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

I’m really struggling with my diet and exercise lately. I’ve realized that I first turn to food when I’m feeling stressed or depressed. The only healthy replacement I can think of is exercise so I’m going to work on making exercise a priority, even when I don’t feel like it.

Favorite Quote:

“One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. Unless you’re a raccoon. Then it’s basically all one category.” – Funny Quotes by Quotes for Idiots

Favorite Links:

• I have two favorites from Early Retirement Extreme: Survival Preparedness – a great starting point for emergency preparation and Extreme Early Retirement vs. Friends and Relatives offers a look at the issues you’ll face with friends and family when trying to save money to the extreme.
• What We Wish We Knew When We Were Younger [from Get Rich Slowly] – a great look at things we wish we had known before, since I knew virtually nothing about money these all apply to me and many more too I’m sure.
• The Short Term and the Long Term Choice [from The Simple Dollar] – Ask yourself where you’ll be in the future when making a decision, this is great advice and something I’m trying to put into practice in my life now. I have far too much of a short term focus.

Carnivals

I was fortunate enough to be included in the Carnival of Personal Finance: Famous money quotes edition, hosted by Christian Personal Finance and the Festival of Frugality #189, Extreme Heat Edition, hosted by Modern Tightwad. Many thanks to the carnival hosts for the hard work they put this week!

*As always, you can find all of my ‘weekly web favorites’ and many more links on my StumbleUpon page.

By Eden, Sat 8 Aug 2009, Comments Categories: Web Favorites, Weight Loss

I weighed in at 260.6 pounds this week, for a gain of 0.8 pounds. That leaves me with 50.7 pounds to lose for my iPhone Weight Loss Challenge.

I followed my diet well Monday through Friday, but completely went off the deep end on the weekend and didn’t follow it at all. This carried through to Monday too, so I’m guessing the three days of gluttony did some damage to the previous five days of good eating.

On the other hand, I know my 3.6 pound loss from week one was probably a bit of a fluke so I don’t feel too bad about adding less than one pound this week.

My average lost per week is now 1.4 pounds. I’ll be happy as long as it is over one, but my goal is to lose two pounds per week.

I didn’t do as much exercise as I should have last week either. I’m back on my diet today and hopefully will be doing more exercise this week too.

As always, you can see my all-time weight loss progress chart here.

By Eden, Tue 14 Jul 2009, Comments Categories: 54 Pound iPhone Challenge, Weight Loss