Half way to my yearly goal!

May 8, 2013 5K, Wednesday Updates One comment
50 pound weight loss badge

Another great week with another major milestone. This will probably be last major milestone for a couple months, but as of this morning I have lost 55 lbs, and am just past the halfway point to my one year goal of losing 100 pounds. I struggled overall this past week to stay motivated, but Monday I started to hit my stride again and have started to try to climb back up with my activity level.

On Monday I left work without any training plan or apps, and ran 5k to see where I am. I was shooting for a 39 minute, 50 second time. My first mile I ran way too hard and set a personal best time of 11 minutes and 53 seconds. I was out of gas about half way through mile two, and set times of 12m 58s & 12m 41s for the last two miles. Even being completely exhausted for the second half, I beat my goal time with a total 5k time of 38 minutes and 57 seconds.

Runkeeper Run Data

Stats for the previous 7 days:

Steps Data

Total Steps – 84,612 steps
DAILY AVERAGE – 12,087 steps
BEST DAY – 23,580 steps

Distance Data

TOTAL DISTANCE – 40.88 miles
DAILY AVERAGE – 5.84 miles
BEST DAY – 11.33 miles

Floors Climbed Data

TOTAL FLOORS CLIMBED – 183 floors
DAILY AVERAGE – 26 floors
BEST DAY – 59 floors

Caloric Data

TOTAL CALS BURNED – 24,683
DAILY AVERAGE – 3,526 cals
BEST DAY – 4,814 cals
CALORIES IN VS OUT – -16,519

Weight Data

WEIGHT CHANGE – -6.9 lb
LIGHTEST – 288.6 lb
HEAVIEST – 295.5 lb

I am a cheater and I am ok with it

May 4, 2013 Friday Foods No comments

I completely blew past my Friday morning deadline for this week’s food report, but this is something I have been debating for a while now. Does having planned cheat days or meals give motivation to eat healthier and exercise more, or do they undermine the work of trying to make long term and meaningful lifestyle changes? I have to say that one of big reasons I put off writing this by Friday is that I had planed a cheat/celebration meal for Friday evening and wanted to see how it went. I have to say not only was it an awesome meal at the Vortex with great friends, but I pushed hard to meet the goals I needed to hit to go there. I also ended up losing another pound after eating there.

For me, I have set several big goals and several smaller goals. Each of these goals have some sort of reward set. The big goals almost always revolve around some sort of food based rewards which are my cheat meals. I have always loved food. Anyone who has seen me can immediately see that. By giving myself these rewards after major goals, I am motivated to work harder over a longer period of time. For me the cheat days work well for me.

Talking with a friend of mine a few weeks ago, who has a personal trainer as a friend, I asked about cheat days and was told that he is completely against them. This got me looking into reasons why it might not be a good idea. Several places, like this forum topic on myfitnesspal.com, talk about how cheat days lead you off track. Multiple people bring up as a con that cheat meals lead to cheat days which lead to cheat weeks, which lead to falling off the rails. I also found an article on yahoo.com that talks about cheat meals have the potential to throw of your hormones, causing your body to no longer respond to fullness properly.

So what I have learned? I guess the biggest thing I have learned is that like everything else I want an answer to, there isn’t a real answer to this question. For some people cheat days are bad. For others they are a necessity for long lasting change. For me, they work great. I was never addicted to eating, but I love good food. This creates motivation for me, and doesn’t cause me to back-slide into eating unhealthy everyday. This won’t work for everyone. I really hate answers to questions that are not actual answers. Hopefully this will give you a good starting point if you are looking at putting cheat days in your plan to healthy.

Wednesday Update Number Three

May 1, 2013 Wednesday Updates 2 comments

Well, I am just barely gonna get this one in under the wire. After some huge milestones last week, this week has been a huge combination of not feeling motivated and very busy at work. I feel like I have really let this week slide by, but the numbers are still really good. Hopefully the next 7 days will give me a chance to get back to the drive I have had in the past.

