The practice of logging what I eat and drink has already had a huge impact on me.

A few nights ago my mother-in-law treated us to dinner at Red Robin. I’m allowing myself one meal a week in which I can break all the rules. And boy, did I break the rules! I had a bacon guacamole cheeseburger with a chocolate malt and a heap of greasy french fries. Man, it was good. That is, until I got home and entered the meal into FitDay.

That meal alone consisted of 2,509 calories, 30 grams of fat, and 168 grams of carbs! I had a net total of 4,340 calories in that day alone. These numbers came from Red Robin’s website, so I’m willing to bet these are even a bit conservative.

I read somewhere that the average American eats out about 4 times per week.  Given how much America eats out, it’s no surprise how fat we are.

I slipped on the ice and landed on my left shoulder on the night before Christmas eve. The pain was so bad that my wife took me to urgent care for an x-ray, which resulted in the official diagnosis of a “contusion,” which is the expensive version of a bruise. Sunuvagun hurts, too! I can barely move without feeling sharp, shooting pain, and my whole body is sore from stiffening up to brace for impact. I feel like I was just in a car accident.

This has me absolutely bummed out. How am I supposed to get svelte when I can’t even lift my arm?

You might think I’m making this statement as someone who gets up early, works out, and does all sorts of productive activities. Actually, right now I’m kind of the opposite and it has me frustrated.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been waking up at about 7:45, frantically jumping in the shower to get my scrub on, force contacts into eyes that won’t yet open fully and rush to get to work by 8:30. Once I get here, I try to be as inconspicuous as possible, which isn’t very possible at all, and I spend the rest of the day playing catch up. I leave around 5:30 when the sun is down and I feel like I get home, eat dinner, and barely have enough family time because we usually have somewhere we have to go. We’re home by 9:00, get the kids off to bed, and the next morning it all happens again.

Not exactly my ideal day.

There used to be a time when I’d get up around 5:00 or 5:30, spend 30 minutes in prayer and reading the Bible, then I’d go for a “jog” (that’s what I call it when I go for a walk). I’d get home, have a smoothie, shower, and get to work by 7:30.  I loved those days because I felt grounded. I’d get tons of stuff done at work and I’d be home in time to hang out with the family before our evening obligations kicked in.

So what’s really the difference between the two?

Being a right-wing evangelical Christian zealot, I believe the primary reason the latter version is better is because I start the day doing what I’m supposed to do, which is nurture my relationship with God and asking Him to help me through the day. Doing this sets my priorities in my heart and mind, not to mention it makes me feel good, which is the daily attitude boost I need. I could then have a good workout and arrive at the office ready for the day.

If it’s so good, why am I not doing it?

I ask myself this question every day as I’m dodging traffic on my way to work. This isn’t how I want to live! So why can’t I do it right? I know what I need to do to be on the right path, but knowing what to do and actually doing it are worlds apart. Oh, and I should mention that this isn’t one of those blog posts where all the answers come in a nicely packaged bullet list at the end. Nope. You see, I’m merely expressing my frustration that I have some major life-changing goals for 2009, and if I can’t get up on the pony then I’m not going to make it.

So these are the questions I’m asking myself:

• What’s changed that I no longer do my morning routine? Something always comes up. Usually I get a cold or some virus that knocks me on my ass for a few days, then the routine is shot. Sometimes it’s just pure unadulterated laziness. Actually, most of the time that’s what it is, but I also mask laziness as:  The bed is too inviting at 5:00 AM. The kids kept me up all night continually sneaking into bed with us.
• When I have done it right before, why can’t I sustain it? That’s what gets me. The sheer awesome feeling I have when I do do it should make it more likely I’ll continue it, right? But the thing is, it’s not easy to do it. The human condition primes us to take the path of least resistance, and my cozy bed isn’t nearly as resistant as dragging my lazy butt out of bed and into the cold morning air. It’s like I tell my 13 year old: Anything worth doing is hard. If it’s easy it probably isn’t worth your time. I guess I should take my own advice. I know that once I get over that initial daily hump of oh-god-i-don’t-want-to-do-this-today it goes quite well, but it’s that first hump that gets me every time.
• What’s my motivation to get over that hump? I read an article about a guy who hangs a sign on his ceiling so that it’s the first thing he sees when he wakes up. The sign says, “Get up and exercise you lazy f###er!” That works for him. It wouldn’t work for me because I so blind that I wouldn’t be able to read it until I put my glasses on, but I need something on that level. I’ve considered wiring my alarm clock so that the speaker is in the wall of our bedroom and the controls are in another room somewhere else in the house so I’d have to get up and run into another room to turn it off, but that wouldn’t go over well with the wife.

Cross posted at shan <definitive>.

I “borrowed” the idea from this post on MarksDailyApple.com. It’s along the lines of the K.I.S.S philosophy (Keep it Simple, Stupid!). In the article, the author identifies “primal” ways to get fit, such as going for a hike, and eating simple foods.

