – These 2 loans are already scheduled to be paid off this year anyways but paying off these 2 loans set me up to use Dave Ramsey’s snowball strategy to get completely out of the debt I built up from college.

I’m trying pretty hard to stick to my daily caloric intake but for whatever reason I’ve really been in a snacking mood every since I got down to Kansas. I need to curb that asap. At least I’m keeping healthier snacks (fruit, nuts, etc) close by.

A month later and a new year: Back at it

I’ve referred to the wagon train before. When you don’t exercise for awhile or eat terribly you call that “falling off the wagon train”. Well, in the process of moving myself from Minneapolis to Kansas for a new job I not only fell off the wagon train, I left my wagon train in a burning pile of ashes along the mississippi river.

About a week after my last post I pretty much made a conscious decision to put this project on hold and focus on getting myself moved down and say goodbye to my friends and family in style. I had more happy hours, drank more beer and ate more wings and bbq in a 1 month period than I probably had in the rest of 2009 (and I drank and ate a fair amount this past year).

After getting settled in and starting my new job today I started over. Holy crap I did some damage. I’m up 16lbs from my last weigh in to 336lbs. Ugghhh… With that in mind, I have some new goals for 2010. The main goal concerning this blog is to lose 100lbs during this calendar year.

To accomplish this goal I’m getting back to tracking my caloric intake via the iPhone app LoseIt and joining the YMCA down here because of the amazing discount my new employer offers as part of my benefit package.

I’m back to the weekly weigh-ins and need to average 2lbs to beat my goal for the year. Here’s to yours and my success in this new decade!