Stats for the previous 7 days:

Steps Data

Total Steps – 95,416 steps
DAILY AVERAGE – 13,631 steps
BEST DAY – 21,799 steps

Distance Data

TOTAL DISTANCE – 45.99 miles
DAILY AVERAGE – 6.57 miles
BEST DAY – 10.56 miles

Floors Climbed Data

TOTAL FLOORS CLIMBED – 181 floors
DAILY AVERAGE – 26 floors
BEST DAY – 43 floors

Caloric Data

TOTAL CALS BURNED – 27,792cals
DAILY AVERAGE – 3,970 cals
BEST DAY – 4,879 cals
CALORIES IN VS OUT – -10967
WEEKLY TOTALS

27792 cals burned
9825 cals eaten
-7000 plan deficit

Weight Data

WEIGHT CHANGE – -6.6 lb
LIGHTEST – 294.6 lb
HEAVIEST – 301.2 lb

Weighing your food makes a world of difference.

April 26, 2013 Friday Foods No comments

Last Friday I talked about the importance of writing down everything you eat and counting calories in vs calories burned. You don’t really have to be that accurate, just make sure you give yourself room to be off a little. For instance, when I first started counting calories, I had a goal to burn 1000 more calories than ate. So if i wanted to eat 1500 calories, I would need to burn 2500 throughout the day. I knew that my calories burned on the FitBit were a close approximation, so if it said 2500, I would try to stay closer to 1200 calories of food that day. I found that some days this worked out, but others it just wasn’t adding up right. It ended up being I was completely off calculating how much food I was eating throughout the day.

The Ozeri One Touch Profession food scale. I wasn’t off to much with each item, but enough that all the items of food I would eat would be off by as much as fifty to one hundred calories by dinner time. Not good, but it was fixable. I corrected it by getting a food scale that measures in pounds, ounces, grams, fluid ounces, and milliliters. Talk about an awesome investment. I got the Ozeri One Touch Professional 17.6 pound digital scale from amazon for about $30. There are cheaper ones, but I really liked how this one had a single piece of glass as the top surface, and it got really good reviews on Amazon.

I have had my food scale for about a month now, and it has been awesome. I am not sure how I calculated portions and calories before I had it. If you are serious about wanting to get healthy, I would highly recommend a nice food scale. For ease of use, look for one that has a tare function, and find one that is easy to clean. So far I would say that my Ozeri food scale does all of that and more. I would provide a link to their website, but it is horrible and auto plays music. I can’t subject any one to that!

Notch.me for the last 30 days…

April 25, 2013 Uncategorized No comments
http://notch.me/p/25zNOEEKzAHxrDsV7oCXGq

May 25th through April 25 Notch.me Numbers.

A major milestone has been reached!

April 24, 2013 Wednesday Updates No comments
FitBit 40 pound weight loss badge

I am so excited as I write this post. Yesterday morning I woke up to get ready to go on my 5K training run, and like normal I stepped on my scale. This morning was very different though. For the first time over a decade I looked down the first number was no longer a 3! Yes. That is right. I weighed in under 300 pounds! I know it wasn’t much below (299.8lbs) and could fluctuate back over in the next few days, but just seeing it was amazing. It also earned me my forty pound goal weight loss badge with FitBit. Talk about motivation to keep working hard.

I also hit another big milestone towards another goal yesterday. I finished week two of my 5K training. That is a quarter of the way through it. Zombies Run: 5K has been a blast so far, and I can’t wait for the next six weeks! The story has been extremely fun, and keeps me motivated to keep going. I am sure once I finish the training I will be getting the full app so I can really start building up the town and playing the game.

There has been a downside over the last couples weeks though. Mainly my step count has been going down. I had a couple weeks of over an average of 18,000 steps per day, but with running, I have been reducing that down to 10,000 to 15,000. I still want to get my steps back closer to 20,000 a day, but for now my knee’s just can do all the running plus five or six more miles of walking a day.