At first glance, that might not sound so difficult. But let’s get real. My ideal weight is 200 pounds. I haven’t weighed 200 pounds since my senior year in high school, which was 15 years ago. In other words, I’m planning on undoing 15 years of damage in 365 days. Are you starting to understand the challenge that I’m about to face?  Damn. I sure am.

The first step is to redesign my eating habits. For the entire month of January I’m going to deny myself the pleasure of eating refined sugars. Why so drastic? Man, I want to start this off with a bang. Not to mention I’ll still be doing my walk/runs during this time.

While I’m not following a diet per se, I am going to use the principles laid forth by the editor of Men’s Health Magazine in his book The Abs Diet. Not because I think I’ll end up with killer abs, but because the plan seems to make sense. Not that I won’t bastardize for my own uses. The plan focuses around eating lean proteins, but it never says to kick refined sugars for a month.

So what happens on February 1? Hopefully I won’t crave chocolate and crap like I do now. Hopefully I can focus on eating what’s healthy, but we’ll jump that bridge when we get there.

http://shandefinitive.blogspot.com/2008/11/year-of-five-fs.html

I’ve been in kind of a funk lately. It all started around election-time (for obvious reasons), and then my employer went through a round of lay-offs, and now I’m just kind of looking around wondering where November went and asking myself, “What just happened?”

I haven’t been micro-bursting, not to mention lifting or weighing in. What the heck?!

I was hoping to get a jump on this, but I’m pretty sure I’m back to square one. That’s OK. Square one is like home to me.  I spend a lot of time in square one. But now it’s time to go.

Citizens of the world are engaged in many theaters of war. Along side the literal ones, there are the countless figural ones: terror, drugs, halitosis and obesity, to name a few. I am a Veteran of the War on Obesity. The WoO.

There are varied reasons why or how an individual can come to find themselves fighting this war, yet, I believe that the lone principal for winning is universal and therefore, I asked Shannon if I could share. And before you ask, no, it isn’t this, this or this.

Let me share my fat story.

It’s nothing spectacular. I grew up fat. I never needed a Rascal or anything to get around Wal-mart, but I had thunder thighs and belly rolls. I had friends and a social life, but I didn’t have boyfriends and my love life consisted of Nora Roberts novels and my imagination. At the age of 23, I would get winded climbing UP a flight of stairs and my knees would hurt climbing DOWN a flight of stairs. My acute phobia of elevators and escalators forced me to take a severe look at what I was letting my body become: Morbidly Obese. Not attractive.

I could go into how I was an emotional eater – if I felt an emotion, I was eating – or I could relate a period of my life where my self esteem tanked faster and further than our current economy, but neither are the reason I was fat. I was fat because I had no self respect. I didn’t respect my emotions enough to confront them head on, without the aid of food. I didn’t respect my own body, I didn’t respect my mind and I didn’t respect myself – my being, my heart & soul and all that other hippie shit.

And then one day, something finally clicked into place and I was able to follow a program that allowed me to lose 100 pounds and counting. Yes, the program was amazing and worked very well for me, but it wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t been in the right place mentally.

As soon as I took responsibility for how I got myself into my size 20 pants, I finally had the tool to get myself out of them. It took time, and in fact, I haven’t reached my final goal – but I know I will. It was hard and I struggled daily and slipped often, but I always took responsibility.

Just as Shannon says on his personal finance blog: The credit card companies didn’t get you into debt… YOU did, and you’re the only person to get you out. Fancy that that is the same principal for weight loss.

I’m seriously off track here thanks to being off the wagon on Monday and Tuesday. My goal was to start my weight-lifting circuit the week daylight savings time ended, but that hasn’t happened. I’ve missed two days of my walk/micro-bursting.

The good news is I haven’t lost much ground, so tomorrow I hit the pavement!

On October 17 I hit my low of 265.5 pounds, and since then I’ve been steadily climbing back up. I’ve been through this before, but it isn’t any less discouraging. If you’re like me, you’re thinking, “What the heck?! I’ve been eating normal portions most of the time. A lot more than I used to! Plus I’m exercising regularly!”

I had to remind myself not to despair. What’s going on is that my regular walk/micro-bursts are causing me to build muscle. Muscle is denser than fat, so a square inch of muscle weighs about 20% more than a square inch of fat. What really drove it home for me was when I pulled on my jeans and realized that the smallest setting on my belt is no longer tight enough to adequately keep my pants up!

When you hit this wall and you start increasing in weight, keep these things in mind:

• You’re actively building muscle, and more muscle means more calories burned.
• This is a temporary trend. Soon, your calorie consumption will catch up with your efforts and your weight will start decreasing again.
• You’re making small savings deposits. My other blog is on personal finance, and starting out a fitness program feels a lot like starting out a savings program.  At first, you can only save a few bucks here and there, but as you continue that amount grows. Compound interest kicks and and soon you’re looking back with amazement on how far you’ve come.
• Don’t rely on just one measurement to track progress. This is the biggie. Weight alone is not adequate to measure progress. This is a good reminder for myself that I need to start measuring my hip-to-waist ratio.