Today's weigh-in : 223
Difference : +3
Eee-yeah. Kinda fell off the wagon a bit at the end of the year, huh. But...I guess this is the reason they make the days after January 1st, for starting over with a new year. And like dad always said, you fall off the horse, get back on it right away or you never will...the same is true with being healthy. Only...with dad it was a Honda CR50 that I had to get back on. I still don't really like horses, nor do they appear to care much for me.
So what happened. Ok...well...
Let's start with what you already know if you were a regular reader of this blog last year (and if you weren't, then hey, howya doin). About a week or so before Thanksgiving I had a pretty major muscle strain in my upper quad (sartorius to be exact), in addition to soreness in my right knee and tenderness in both achilles. Let this be a lesson to you all - if you're going to run on artificial turf with a bunch of 6-8 year old kids, then um...even if you're all warmed up, you better stretch out at some point. I now do a specific stretch just for the group of muscles I strained (I think I'll post the stretching routine I do in next week's installment). I didn't back in November and man did I pay for it. I couldn't exercise at all for about two weeks, couldn't make it to work in Oakland for about a week and a half, really just laid around icing myself in various places waiting for the aches to stop. Over a period of 5 weeks since posting I have now gradually brought myself back to about 80-90% of where I was, but still - today I did my 3.2 mile loop through the neighborhood for the first time since the injuries and had to bonk out around 3 miles because my lungs were on fire and my right ankle was a bit sore (it's fine now, no ice required - just some beating it needs to take to get back in shape I guess - it doesn't hurt when I do treadmill running of any sort).
So that was the factor that was out of my control. What was in my direct control and didn't get handled properly was the swirling miasma of eating and drinking that happens at the end of each calendar year. This is where you really see in yourself that eating bad stuff is a form of addiction - because I was so regularly screwing up with trips to Taco Bell, nights eating out, binging on cookies and sweets, eating late at night, drinking too much, etc, etc....I stopped posting here and only made a passing effort at recording my activity/diet in Weight Watchers because I just didn't want to admit to anyone, even myself, what I was doing wrong. That stuff might be okay here and there but not to the level I was doing it. As a result of both of these factors (and the return of a screwed-up sleep cycle), I actually hit a peak at 227 pounds at one point before I was able to turn it around (last week I was 225, this week I'm back down to 223).
Now here's where the truly FAT are thinking - big whoop, buddy. So you gained seven pounds over a month or so, well...la-deee-FRICKIN-daaaaa...., I do that every other day. Well that may very well be the case. But if you know that, then you also know that 7 pounds turns in 10, 10 turns into 15, and pretty soon you're right back where you were. I really, really do not want to go back to where I was 40+ pounds ago. And as it turns out, disappointment really does not have that many different shades, it still sucks to fail on any level. So let that echo in your head as you finish that tub of Haagen Dazs watching the half-ton Italian on TBL tomorrow night. And oh yeah, BITE ME. I'm just playin. Don't bite me, for real. I might disappear BADAP-BSSSSH thank you!! I'll be here all week!! Seriously though, I do understand I'm somewhat beating myself up here - I have accomplished a lot and I should be proud of it; this is the first year in nearly 20 years that my first New Year's resolution wasn't to lose 50 or more pounds. I just have about 10-15 to go and I'm cool. But this isn't a blaze-out race to the death, it's a marathon away from it, and I intend to finish that race by going slow and steady.
Last comment I want to make before signing off today - Weight Watchers. Really have to credit the tracking software with getting me this far, but I'm thinking that perhaps this particular tool is now waning in usefulness on my journey. My year-long subscription to WW runs out in 2 months - and if I'm still stuck around 219-220 pounds, I think it may be time to move on to something else. Basically, the kind of tracking that WW does - measuring "points" - is very much a higher level way of looking at your diet/activity. With diet, what constitutes a certain point level is only related to calories, total fat, and dietary fiber - I really don't know the formula they use for that, it's proprietary. But it's not really all that exact because it's leaving out other factors like the composition of fat (saturated vs unsaturated, good vs bad), carbs, sugar, and in particular sodium which may explain why I'm losing weight so much more slowly now, other than the fact that I'm getting down to a more reasonable body fat percentage where there's less fat to shed. With activity, I could be more precisely measuring calories burned per activity, but instead I'm relying on a much less exact point level which only takes into account minutes plus a very subjective "exertion level". In short, Weight Watchers really worked well for the first 40 or so pounds, but is not working out so well for the last 10. I think for the last couple weeks in February I'll look into trying out sparkpeople.com and fitday.com to see if what I'm doing in Weight Watchers is really measuring what I need to measure, and to invest in one of those "exercise buddy" arm bands to see how many calories I'm really burning during exercise. No disrespect to WW - it's great for obese people like I was to get down to a reasonable size (and I get tons of compliments on that), but to really push down to the shape I want to be in I may very well need something more detailed.
If you have questions or comments, by all means - don't be shy, send em on. I need the feedback. I know I don't come off too touchy-feely but I'm actually a nice guy. GET TA KNOW ME!!!
That's it for now. Welcome back and Happy New Year!!
Diet for Monday 1/11/10:
Breakfast
- Cheerios w/fat-free milk
- 4 oz orange juice w/vitamins
- 2 pieces wheat toast w/yogurt butter spread
- Big cup of coffee
Lunch
- Turkey sandwich on wheat w/fat-free cheese
- 2 large carrots, raw, peeled
Dinner
- 4-6 oz London broil steak
- 1 cup mashed potatoes
- 1 cup corn
- 1 glass red wine
Dessert
- 1 1/2 cups fat-free Breyer's chocolate ice cream
Exercise for Monday 1/11/10:
- 5 min warmup @ 4-5 mph on treadmill
- 10 min stretching
- 2.97 mile run in 26 minutes (measured by Run.GPS on my new phone - avg. speed 6.9 mph)
- 5 min cooldown walk
Sleep for Monday 1/11/10:
- 8 hours (ahhhhh)
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