Well, this week - hours before the Super Bowl, I weighed in for the week and I’ve passed my first two weight loss goals: losing 15lbs and 5% overall weight loss.
I’ll try to find a photo of the graph to post up - it’s really motivating to see the change on the scale and the change on the chart. Even though I’m not seeing the change in my body, I can feel it. I feel like I have more energy, more pep, more go-juice.
Let’s Do This!
To help me keep track of myself on this journey, I’ve collected a couple tools to keep me honest.
DIET
To keep track of my food intake and give me guidelines on what to eat and how much of it to eat, I bit the bullet and bought into the Weight Watchers for Men. Their points plus program has made it easy to start out - they gave me more points than I knew what to do with and have tightened the noose a little bit with each week’s weight-loss.
At first, I was shocked at how much I was eating. Honestly, on a normal day on a given week, I was probably consuming the equivalent of 70+ points. Some days, I’m struggling to fill up my 52 points, which I had to manually reduce from the 59 points that the program was trying to give me.
Each day, I’m logging my entire meal - overestimating food values whenever possible so that I’m honest and not cheating the system. The biggest change in diet is the realignment from salty, crunchy, snack foods to veggies and fruit because they are “free” from a points plus perspective. This single change has likely impacted my overall health tremendously.
ACTIVITY
To keep an eye on how much I’m “doing,” I’ve purchased a Fitbit One. This little device helps me measure my daily steps, intensity level, distance, and floors climbed. It’s a small but rugged device and they learned so many lessons from their original device.
When living in the city, it’s sometimes easy to forget that you can walk everywhere. Sometimes I’ve forgotten this and taken cabs, driven, or hopped on public transportation when I could easily have walked to my destination.
What do you use to track your daily intake and activity?
As the title suggests - I’ve officially lost 12.1 lbs since the beginning of January. Sunday mornings before we do anything is the official weigh in and I made a number that i’m very proud of.
I have to say that there is serious sway in the scale and my weight. For example, I weighed myself on Thursday night when I got back home from the airport thinking that I could see some result. What I had was a disappointing .3lb change from last Sunday’s weigh in.
Well, what a difference s couple days of good food and extra walking made. When I weighed in on Sunday morning, I was down a whole 5.2lbs… AND I had had 3 slices of pizza and 2 mozzarella sticks at dinner (all within my points, surprisingly).
Whomever is looking down on me, probably pop pop since he always gave me a hard time with my weight, they’re really outdoing themselves. I am excited to keep this up.
Summary of objectives for my Do-Life campaign:
Damn - things come and go quickly. Motivation came and went. Project changed. Diets started and stopped.
Some big stuff happened since the last post - now it’s time to set the sights on the next part. I’m still going to blog under the heading of doing life because I think it’s still inherently true to my mission.
Slow Carb Diet is out for the most part. Was being a good practitioner for about 6 weeks when I noticed my natural smell started to get funky… it was downhill from there. Needless to say I hopped off that bandwagon, gained more weight, fell in love, let myself go, now need to reel it all back in.
I hope you’re along for the ride - this should be interesting.
Some of you know, I will be using the Slow Carb Diet as my eating plan to help fuel this transformation. SCD was introduced to me originally on Tim Ferriss’ website in this post but I didn’t pay it much notice because at that time in my life I didn’t think that there was a problem.
Well, folks, there was.
The Four Hour Body reprised the SCD and I’m now declaring war on this body. How, you ask? The tenets of SCD are:
Tonight I’m going shopping for some delicious ingredients to put on the table a good portion of the Slow Carb foods that will be the meals for this week.
Cheers,
James
We’re gonna go inside, we’re gonna go outside, inside and outside. We’re gonna get ‘em on the run boys and once we get ‘em on the run we’re gonna keep ‘em on the run. And then we’re gonna go go go go go go and we’re not gonna stop til we get across that goalline. This is a team they say is… is good, well I think we’re better than them. They can’t lick us, so what do you say men?
- Rudy (1993)
Today is the day that I change my life. Today is the day that I decide to live. Today is the day that I finally take into my hands that which I have let go by the wayside… my life.
With the help of friends, family, and my determination to live, I will change this life and take all that I want out of it. Inspiration from BEN and the tools from TIM will fuel this transformation.
The goal is simple, become the best me that I can be. This goes beyond fat loss, muscle gain, and looking good. This is lifestyle transformation. Over the next year, you will see this change first hand. Phase 1 begins today. I hope you enjoy the ride.
I used to be little but that was a long time ago. Since I can remember I have been the big kid, the large one, the fatso. Over time, I have become that person that people once called me. I've gotten so large that I'm starting to get sad - depressed maybe. My health is deteriorating and I'm not happy with life.
That changes now. This tumblr is going to show you my change if it's the last thing that I do.
I choose life. I do life. I live.
