Here we are again, almost a year since the last post — Back to Blogging and Goin’ Paleo. It’s funny to read that post now. A lot has happened since I wrote it, but not much has changed — at least as far as this blog is concerned. I’m fatter today and I have roughly the same amount of debt. To be honest, I don’t care much about the debt right now — debt is a much easier problem for me to solve than fat.

The scale told me a horrifying story this morning — 273.3 pounds. That’s the most I’ve ever weighed. Even though it’s not that much more than I weighed a year ago, seeing a number over 270 is kind of shocking.

I really was on the right track last year. I briefly dropped under 240 pounds — thanks to a mostly-Paleo diet and somewhat regular walking. However, I had given it all up by the middle of 2011. We had some big things happen in our lives last year. The biggest being that I’m now a father (which is awesome), but I don’t want to hide behind excuses. I chose to do something else when I could have exercised and I chose to eat the foods I knew I should avoid. Understanding the problem isn’t difficult. It’s actually putting what I know into practice when I fail to succeed.

I don’t remember when I last exercised, other than a round of golf this year, it must have been sometime before Christmas. My diet is bad — I mostly just eat what I want, particularly lots of carbohydrates neatly packaged in the form of delicious bread. Oh, how I love bread — giving up bread is definitely the hardest part about going Paleo, but obviously a big reason why it works. I’m going to try again. I haven’t cleared out the cabinets yet, but I’m getting closer.

One of my plans for 2012 is to get back into writing this blog regularly. I think the focused effort and accountability it creates makes a big difference. Of course, looking at my past efforts to start blogging again, the odds of me following through aren’t very good. Other than that, I’m going to get started by going for a walk today.

By Eden, Thu 19 Jan 2012, Comments Categories: Fat, Goals, Life

I’m still here. I’ve been tempted to kill the site and forget about it, but funnily enough traffic continues to increase even as I leave the site mostly abandoned. Not that I’m in it for the money (hey that $2 the site earned last month could buy me half a latte), but I enjoy writing and I want to do more of it this year.

Not much has happened since the last post I wrote back in August, 2010. I guess I was about 259 pounds then. I finished 2010 at 265 pounds. I think I hit 267 before Christmas. Amazingly, I actually started exercising and trying to do better the week after Christmas and I’ve been on a nice trend since then—weighing in around 252 pounds today and the last couple of days. That’s a solid loss of 13 pounds so far this year and 15 since Christmas. Not too shabby, and if I’m honest about it, I haven’t really even worked very hard at it.

Not to imply I’ve been sitting around playing World of Warcraft (that game really killed me with the expansion in early December), because I haven’t; I’ve quit that again, something I seem to do about twice a year or so. I’ve done a fair amount of walking in 2011. That’s been my primary source of exercise. I walked 39 miles in January and 36 in February. I tried mixing in some jogging too, but decided to stick with walking until I lose more weight. I really want to take it slow and avoid injuries. And I actually have avoided injuries thus far and I don’t want that to change. I’ve considered 230 pounds to be the starting point for adding some jogging to my routine. I’d still like to run a 5K some day. I don’t know if I really do, but I still tell myself that.

Other than walking, the other major change I’ve made is switching to a Paleo diet. I was learning about Paleo in January and so not really following it until the end of the month. Just about all of February was Paleo compliant (I’d say I’m 80-90% Paleo) and that’s when my weight really started dropping. I can only describe it as effortless weight loss. No doubt that the walking helps, but I had months in 2010 where I logged the same kind of miles I do now and didn’t have nearly the same weight loss.

I’ll share more about Paleo in the future. If you’re curious, here’s a couple of great getting started resources:

• Primal Blueprint 101 from Mark’s Daily Apple
• Paleo FAQ from Robb Wolf

By Eden, Mon 7 Mar 2011, Comments Categories: About, Fat

And I’m back. August 4th seems like as good a day as any for the first progress update to my 2010 Weight Loss Goals, written way back on Saturday, January 16th, 2010. Boy, things sure were different back then. I had hope for the New Year! Now it’s just another New Year of Regret. I’m joking of course, I don’t regret things much—maybe I should? I see that I even created a fancy little Google Spreadsheet for tracking all of my amazing progress back then! Funny thing is, I forgot I had done that until today. I’ll see if I can update it, but I’m probably lacking most of the data points needed.

In case you can’t tell from the tone of the above paragraph, things haven’t gone well this year. In fact, as things stand today, I’m a big fat zero on the progress chart for 2010. Seven months later and I stand exactly where I did when I was full of optimism and hope for the New Year. Oh well, that’s pretty much standard operating procedure for me over the past few years (as you can see if you check any of the weight loss archives around here).

