Week 4 - 266lbs

Well here we are in Week 4 and we finally have some movement on the scale. This was another good week from a eating within my calorie range, there were days with wings and beer but in moderation. The other key factor was getting some gym time in and feeling better in a general sense. You know they say it takes 2 weeks of doing something consistently to make it a habit and right now I’m feeling in the habit of eating the correct portions. There might be a big meal at lunch with a juicy cheeseburger but I didn’t eat ll the fries and then followed up with a controlled dinner.

I know I said this week I would go into a bit of my workout program but again work is just a bit nutty so I will just have to leave you with exercise helps you feel like your making progress. We all dread doing it and its not an excuse to go out and have 10 beers or that chocolate cake you wanted, exercise is needed to keep your body functioning and goes way beyond trying to shed a few pounds. If your trying to lose weight, watching what you eat is 80% of any weight loss strategy and exercise 20%. You can reduce weight by only watching how many calories you eat but you can’t reduce weight by only exercising……food for thought!

Week 3 - 267lbs

This week is going to be short, although not for the reason one might think based on the title still saying 267lbs. I had a very good week, actually kept my calories down everyday except Sat/Sun due too total lack of disciple. It’d be very easy to say, “Oh it was Super Bowl Weekend”, which is probably what I told myself while I was doing to make myself feel better about it but in reality you must take responsibility for your actions. I made a choice to go crazy and eat with wild abandonment, I could have eaten better but choose not too. However, I’m not going to sit here and dwell on that I choose to recognize my break in disciple and focus on the other 5 days where I ate better.

Something else that is a plus this week is that I’ve already hit the gym 2 of 2 days this week and feeling great afterwards….maybe the snowball effect is starting to happen as far as getting into a good routine. I’m hoping next week to talk a bit about my workout philosophy and the things I try to hit on when at the gym. There are many different philosophies about working out as I’m sure you can see if you’ve ever watching The Biggest Loser.

Thanks for staying tuned and here’s too another positive week!

Week 2 - 267lbs

Sorry for this weeks post being 4 days late but between work and the slacking I did on my goals caused me to procrastinate as long as possible, however here it is.

While yes my weight stayed the same this week I didn't achieve my goal of eating within my calorie range.... actually maybe I did some days but since I didn't log my food, I have no idea if I did or did not. THAT was the biggest failure of last week, which has continued this week. I believe I’ve eaten better this week but again not logging food keeps that a mystery and the 2 bowls of dry fake applejacks last night while not healthy might or might not have pushed me over the calorie edge for the day.

So if I’m not going to food log whats the point, right? Well that’s how I felt and figured why blog about my failure yet again to stick to a plan but then a friend of mine reminded me that the blog was to help keep me honest. Its easy to blog the successes or the minor setbacks but when you have a crap 10 days and ignore it and treat it like if no one knows no one will care. Its like when you have that bite size snickers (or 2 or 3) and leave it off your food log and no one sees it…its like it didn’t happen right? But then when you weigh in and you haven’t lost anything you say…but I was perfect…that handful of pretzels or snickers or beer didn’t “really” count. Hell you probably forgot you even “sneaked” that in anyway come weigh in day.

Basically what I’m saying is YES I didn’t do a darn thing I said I would do in last weeks post…except I did blog about it so at least I didn’t totally hide from it. Maybe it’s a step in the right direction, maybe it’s a way to excuse myself. I guess we’ll find out next week and by next week I mean Tuesday, which is 4 days away. See you then….I hope.

Week 1 - 267lbs

In my first blog post I mentioned I would use this to space to keep me honest about some of my goals this year. Well the biggest goal of the year and basically why I started the blog is to get back to eating at a healthy level, not diet mind you although eating correctly will probably result in me losing some pounds. There are many different levels of eating healthy and for me the first step in doing that is going to be eating within my calorie range.

How do you know what your calorie range should be you might ask? Well for me I use the Harris Benedict equation (BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) - ( 6.76 x age in years )) to figure out mine. Now you’re probably saying, What the heck is that and why would you use it. Basically it’s a method used to estimate your daily calorie in take and you can read about it on Wikipedia here Harris-Benedict_equation. Don’t worry about doing the math unless you like numbers like me because there are plenty of online calculators that use this principle. Go to Caloriesperhour  and click on BMR & RMR Calculator.

According to the site based on my info and taking into account that I consider myself lightly active my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMB) is 3,295 and Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) are 2,981. What does that mean? It means that is I want to maintain my weight of 267 pounds I need to eat between 3,295 and 2,981 calories A DAY. Now you might be thinking wow that’s a lot of calories but if you’ve ever done a food log you can see how quickly the things we eat and snack on add up. Obviously I don’t want to maintain a weight of 267lbs in its current distribution on my body, meaning that a high amount of that is just fat and not muscle or bone.

Starting today I’m going to begin my food log again and aim for a caloric intake of between 1,800 and 2,000 calories a day. I’ve used this technique about 5 yrs ago and it helped me shed about 70lbs. Monitoring your caloric intake can be time consuming and a tough task but I think its well worth it for the health of your body. Over the next few weeks I will take about some of the tools I’m using and how my journey to eating healthier is going.

I also think goals are an important thing to have but in this case I’m not going to set a “goal weight”. However I am going to set a goal of days eating within my calorie range that will total in 12-week increments. There are 84 days in a 12 week period and since I’ve done this before my goal might be a little bit higher then yours if your doing this for the first time. My goal is to eat within that range 70 times out of 84(83%), which doesn’t mean those 14 days I can eat 5,000 calories but we all know life can get in the way sometimes and I don’t want to give up just because I hit one of those patches.

Welcome to my Bloggy

Starting this in hopes of keeping me on track on my goals this year. Hopefully some of the information that I pass on will be useful, helpful or just makes you smile. I'm not a writer and often use spell check to help me but if you find something grammatically incorrect, feel free to let me know as I'm not opposed to some help.