I haven’t posted anything in a long time.  I did pretty good last year with sticking to the new lifestyle, but a back injury in early October really stopped my progress.  There were weeks where I could barely walk, so exercise to any degree was out.  Then the holidays arrived, and with it plenty of tasty treats.  On my trip to the doctor for a physical in December I tipped the scales at 222 (fully dressed, with phone, keys and wallet in my pockets).  As a comparison, I noticed on the computer my weight history.  My highest weight at the doctor was a couple years ago, at 307.  So I finished up the year a few pounds above my low point last Fall.  But overall, still 85 pounds off my highest weight a couple years ago.

So, time to get back on track.  I started this week tracking my food again with the FatSecret mobile app Calorie Counter.  I set my daily RDI limit at 2400 calories, and so far have averaged around 2150 per day.  We will see how that holds out over the weekend.  With my daily exercise and watching the calories, I have finished off the days with a decent deficit.

Now that I am getting back into the tracking thing, I will try to get back to the regular blogging thing too.  These are the tools that helped with my initial success, so the smart thing to do would be to use these same tools to move onto the next  goal–to get below 200 lbs in 2012.

I have been back in the real world for a week now, following my week at the beach with the family.  I decided before I packed the first item into my suitcase (duffle bag actually) that I would not worry one bit about “diet” on vacation.  I figured that there was not too much damage I could do in a week anyway, so I indulged.  In fact, I was indulging so much that at one point the wife even commented that she saw me eating more cookies, chips, snacks, and other junk over the period of a few days than I had in the past few months combined.  She was right.  And they were all good.

I stepped on the scales a few days after I got home and was not surprised at all to see the number a few pounds higher than when I left–about 5 pounds.  This past week I focused on what I ate, broke some of the habits I quickly picked up on vacation, and paid close attention to my portion sizes.  I also made sure I got in some good exercise every evening.  (I walked daily at the beach too, but probably not as intensely.)  Now a week later, the scales this morning showed that I am back to my pre-vacation weight.

I have read a number of discussions in various forums about people obsessing over a vacation.  They are concerned that a few days to a week of letting go will destroy everything they worked for.  I don’t buy it.  Sure, I didn’t eat chocolate cake for every meal, and I didn’t eat the whole sleeve of cookies at a sitting, but I didn’t feel like I was making myself miserable obsessing over everything I ate.  And a week later, it seems that really was not a bad thing.

Over the weekend I was looking through some old pics on my computer with my little girl.  She likes to look at pics of “when she was a baby”.  It is nothing like looking at how big you used to be to motivate you to continue working hard every single day to keep moving forward.

The “before” pic below is from April 2007, just a few weeks after my little girl was born.  She would sleep for hours on my chest/stomach.  She had plenty of room to get comfy without rolling off.  I have no idea of my exact weight back then, but in the neighborhood of 300 pounds is close enough.  I don’t have a lot of pics of me from back then, for obvious reasons.

The next pic was taken on my birthday this year in June.  My little one is now 4 years old, and my weight is right at 215 pounds.  I don’t miss the old me, or the 85 or so pounds I have lost along the way.  It took me a few years to realize that I was at the point I HAD to do something.  In fact I have lost 80 pounds in just the past year, so for the first three years of her life, daddy was a big one.

I don’t want to return to being the “big one” again, and finding the rare pics of when I was keeps me motivated.  Eat less.  Eat right.  Move more.  It is really that simple.

Almost to the 1 year mark since I really started tracking my weight loss–the day my new digital scales arrived from Amazon.  It was on that day, July 1, 2010, that I first weighed myself since my trip to the doctor a couple months before.

For the past month, I have not been too focused on the scales.  I will probably hop on this weekend just to get a feel of where I am before I get to that 1-year mark.  I don’t believe I have gained any in the past month, and I may have even lost a pound or two.

I spent the Memorial Day weekend working on my latest around the house project.  It took four full days, plus an evening after work, but I now have a multi-level deck in the back yard.  I still have a few finishing touches to work on this weekend, but it is 90% done.  If I could work like that every weekend, weight would probably not be a problem I would have at all.

Even though I decided to stay away from the scales for a month, I could not stand it any longer and hopped on today.  Without obsessing over everything I ate, and recording my exercise in my journal at FatSecret.com, I dropped another 2.2 pounds.  With that, per my digital scales, my BMI is now 29.9.  I am now only overweight and no longer obese per the BMI charts.  When I started this weight loss thing last year, my BMI was around 39.  I know the BMI is only one measure, and not always the best measure, but it is nice to see it drop below 30.

