Fried on fried (and sugar)

Moving Christmas off the treadmill has not happened yet. Actually, I just need to beat a path through Christmas and find a different place for an eight-foot artificial tree, but even that seems to be a challenge at the moment.

So I'm going to put the treadmill on a back-burner for the moment.

Now before you start ranting that I'm falling off the proverbial wagon by failing at my last two attempts to modify my lifestyle, let me first say that I'm not just pushing it aside, I'm moving something else in to take its place: Fried food.

Or rather, the removal of such from my diet. This has actually been a goal of mine since the start of this whole "Live Healthier" effort, but I wanted to tackle the soda first and then try portion control. Soda's still completely out of my diet after almost 3 months. I miss it, but I'm happy it's not there anymore. Portion control failed miserably. Fried food I can do. Or not do. You know what I mean...

Of course, it's not completely a coincidence that I'm bringing up fried food now. I happened to have a pretty unpleasant day last Thursday after eating too many fried items at lunch. I ended up tasting that lunch for the rest of the day as it sat like a rock in my gut. Determined that this was no way to enjoy a meal, I decided that it would be the perfect time to modify "fried" out of my gastronomic vocabulary.

No more french fries, onion rings, fried chicken, battered cod, corn dogs or anything else that requires submersion in boiling oil to achieve a "cooked" state. Fries are my big one... the rest not so much, but they do creep in from time to time so I thought I'd mention them.

To go along with fried, I'm also excising all items that are overtly sugary like the hot cocoa I sometimes drink at work or the half-and-half tea (half sweet, half unsweet to those living outside the South) I've been ordering at times at restaurants. Seems obvious that I shouldn't be drinking them anyway given the whole "no soda" effort, but I guess they've been a crutch. (Artificial sweeteners don't work for me, don't ask me to explain.) Well, no more.

I've been sticking to these new rules since Saturday morning and so far I've lost 3 pounds. I was actually lighter this evening after dinner than I was when I woke up this morning. And that's eating normal meals, just skipping anything fried, breaded or battered and ordering water in place of tea at restaurants.

Hey, this could work!

Portion Control Fail

Ok, so the Portion Control portion of my "get healthy" routine was an abject failure.

(No, this is not one of our pugs)

I guess in a way it was doomed from the start. It's really something that I should have saved until later this year or at least a few more steps down the road. So for now, I've drawn a red line through it on my spreadsheet, which means I need to revisit it at a future date. For anyone who's interested, both weight and waist are hovering around the same place they've been for a while, for obvious reasons.

All is not completely lost however, as I did begin taking a multi-vitamin and a separate Vitamin D pill over the past 3 weeks and that's now a daily routine.

So, for those keeping track, I started with "No Soda", which is still going strong, and "Sit Ups & Push Ups", which is not quite as strong, but I'm still doing them when I remember. They'll be easier to work into a full exercise routine.

And lucky me, I've arrived at my predetermined week to start walking on the treadmill 3 times a week for at least 20 minutes. Don't laugh, but I'd be afraid what 30 minutes would do to me and I really don't want to end up unable to get out of bed one morning because I tried to do too much too fast. I'd have started with 15, but I'd be laughing at myself at that point. So, we're working up to 30 minutes, ok?, and then eventually 5x a week and then for longer periods until I'm on the thing for some yet-to-be-determined number of minutes, hours or miles every day.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The trouble is that the treadmill is buried under Christmas in the basement. When all was said and done in January, there was literally no room in our basement storage closet for most of the Christmas decorations because it's already been filled ...
with the ever increasing piles of Connor's toys ...
and clothes ...
and much larger piles of my own toys ...
and random things in file boxes ...
that need to be cleaned out ...
but haven't yet ...
but I swear I'll get to them one day soon ...
so don't get on my case about my 47 file boxes ...
that I've brought from San Diego ...
to Chicago ...
back to San Diego ...
and now out to North Carolina ...
and hid away in the basement ...
hoping I wouldn't have to deal with them...

...where was I? Anyway, I'm taking a day off next week to work around the house and priority 1 for me is excavating the treadmill and getting it into working order so I can start walking next week. I'll keep you posted.

Should be fun.

So how's that portion control thing working out for you...

Yeah, we won't discuss what I had for lunch. Suffice it to say I'm going to have to take a much sterner look at how I approach ordering food and how much I actually eat and how much I take home.

As for weigh-in this morning I lost 1.7 pounds but gained 1/4 inch. The increase in my waist might be due to the sit-ups, who knows. I'd feel better about the weight if it wasn't coming off pounds I'd put on during the Superbowl and while my parents were visiting. I guess the positive spin is that I'm at least moving in the right direction again without much effort beyond my 3 modifications (no soda, simple exercises, portion control for those keeping track).

More through less

Anyone who knows me well knows that I've struggled with my weight for most of my life. I'm not morbidly obese, but I'm by no means skinny.

With the exception of the first 9 years of my life - when my parents feared that I was malnourished because I wouldn't finish my Happy Meals - I've always been either overweight or dieting. Those Happy Meals I didn't finish turned into Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger Meals that I'd chow down without a second thought just 4 years later, which put me in a weight class in PE Wrestling with all the really tall, really buff guys in my grade. Needless to say, I didn't like PE.

