Showing posts with label weight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weight. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 05, 2020

I should be selling myself as a self-help expert?

I was watching the news this morning and one of the channels had a guy on who was an inspiration because he'd lost 45 pounds during Coronavirus work from home via a keto diet and exercise.  Apparently he was teaching others to be just like him and eat healthy and harness the ability to change during this time.  

I've lost roughly 42.5 in the same period.  No Keto.  I have a beer now and then, and even a little more often now that I do a beer swap with the new neighbor (although he takes beer off my hands, so maybe that's the secret), eat a lot of ice cream, numerous eggs, have some m&m's.  If anything, my most common meal is a large pancake with a whole chopped banana, berries, and a bunch of whip cream almost every morning.  Seriously.  I have a plastic freezer bag with a series of dates on it going back to 3/16/2020 which is when I started making sure I always had a week to a week and a half of pancakes in reserve.  If anything, my whip cream consumption is foiled by my niece who steals my whip cream and fresh strawberries about as fast as I can procure them.  I've learned to create a glut before she gets here.

I'd add that most of that weight was the first 4 months.  The last one has been a little slow.  Cutting a big chunk of weight means you burn less calories day to day, so my speed of loss has slowed down.  And I had a habit of a really long bike ride every third week or so that was foiled by some flats the last two times.  I also slowed down my running a bit after I managed to run a couple of 5ks in a week (I'd never run a 5k before period before that).  Seemed like I'd met  my goal, so I lost some motivation.  I ran on Sunday this week for 30 minutes and I can REALLY feel it, so I know a slacked off a bit and have to get back on the plan.  I wanted to be able to do a comfortable (6.25 mph) 5k.  I have made sure I baseline about 10,000 steps a day as well no matter what else I do. I walk to the grocery store or the other grocery store or Target or wherever I'm going.  And if I'm an idiot and forget my mask, well then I walk further than 10,000 steps because I simply walk back to get it.  For a while I was listening to podcasts, but my headphones died, and in the two weeks it took to get new ones I fell out of the habit.  I'll get back in that groove too.  Listening to music and jogging outside is far preferable to treadmill running, even if those 90+ degree days mean I wear out fast.

I think my point is, you don't have to do a keto diet, and what you're doing isn't necessarily going to work for others.  I'm happy for the guy.  45 pounds is a big accomplishment.  But for my part, I wouldn't consider that a mandate to explain to others on national television that what I do will work for you.  Most folks I know have to find their own motivation and own groove - if keto makes you unhappy, you're unlikely to stick to it and there's probably a semi-low calorie food option that makes you happy, reasonably full, and doesn't deprive you of vitamins.

And iterate.  If you find yourself in a rut, the biggest advice I have is mix it up a little and try something else. Don't shift the whole thing (per above, I stuck to 10,000 steps all the time), but mix up the exercise, the food, the destination, the music....lot of options to make things interesting (although I apologize if you're a woman and scared of exercising in the dusk/twilight/dark; that's a serious spanner in the works not to mention patently unfair on a variety of levels).

Saturday, June 09, 2012

One Fourth

I don't think I've ever stated it, but when I was at my heaviest I was 285 pounds.  Shoes off.  Just before 2011 I decided to lose weight.  A lot of weight.  I blogged before that I plateaued for a while, and just before the accident I was refocused on starting the downward trend again.  The afternoon before my accident I'd been out geocaching in the heat near work.  I bumped into two local cachers, ASL Girl and Found Unicorn.  They were on their way out of the loop.  I was on my way in.  But we intersected on a difficult cache that wasn't at ground zero and required several sets of eyes.  I was a sweaty mess by the time I got done looking for the caches around the small pond/lake, particularly after I'd crawled under the local bridge for an hour with no luck (I think I walked for closer to 2.5 hours).

While the accident interrupted my ability to exercise, being in a coma for a while achieved pretty much the same thing.  So I'm at my lowest weight since my freshman year of college.  Between 208 and 210 depending on the clinic scale.  75 pounds.  I officially lost one fourth of me, despite having a new chunk of metal in my hip.  That has to weigh more than bone, right?  And the bone is growing back, so that just makes it extra.

I'm supposed to be back on my feet around the 25th of June at which point, if I can't ride an upright bike, I suspect I'll find a recumbent to buy or rent just so I have some way to exercise.  My original goal for this year was to get past the plateau at 220-225 and get down to 200.  So despite people telling me I look thin after the accident, it's still 8-10 pounds heavier than my goal.  200 is a nice weight.  Round number.  15 pounds heavier than high school.  But I don't spend 4 hours a day playing tennis and basketball and running for an hour now, so I have no delusions about going that low.  Not to mention, I don't want to chance it that I'd be the right size to fit into my old gray jeans jacket with matching gray jeans should they still be stored away somewhere.  That would be a serious fashion faux pas.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Calories

Since January 10, my diet calendar says I have:

Ingested 255,073 calories
Burned 397,313 calories
For a net of...-142,240 calories

/3500 = 40.64 pounds.

Actual weight loss, if I was right about my starting weight, is between 39 and 41 pounds.  Obviously my tracking system is working fine.  I slowed a bit in April, partially due to a vacation full of beer drinking, bbq, manicotti, and tacos (I recommend not eating patty melts - no matter how you factor it, they're Satan's calorie delivery system of choice), but May has seen about x2 the calories chewed up per day on average.  Partially because of bicycling.  Partially because of better eating.  I did buy a quart of chocolate chili ice cream today and I'm tempted to put the calories for the whole quart in today, just so they're a non-issue for counting purposes, but I suspect that's the kind of accounting that got Enron in trouble.