Nothing much to report for the last few days. On the one hand I didn't exercise the way I wanted to, and thus made no real progress. On the other hand, at my weight, just paying attention to what I'm eating and trying to not go over the marks pretty much is progress all by itself.
Weighed myself this morning and I'm down 5 pounds from the start...which is kind of bad for an initial surge but I'm really starting from nothing and have no habits. So I'll take even that as a win.
The early days of any fitness plan are a mess. For obvious reasons all your habits are bad (if they weren't you wouldn't be starting the plan). So that leads to binge days like Thursday. But it also lends itself to days like yesterday, where I'd run out of several basic components because I was eating them more than normal. If I'd already been in the habits replacements would already have been stockpiled likely.
No major accomplishments on Friday but no failures either. Dinner was a little bigger than needed...but that was just a product of wanting garlic toast with my pasta. Otherwise I got back on the bike for a bit and mowed the lawn too.
Food: toast (200 calories), hamburgers (600 calories), ravioli with garlic toast (1150 calories), handful of peanuts (100 calories)
Exercise: 15 minutes on the bike again (133 calories)
Daily Totals
Food: 2050
Exercise: 133
Points Earned: 1083
Total Points: 4188
It was honestly kind of a crappy Thursday. Things had started well and I'd even managed to get the dog to willingly go for a longer walk than normal. But the combo of visiting my mom in the hospital, and thus getting home late sort of overlapped to create a shitty food situation.
On the way home I picked up a pizza from a local place, and kept telling myself I'd save some for the next day. Well after serving myself and breaking up one piece for the dog...I didn't. There were a few slices left and rather than go "oh breakfast" I instead said, "Screw it let's eat it all." While initially satisfying...I ended up uncomfortably full all night.
It's one bad day, and Friday is going okay so far. But even though no one is reading these, I was still too embarrassed to post last night. It's four days into the plan and it's having bad days already.
Food for the day: english muffin with peanut butter (300 calories), PB&J for lunch (500 calories), most of a pizza for dinner (1600 calories), snacks were just a handful of peanuts (100 calories).
Exercise: none of note
Daily Totals
Food: 2500
Exercise: 0
Points Earned: 500
Total Points:3105
Ten years ago I was running half marathons at least twice a year, and training year round. These days I'm getting exhausted doing a mile and a half of walking in the park. Weight's a terrible metric for health but it's a convenient thing to measure. My real problem is that I've lost my fitness.
Fitness is a lot harder to measure independent of weight, and because of it I think it tends to be treated as synonymous. It's really not though. I was still "obese" by BMI standards when I broke two hours on a half-marathon. I could run 7 miles per hour for two straight hours...but my doctor was still recommending I lose weight.
Fitness is really the ability to do physical stuff out in the world. There's a lot of thresholds but there's no convenient easily measured number. Can I walk a mile to a gas station if I run out of gas? Can I go hiking? Could I ride a bike into work? Could I help someone move, without being more of a hindrance?
Right now I'm lower than I may ever have been. That's made my weight even worse too, but I really have hit a point where I haven't been doing much walking, definitely not on a bike, and would have real reservations about walking three miles if I needed to. So the goal right now on an exercise front is just to get back a shard of that fitness. To take short walks and to use my exercise bike, even if it's only 15 or 20 minutes. Hopefully we'll start to see me start to expand the time or raise the challenge.
Until that happens though I'll keep plugging away.
Food today: english muffin with peanut butter (300 calories), a PB&J for lunch (500 calories), spaghetti and meatballs (1200 calories) and some peanuts as snacks (100 calories).
Exercise today: 15 minutes of exercise biking with a steadily increasing resistence (130 calories)
Daily Totals
Food: 2100
Exercise: 130
Points Earned: 1030
Total Points: 2605
The successes of my first fitness plans a decade ago were built on a bunch of things that I managed to make into habits. I really did manage to reshape what I considered the baseline for what I ate at specific meals, and massively shifted my exercise plans. I did it with a lot of small steps that slowly grew until they became habits.
Day two of this new round of creating a fitness regimen...did not accomplish that nearly as well as I wanted. Breakfast managed to stay at my targeted levels. Lunch I made the mistake of adding an extra serving. Dinner by itself would have been fine, but on top of snacking through the day I just ended up exceeding my targets. All of this combined with me not really doing any exercise, despite going into the day planning more bike rides.
Even a blog entry got forgotten at the end of the day...thus prompting an early morning entry.
Blowing up my whole diet because of one messy day is often how things would have gone in my fitness interregnum. Today I'd head into the office and just snack the whole day, or splurge on a big sandwich. So hopefully I can at least make "report what happened" a habit that survives. If even one habit sticks past this week, I suspect the others will come back in time...but boy is getting to that habit stage the hard part.
Daily Totals
Food: 2500
Exercise: 0
Points Earned: 500
Total Points: 1575
Considering how I've been living the last couple years almost any commitment to this project seems like a miracle. I didn't end the day going "what if I got a pound sized steak and cheese for dinner." So I'm taking this as a victory.
Real victory though is more like six weeks away from now. I've had a bunch of false-start diet or exercise plans over the last six years. A few lasted a handful of weeks...but most died within three or four days. Six weeks though would likely represent some habits forming and my appetite restructuring enough that I'm not downing entire boxes of swiss rolls or something.
This summer, independent of my weight, has been one of the worst of my life. It would be nice if I could come out of it with some control at least.
Food today: english muffin with peanut butter (300 calories), two grilled hotdogs (750 calories), grilled salmon, rice and green beans (800 calories), a couple handfuls of peanuts (200 calories).
Exercise today: 15 whole minutes on an exercise bike (125 calories)
Daily Totals
Food: 2050
Exercise: 125
Points Earned: 1075
Total Points: 1075
Back in 2017 I moved blogging about my diet over to Tumblr for a while...but my Tumblr feed has become a lot more about fandoms and geekery, etc. Spamming a bunch of diet posts over there feels like it would just upset or irritate my friends. But I also need something to hold me accountable and after six years it suddenly occurred to me that I still have this blog.
People often confuse fitness and weight loss as if they're the same thing. There are plenty of heavy and fit people, and for a while I was one of them. My weight never got down under 200 pounds but I also was running half-marathons and breaking the two hour mark.
Unfortunately my peak for fitness was ten years ago now and I've been steadily losing ground. Telework removed my daily walks to work, then Covid locked us down and lost me the habits of long walks in the parks. Several years of leaning more and more on take out, paired with a dog who's getting older and less interested in walks herself, and my fitness is spent. Walking a mile is still doable...but I notice it.
So I'm going to resurrect this challenge and try and keep to it. I'm also hopefully going to be able to move away from using large meals as my one activity and one "treat." We'll see how it goes.
Starting weight: 348.6 pounds