Throughout it all - the weight gain, diets, weight gain, etc - I've remained largely unchanged (no pun intended). Short of restricting myself to veggie sandwiches at Subway, I've tried most of the diets out there, some more seriously than others, but all with the same results... I fall off the wagon and gain it all back within 6 months.

So this year, I've decided to take a different route. No fad diets, not even going to concentrate on weight. I'm just going to make small tweaks to my eating habits and lifestyle to improve my general health. And if I lose weight in the process, great, but it's about getting healthy first and foremost.

To this end, I gave up soda on January 4th and have not had a drop since. My close friends may now pick their jaws up off the floor. My 6-pack a day habit was the stuff of legend. I'm not off caffeine - still drinking green tea at work - but at least I'm off the sugar.

The green tea was an earlier tweak (lifehack?) from last year when I switched from Earl Grey. As yummy as Earl Grey was, I tended to like it with a lot of cream and sugar which I'm sure negated any health benefit. When I also found out that Bergamot inhibited the body's uptake of Potassium, I promptly switched. I'd been suffering from some pretty bad calf-cramps at night and ever since switching to green tea they're gone. I'd always connected the cramps to a potassium deficiency, but I couldn't figure out why I was so deficient.

I'm going to continue to either remove an unhealthy habit or add a healthy habit to my life once about every 3 weeks this year (since they say... somewhere... that it takes 3 weeks for you to turn something into a regular habit). Later in January I started doing sit-ups and push-ups and now I'm into Portion Control...

To see how these changes affect me, I'm tracking my weight and waist measurement (around my belly & love handles, not where I wear my belt). Both dropped significantly after giving up soda, but have since plateaued and actually rebounded a bit. But hey, that's OK, this isn't about weight, it's about living healthier. And I do feel healthier.

Future tweaks will include giving up fried foods (yes, no more french fries, though I may have to make an annual exception for latkes), starting to walk on the treadmill again, eating less red meat, adding more fruits and veggies to my diet, etc. So far it's been easier to remove than to add, but that's to be expected.

So wish me luck and I'll try to post more frequently to keep you up to date on my progress and as an added incentive for me to commit to some of the harder tweaks (since I'd rather not report failure).

Weekly Wednesday Weigh-In

Ok, so I want to preface this with the fact that I had a huge company dinner last night at a fancy place that served steaks much larger than I'm used to. Not much of an excuse, but...

Week 3

Weight: 245.1 lbs

Weight last week: 241.1 lbs
Week's weight loss: -4.0 lbs
Total weight loss: -2.3 lbs

Target weight: 212.8 lbs
Weight remaining to lose: 32.3 lbs

Oh well.

Another odd thing worth mentioning is that I've been working to build a playset for my son and despite sweating up a storm and not eating any differently than usual, I was steadily gaining weight every day after working on the playset. It would be nice to believe this is muscle weight, but I think that's giving me too much credit.

Well, time to redouble the efforts, not dwell on this miserable failure, and let's see where next week ends up.

Diet - Week 1 Weigh In

242.8 pounds. Not the heaviest I've ever been but within 10 pounds of that mark, so a good time to start moving back down the scale.

I'm not going to measure my waist or anything, that's just too depressing.

And no pictures tonight. Working on a huge deadline for work so that's been consuming me. Maybe I'll snap a pic this weekend. Something really unflattering like you always see as the before photo on those commercials. Y'know, the ones you look at and say, "really, you couldn't find a better picture?"

So, are we having fun yet?

ok, so it's the 21st...

I realize that in my last post I promised something by the 20th and in my usual blogging fashion I have missed that deadline. I realize I also may have built it up a bit too much. Because what I'm basically announcing is...

a diet

Yes, you read that correctly. In about 3 months I'm going to turn 35 and I'm tired of being as large as I am, I'm tired of getting winded walking up stairs, I'm tired of not fitting into T-shirts that I used to be able to wear... but mostly I'm just tired.

Thing is, diets work for me, been on quite a few in my time. It's when the diet "ends" and I gain it all back that's the bad part. And the reason I gain it all back is that whatever I was doing to lose the weight has ended and I'm right back in my old tricks.

So the strategy now is not a diet so much as a complete change in the way I eat. I've been working on a "10 Commandments" type document that I plan to make my eating credo from here forward. I'll post it in my next post once I polish off the rough bits. It's nothing trendy like South Beach or extreme like Atkins, just a list of rules to govern what goes in my mouth based on basic nutrition and the fact that while I know better, I've been ignoring the part of me saying "don't eat that second Twinkie". Heck, apparently I've also been ignoring the part of me saying "don't eat that Twinkie" the first time around.

My goal is to lose 30 pounds in the next 3 months. That's 10 pounds per month or roughly 2.5 pounds per week. I'm going to post my weight here to keep me motivated and honest, maybe even post some pictures. I was thinking about also posting my daily meals, but that might be overkill and I'd probably get sick of doing it and fall back into my old ways if that happened. Any advice or motivation from the 4 people reading is greatly appreciated.

1st weigh in and photo tomorrow. See you then.