But it’s all in the past now. That’s the funny thing about me. I must be too dumb to give up because I’m always optimistic that I can turn things around and lose 50 pounds before the year is over. Well, 50 might be rough, but I’d be happy with 30. In fact, that is my new goal! Look, a shiny new goal! Surely everything will be better now.

Okay, so things probably won’t be better now, but I’m going to try. I really am. I learned a couple of things this year. Like when I was walking regularly and eating lots of vegetables my weight was going down. The one month I managed to do both at the same time, I had lost about nine pounds. So there is hope, and at least I have a simple way to get started. Just some vegetables and some walking…that shouldn’t be too hard, even for me. Only time will tell of course. Hopefully I’ll be back to update this in less than seven months.

By Eden, Wed 4 Aug 2010, Comments Categories: Goals, Weight Loss

It’s that time of year again! The time of year I pretend to turn over a new leaf and fool myself into thinking I can be productive and fix all the mistakes of the previous year. Of course, I still believe that I can really do it so maybe one year things will come together as planned (I’m hoping it’s this year!).

I’m starting 2010 at about 259 pounds. That’s 8 pounds less than I started 2009. Certainly not good progress, but it beats gaining 8 pounds so I’ll take it. My goal for 2010 is to get down to 219 pounds. That seems to be a long way from 259, and especially considering my poor efforts in 2009, but I believe I can do it.

Here’s my approach for 2010. I’m breaking my annual goal into quarterly goals. So the first milestone is weighing in at (or below) 249 pounds by April 1st. This works out to 10 pounds per quarter, figure about 12 weeks per quarter and I can reach my goals while losing less than 1 pound per week (about .83 pounds per week if I used the calculator properly).

We’re already a couple of weeks into January and my weight is basically unchanged, fluctuating up and down by 1-2 pounds each week so far. Not the most promising start, but these pounds should be the easiest to lose so I’m still confident I can reach the April 1st deadline. There’s probably some irony in choosing April 1st as my first milestone, but that’s just how it worked out so I’m going to go with it.

Look for more regular updates on my progress this year and probably even more frequent updates on Twitter (follow @financeandfat if you’re into that Twitter thing). By the way, I’ll be tracking my progress on a publicly visible Google Spreadsheet.

By Eden, Sat 16 Jan 2010, Comments Categories: Goals, Weight Loss

Regular readers may have noticed the weekly weight loss report has changed to monthly. On the other hand, the weekly reports haven’t happened much at all lately, so I’m not really missing out on anything here.

My weight loss efforts have been a total failure over the past few months. I weighed in at 265 pounds today, which is within two pounds of my all time high (where I started this year). I guess the silver lining is that I’m at least down two pounds for the year. But with so much weight to lose, I really need to be making faster progress than that.

My iPhone challenge hasn’t helped at all either. Frankly, I think it’s made me not even care about an iPhone anymore! I suppose that’s a good thing, but I’d feel better if it was motivating me to exercise more.

It’s not all bad news though. I actually went out for a run today. I’m running a 5K in December and I finally started training today. I’m doing the Couch to 5K Running Plan. The plan is intended to get a sedentary person off the couch and ready to run a 5K in nine weeks. I’m happy with day one. It was challenging, but not too tough that I felt like I couldn’t finish it. Today’s workout consisted of a five minute walking warmup, followed by intervals of sixty seconds of jogging and ninety seconds of walking. The intervals last for twenty minutes and finish off with a five minute walking cool down.

As usual, I feel great after finally getting myself off the couch and actually doing some exercise. If only I could remember that I would feel this good when I’m making excuses to avoid exercise. Hopefully the race in December and this training plan will help me to stay on top of things this time around.

Lessons Learned:

I feel better after exercising. Maybe this should be obvious, but apparently it’s not because I always forget.

There are no tricks or shortcuts. I have to choose to exercise and stop making excuses.

Tracking progress helps. I’m using Daily Burn to track my calories and exercise. It can be a bit cumbersome at times, and adding exercise is not always intuitive, but overall it’s a nice application and I’ve found it to be helpful (it’s free by the way). I really like the stat tracking. It helps me to see my progress built up and charted over time. It makes it seem worthwhile to go for a walk even if I only have ten minutes. Little efforts do add up!

I’m not happy that it is almost the end of August and I’ve only lost two pounds this year. On the other hand, there are still four months left in the year, so it’s far from too late to give up. I can still easily finish the year down twenty pounds or so. I think the 5K will help a lot. Even though my marathon plans turned into a complete and utter failure last year, I did reach my lowest weight of the past several years when I was in the early stages of training for it. I have a marathon in mind for the end of 2010, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself yet. We will see how the 5K goes this year.

By Eden, Tue 25 Aug 2009, Comments Categories: Weekly Weigh-in, Weight Loss