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

I’m late posting this update, but I want to make sure it’s here so I can look back at my weight loss posts later. On May 26, 2009 I weighed-in at 258.4 pounds (see my all-time weight loss chart here).

I’m participating in a weight loss contest with some of my family and we weigh-in once a month, so the May 26th weigh-in was my ‘official’ weight for the month. That was good for a loss of 1.6 pounds in May. I lost 4.6 pounds in April, so I suppose it’s reasonable to expect a bit of a drop-off, but I feel like I should have lost more weight in May.

I was on vacation for the past week and a half and I know I ate a lot of food so I’m not going to be getting on the scale again any time soon. My next contest weigh-in date is June 30th, so I’ll probably wait until the week before that to weigh-in again.

I attribute most of my success over the past 2 months to playing basketball. But it’s been about 2 weeks since I last played, so I need to get back on that as soon as possible. Not only is the basketball great exercise, but I have the desire to do exercise apart from playing basketball to help improve my game so that’s an extra bonus. It seems that having a sport to focus on is incredibly helpful with weight loss motivation.

I’ve also bought a few exercise gadgets lately and I’m trying some different workouts, which I will write about in further detail in the coming weeks as I have a chance to evaluate them.

By Eden, Mon 15 Jun 2009, Comments Categories: Weekly Weigh-in, Weight Loss

It’s too bad that I’ve had to start over many times with my weight loss, but I’m sure that’s how it goes for a lot of people as they try to get their weight under control after a long time of doing nothing. All I can do is act like it’s for real this time and try to make it stick.

About two weeks ago I woke up after a couple months of laziness and not paying attention to my weight. Since then, I’ve lost 3.2 pounds. I’m glad about that, but I know that I could have done a lot more exercise in that time. I only did some walking and have yet to start my 100 pushups plan restart.

What I have done well is cut back on my calories and I am replacing several meals with protein bars and drinks. I’m also experimenting with some weight loss supplements, probably not a good idea, but I did have success with these years ago and never noticed any bad side effects. If you’re interested, I’m using Ripped Fuel Extreme, by Twinlab.

I’m not recommending weight loss supplements for anyone, they can have dangerous side effects, but you can do some further research and decide for yourself if you think it might be right for you. I think the biggest benefit for me is that the caffeine in the pills allows me to skip coffee all day long and that is saving me some calories from milk and creme. These pills seem to reduce my appetite as well.

Other than that, I’m trying to be more active throughout the day and I have lots of yard and house work to do around here that should help me lose a little weight. We are entering the always dangerous Holiday eating season so I need to try to work extra hard to keep my weight moving down.

By the way, I have updated my weight and body fat charts. It’s always fun (and sad) to see the big picture of my weight struggles. Hopefully you can learn something from my many failures and few successes.

By Eden, Wed 19 Nov 2008, Comments Categories: Weekly Weigh-in

I decided to drop the weekly weight loss reports since it was hard to keep up with them and I don’t really think the weekly weight fluctuations are worth reporting anyway. From now on I’ll post my weight loss progress approximately once a month.

During my previous weigh-in on August 4th, I was 259.2 pounds (my heaviest weight of the year) and at my last weigh-in on August 26th I was 257 pounds.

Most of those 3 1/2 weeks were spent eating too much food and not doing much exercise. On a positive note, I gave up hydrogenated oils around the end of July so that has likely helped my weight move down a little bit.

Just this week we bought a Wii Fit and we’re really having a lot of fun with it. It is by no means a replacement for intense exercise like weightlifting or running, but it is perfect if you need help getting off the couch and simply adding more activity to your life (exactly where I’m at right now). I will write more about the Wii Fit in the future after I’ve had more time to evaluate it. My early impressions are very positive and if you can afford the rather high cost ($90) I think it is a worthwhile fitness investment.

I will continue to update my weight loss charts each week when I weigh in, so if you’re interested feel free to visit that page and see more details about my weight loss progress.

By Eden, Fri 29 Aug 2008, Comments Categories: Fat, Weekly Weigh-in

I had a great week last week. I did four days of cardio exercise for 30 minutes per day and I did two days of the 100 push-ups challenge. I did a pretty good job with food too. In fact, I gave up all hydrogenated oils and diet soda at the start of the week. Maybe that was too much healthy living for my body to respond to because when I stepped on the scale this morning I had gained 3 pounds!

My weight was up, but my body fat was down by 0.8% (a 2% decrease). I’m going to chalk the weight gain up to one of those strange weight fluctuations that happen from time to time. Honestly, the weight gain is a bit discouraging. It’s easy to think why should I bother with the exercise if I’m going to gain weight anyway, but I’m not going to fall into that trap. I feel much better after last week and I need to trust that continuing with the exercise and improved diet will bring the results I am looking for.

As far as the 100 push-ups challenge goes I was going to give up on it after day 1 because I was having a lot or wrist pain. Saving a long story, I had an accident years ago that required surgical repair of 3 tendons in my right hand. I still get some pain and stiffness from those repaired tendons and the normal push-ups were putting a lot of stress on them. Later in the week I decided to try doing push-ups with my hands closed instead of open and that relieved all of the stress on my tendons and I was able to do the full set of day 2 push-ups. I decided I will re-do week 1 (again) this week using this new push-up form. I think that was the change I needed to get through the program.

Below is the weight chart for this week, also see my updated weight loss graphs page with all of the latest numbers. These weren’t the results I was hoping for, but I’m not going to let the weight gain slow me down. I just need to make sure I work even harder this week. I can’t wait to get on the scale next week!

*Note about this weight loss chart. When I started this blog I weighed 266 pounds and I was only tracking my pounds lost each week. On November 28, 2007 I started using a new scale that tracks body fat and more (the numbers you see above). I report the figures from that scale in these weekly posts and I still track my total pounds lost in the Weight Loss Goals section in the sidebar on my site.

By Eden, Mon 28 Jul 2008, Comments Categories: Fat, Weekly Weigh-in