I suppose it is a good thing I decided to hop on today though.  This evening, a trip to the local BBQ buffet joint is planned for the Friday evening family outing.  I will exercise a LITTLE restraint, but I will likely come home stuffed.  I will make up for it tomorrow though.

On August 22, 2010, I joined up at FatSecret.com and started tracking EVERYTHING I ate.  This is a neat FREE website that provides users with their personal food diary and exercise diary, among other tools and a forum.  I was at times obsessive with completing my food diary at every meal, and often planned ahead days in advance.  The app for my Droid made it even more appealing, especially the nifty bar code scanner feature.  Using the phone’s camera the app will read the bar code, and if the product is in the food database (most are), the nutritional information is available so you can enter it directly into your food diary.  This has been an invaluable resource over the past 8 months.

I think I am ready to go it without the diary for a bit now.  I knew when I started logging everything that eventually I would learn how to manage what I eat intuitively.  I am pretty good at judging what a serving looks like for most of the foods I eat on a regular basis.  I believe I am ready to take the next step to a more “normal” way of eating.  So starting today I am going to stop entering in my food in my diary.  I will give it a try through the end of the month then decide if it is working for me or not.  In my mind, this is the natural progression of things anyway, so I need to move forward.

Another reason to move to the next step–I have reached my original goal.  When I started this, about a year ago now, I set an initial target of 220 pounds.  That number was a long way off from where I started, but I thought then that 220 would be a good goal, and I knew that once I got there I would have to evaluate how I looked and felt to see what my next step would be–lose more or maintain.  Well, now that I have hit that 220 mark, I have my answer–LOSE MORE.  My next goal is to see below 200 on the scale, and I would like to hit that one by the end of summer.  And by the “end of summer” I mean by about Labor Day.  This gives me about 4 1/2 months to drop 20 pounds.  This is coming at a good time though since the weather is getting nice.  It is that time of year when the grass is growing (which gives me plenty to do outside on the weekends), and the days are getting longer.  All of these are big pluses to help me push through the next 20 pounds.

My walking/running turned into running/walking, and now is mostly running.  And it seems to be paying off.  My weigh-in this weekend I finally dipped into the 2-teens.  I stepped on the scale three times to make sure, and it was the same number each time–219.4.  That was quite a drop from my last weigh-in at the beginning of the month, but the fact that my newest pair of jeans is already getting loose, I have to think I am making real progress.  I have to attribute this recent drop probably to an increased focus on the running part.  I can burn a lot of calories in 40 minutes or so, which makes an occasional indiscretion have less of an impact against my progress.

Over the past few weeks I have started back doing one of my favorite outdoor activities.  Cutting grass.  Fresh oil, plugs and sharp blades for the Deere, fresh oil and sharp blades for the push mower, so I am ready for the season.  I really do enjoy warm weather yardwork.  It is a great way to burn some calories.

For the upcoming weekend, we are thinking about taking the little girl to Winnsboro, SC. for the Easter Bunny train ride.  The SC Railroad Museum (http://scrm.org) operates the Easter Bunny Eggspress Train the two weekends before Easter.  I think it is something she will enjoy.  I think I will enjoy it too.

When I was extremely overweight I really shied away from such gatherings of a lot of people, mainly because I was so self-conscious about my weight.  Now I feel more “normal” and feel much more comfortable in a crowd.   I am glad I made this lifestyle change now while the little one is still young.  I would really hate to have her grow up missing out on a lot of really fun activities because I was too “uncomfortable’ to go.

Went out this morning to Kohl’s to pick up some new “work” clothes.  By work clothes I am talking about the casual shirts I wear to the office.  I have a closet full of shirts that don’t really fit any more.  The last shirts I bought for work before I started on my lifestyle change were 2XLT.  The regular 2XL shirts I had would not stay tucked in, so I stepped it up to the “T” instead of just admitting that I probably needed to move to a 3X shirt.  Today, I bought regular XL shirts, and they are plenty roomy.

I also had to buy ANOTHER pair of jeans.  My barely broken in jeans that I just bought a few months ago have quite a gathering of material once I cinch them down with my belt so they won’t fall off.  The pair of jeans I bought today are 38″ waist.  It was almost a year ago since I bought my last pair of “big” jeans, with a 46″ waist.  Going into a store like Kohl’s and not having to limit my selections to the “Big & Tall” racks is a new experience for me.  There are so many choices in the regular sizes, even if I am a bit toward the upper end of “regular” still.

