Lorena and I bought a treadmill to replace the one our good friends, Bob and Gena, lent us when we lived in Centralia. Lorena has been using it regularly and I have been using it only sporadically for about a year now. Now that I have finished the Ph.D., I no longer have an excuse for being so fat and out of shape. I need to lose fifty pounds (probably more). So, I decided to get on a program again and deal with it. I have always walked pretty fast, between 3.5-4 mph, but I could not do that this time so I am starting to put a program together where I can take it slower and build back up to where I was before. About the maximum rate I can maintain and read a book is about 2.5 miles per hour. I am just going to try to maintain that for a month or so and enjoy the books I have been buying. I am trying to get my speed back up to at least 3.5 mph by the time the weather cools off so I can walk outside. In the meantime, I am going to try to read my book on weightlifting for old guys so I can figure out whether we want to buy some weights or join a gym. We might even see if we can go to a seminar on weightlifting by the company that offers they book–the company is only a couple of hours from where we live.
This deer stood outside my office window about 10 feet away from me on the other side of the glass door. He (It seems like a he–I might be wrong, but that looks to be the start of some horns between his eyes and his ears) happily ate grass while I moved around and snapped a few photos. We see a lot of deer in the yard again after somewhat of a hiatus in the winter when we only saw a few.
A few days ago, I tied my old record for fatness. I am a pretty short guy (5′ 7″) who should not be weighing 231 pounds. But that is where I was three days ago. So, I popped a note to Jon, my old weight loss buddy and 1955 birth year partner and fired up a new weight/calories/steps graph for us. Then I started back in on eating more healthy and walking. I looked back to the last time I weighed that much and calculated that I lost 40 pounds in 100 days. At that time it was without consistent walking. I have decided to give myself a 100 day kick start to get myself under 190 lbs. To do that, I will have to lose approximately 2.9 pounds per week for about 14.3 weeks. I like these kinds of things and plan to keep track here. I got a good jump on it the first few days, but that will slow down pretty dramatically. For the record, here are the first three days:
It amazing how good it felt when I got my first pair of reading glasses and did not have to struggle to read anymore. It is a pain to have to always be looking for your glasses, but it is a much bigger pain to not be able to read. And with Lorena, there is the added benefit of making a fashion statement.
This endless refrain has been taking up again that it is time to start the fight against the waistline. Lorena bought me several packages of vegetable mixes compatible with the 1200-ish calorie per day intake I need to take my weight down at a reasonable rate. Jon and I are back in the fight. We opened the spreadsheet back up and are recording our weight, steps, and, for me, calories. Right before Christmas is a really rough time to take up such an enterprise, but “if not now, when?” I cannot believe I am not only saying it, but I actually embrace the fact that I enjoy this kind of a diet and tend to get more exercise and more work-work and project work done when I am on this kind of a program because I have to stay pretty regimented to be able to handle it.
For the first time in several years, I did a workout last night that was more rigorous than a brisk walk. I spent just a 1000 meters on a Concept 2 rowing machine and felt pretty pathetic when compared to Lorena’s 12,000 meters in an hour. Working out and eating right while I travel is hard for me. Still, I do not have any excuses. I am within walking distance of a Whole Foods (not my favorite grocery store, but it will have to do) so I can eat OK foods. There is no workout facility at the hotel where I stay, but we have access to a great workout facility with three rowing machines just like the one we have in our workout facility at home.
I ordered a bright red raincoat and had it shipped to the Boston office. Bright red because it gets dark early in the winter and I do not want to get hit by a truck. It is not really a winter coat, but something more than just a windbreaker. The plan is to wear sweaters underneath and get some weatherproof shoes when the snow hits. My decision to take Uber from the airport to the hotel and back seems to still be a fine decision because it forces me to walk the mile and a half to the Whole Foods (not a fan, but it is the only grocery store within shooting distance) and driving in Boston in the winter is, I think, a sport for younger men with faster reactions. The raincoat will join my Boston scale and a large container of skin moisturizer that I keep in the file cabinet at my desk. I am sure that repository will grow.
The trip to Boston last week was fruitful because, for the first time on a trip like this, I actually lost weight. For a sedentary desk worker in his early sixties with a propensity for packing on pounds, that is quite a feat. I did not lose much (a little more than a pound), but I did not follow my normal pattern and add a few pounds. Dedicated use of my Fitbit to walk 8000+ steps per day while eating less than 1200 calories did it. I am not sure how this is going to work in the winter in Boston when the snow is a foot deep, but will try to work it out when I get there.
I have always quit my daily weigh-ins when I was traveling, but my weight loss war with has Jon has forced me to re-prioritize. To that end, I bought a Bluetooth scale that can sync with the Fitbit app on my Android phone. It measures more than just weight, but that is all I really want to track because I track food intake and other measures in other ways. The reality is that I don’t really need Bluetooth connectivity and it is a little bit of a pain because I have to keep the thing charged with a USB charger while most of these kinds of scales have (pretty much) lifetime batteries.
I have not made a whole lot of progress on my diet over the last two months. On the other hand, I went on a week of vacation and had a couple of big events that were not so diet friendly and I still managed to not gain any weight. Right now, I am within 1/10th of a pound of my record low (for the diet–not for my life) back on March 30. I am down almost 45 pounds from where I started and figure I am well positioned now to make a push to get down another 15-20 pounds. After that, I will figure out whether I want to stay where I am or go a little lower. One thing is certain: I have done this in completely sedentary mode and I need to break that habit. There are work changes coming so I will try to use those to my advantage to add some exercise.
I have been about 40 lbs. down from my high for over a month now since Jon W. and I first started our weight loss plan a little after Thanksgiving last year. It is good I am down and not going back up, but it is not so good I have been stuck for so long. I would like to say that I am on this plateau just because my metabolism has adjusted, but that would not be entirely true.