Stats for the previous 7 days:

Steps Data

TOTAL STEPS – 81,511
DAILY AVERAGE – 11,644 steps
BEST DAY – 16,558 steps

Distance Data

TOTAL DISTANCE – 39.09 miles
DAILY AVERAGE – 5.58 miles
BEST DAY – 7.92 miles

Floors Climbed Data

TOTAL FLOORS CLIMBED – 130
DAILY AVERAGE – 19 floors
BEST DAY – 31 floors

Calorie Information

TOTAL CALS BURNED – 26,454
DAILY AVERAGE – 3,779 cals
BEST DAY – 4,466 cals

Weight Change

5.5 lbs lost

Uh oh Fitbit!

April 23, 2013 Uncategorized No comments

Looks like UK fitness tracking company FitBug is filing a trademark infringement case agains FitBit. Hopefully the two companies can work this out soon. FitBit and FitBug are really not that similar to me, but I guess in todays world you have to defend your trademarks.

Read more from the consumerist.com.

Chick-Fil-A is getting healthier!

April 22, 2013 Uncategorized No comments

Chick-fil-a's Salad Infographic

I have to admit that I absolutely love Chick-fil-a. I am really excited to try the new salads coming April 29th, as well as some of the new dressings! Check them out by clicking on the infographic above.

Getting fit with the FitBit One

April 22, 2013 Fitness Tools, Mobile Apps No comments
20130421-184405.jpg

Anyone who has been around me in the past few months has heard me talk about my FitBit One. I even mentioned it in an earlier post. At this point I figure most of my friends are pretty sick of hearing about it because I am completely in love with it. Hands down it has been the best investment I have made to get fit. So what is a FitBit? Well, at it’s core it is a pedometer. They currently have two models, the Zip & the One, with a third on the way called the Flex. All of them do the basic pedometer functions, as well as bluetooth connection to smartphones, estimated calories burned, and activity levels. The One also records floors climbed in a day as well as monitors sleep to let you know how efficient your sleep is. The Flex will do everything the One does, except floors climbed.

After reading several articles about the importance of getting at least 10,000 steps throughout the day, I new one of the first things I would get to help me get in shape was a pedometer. Knowing my love of data and wanting to get the most data I could, I opted for the One. The data I get amazing. When I started using it, I was pushing it to get 5000 steps and 10 floors a day. Now I do between 10,000 and 15,000 steps and 40 floors on an average day, and have gotten as high as 25,000 steps in a day and 65 floors. Read more

Friday Foods – Writing down what you eat.

April 19, 2013 Friday Foods, Mobile Apps 2 comments

Fridays I hope to talk a bit about what foods I am cooking, eating and places to eat healthier. This first Friday of Fat to Fit I want to talk about the single biggest thing I changed in my diet that helped me be a healthier eater. Before getting to that, I want to define what I mean by diet:

Diet (di-et)
1. the foods eaten, as by a particular person or group

I am not on the kind of “diet” most people think of when they hear someone is trying to get fit. My goal is to make slow, but permanent changes to my lifestyle. I have tried things like Atkins, or vegan diets in the past, and while I have lost weight on them, I always rebound back. This time I knew whatever I did had to stick. After a lot of reading about weight loss and healthier eating, I came to one simple conclusion. What matters most is to eat less calories than you burn.

Talk about simple. On average, for every 3500 calories you burn over what you take in, you should lose about a pound. Here is the key to that. Start by writing down everything you eat. Not just at meals, but EVERYTHING. Just the simple act of writing it down will make you consciously think about what you are eating. For me, I wanted to take this a bit farther though. I wanted to actually start calculating as close as possible to the calories I ate and the calories I burned.

You could always use a simple piece of paper & a pen, or look at many of the technology based applications to help you with this. For me, technology offered me more numbers and stats, which in turn help motivate me. I know this method isn’t for everyone, as technology is not always easy to use, but the data you can get is remarkable. It can also help you stay focused on what you eat and how much you eat. If you are looking for a web based tool with a great mobile app just for tracking food, check out My Fitness Pal. There are several others out there, but MFP is one I have used and it’s food database is huge! Also, because it is one of the largest players in this market, it has tie-ins for many other health and wellness products, like the Fitbit, which I will talking about Monday!

I hope everyone has a safe and healthy weekend!

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