The scales are moving really slow these days. I am still holding close to the 225 pound mark, but I am still working on the exercise part pretty hard.  The great thing about the weekend is the extra exercise time I can get in.  An hour long run/walk can burn a lot of calories.  However, to get the scales moving along again, I may need to look hard at the diet and see where I can make some changes.  I have been telling people throughout this that I changed my eating habits to eat how I think I will need to eat once I reach my goal, but as I get closer to that goal, the gap between what it takes to sustain my goal plus what I need to lose and what I need to eat to maintain my goal grows smaller.  I knew progress would eventually slow to a crawl, but if I want to hit the 190′s by the end of summer, I need to get things moving.

Yep, almost Friday.  This has been one of those weeks that just flew by too–busy at work and busy at home.  Through it all I still have managed to keep to my exercise program for the most part, and have tried to be pretty good on my calorie limit.  I am hoping for an early “escape” from the office tomorrow–I have a few stops to make on the way home, and it really helps when I can get them out the way and still be home before the rest of the family on Friday afternoons.

One stop I NEED to make is by Dick’s Sporting Goods.  With the addition of the heart rate monitor to my workouts, I have been really able to focus on the intensity of my exercise efforts.  One area that I have really been pushing the past week and a half is doing my “walks”.  And I say “walks” because in order to keep my heart rate in the fitness zone, I have to jog along at a pretty good clip, for a still sort of fat guy, to keep the heart rate up.  Using the training app on my Droid that takes advantage of the GPS feature, I determined that I my walking/running was averaging just under a 13 minute mile.  For a novice runner that still has a good 30-40 pounds to go, I think that is pretty decent.  My “walking shoes” I purchased months ago are starting to show signs of wear, and with the extra punishment of trail jogging, I really need to invest in a good pair of running shoes.  Just so happens I received a promotional $10 off coupon from Dick’s yesterday, so I need to put it to use.

The walking/running has been about half my daily exercise this week.  Starting Sunday evening, the wife finally started exercising with me.  We are using one of the Biggest Loser Boot Camp DVD’s that is geared to the beginner.  While it isn’t that tough for me, since I have been exercising regularly for months now, it is where she needs to start.  We have done a basic warm-up, intro interval training, followed by the cool-down for four of the past five nights.  A few more weeks with this and I think she will be ready to start the Power90 program.  Until then, I will try to get in a half hour walk/run every day to supplement the BL Boot Camp routine.

I am hoping for a good number this weekend.  With my Dad’s birthday last weekend, which involved a family meal at the local Japanese steak house where tremendous amounts of sodium laden foods were consumed, I stayed away from the scales.  I knew that I wouldn’t like what I saw, but I knew that it would just be temporary so no need to stress over it.  I adjusted my daily calorie target down a couple hundred to 2200.  While I have been going over it slightly most days, I feel better about going over 2200 slightly than bumping into 2400 as I had gotten into the habit of doing.  I do hope with a little more attention paid to what I have been eating this week, with a little bit more physical exertion that I will see a number under 225 this weekend.  We will see.

I finally decided to pick up a heart rate monitor.  The wife and I plan to start Power 90 the first of March, and a lot of what I have been reading says to get a HRM and use it during workouts to track your activity.  While I haven’t started the program yet, I have been playing around with the HRM and it is a really useful gadget.

I decided on the Polar FT7, after a bit of internet research.  Out of the package I was using it within about 15 minutes.  I set up my specifics (height, weight, age, gender), strapped on the chest strap, and hopped on my elliptical.  As I suspected, the elliptical machine’s calorie counter is highly optimistic.  In the 20 minutes I was on it, the elliptical guessed I had burned about 350 calories.  However, my HRM showed about 250 calories.  I will go with the HRM for my elliptical workouts from now on.

Outside the HRM proved even more useful.  On my first long walk, I was able to keep up with my heart rate and try to keep it in the fitness zone.  I was surprised by how many calories a really good brisk walk, with occasional sprints, could burn.  Try 450 calories in about 45 minutes.  I also work the HRM while doing some outside “yardwork” yesterday.  This was an hour and half or so of swinging an axe, dragging limbs and logs, and general  heavy cleanup activities.  I burned enough calories that I did not feel guilty at all having a small bit of brownie with ice cream after dinner.

The weather has been really nice the past few days, almost spring-like.  It is still February, and will probably turn cold again in a few days, but it was enough of a nice weekend to enjoy working outside.  Soon enough it will be time to start pushing the mower again, and that is one calorie burning chore outside I really don’t mind doing.