Weight: 228.6 (-2.6)
Fat: 35.4% (-3.9%)
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Light Cardio (Treadmill 30:00 WL3 - 280 calories, 1.75 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back

Week 1
Avg Weight: 229.3 (+0.0)
Avg Fat: 36.5% (+0.0%)
Measurements

  • Waist: 46.6 (+0.0)
  • Hips: 43.1 (+0.0)
  • Forearm: 11,6 (+0.0)
  • Calf: 17.1 (+0.0)
  • Thigh: 24.1 (+0.0)
  • Wrist: 6.8 (+0.0)

Today is day 7 of the official start of my new plan for healthy living. One full week of focus on eating better and working out. As you can see I've added a few more metrics to the top for this weekly edition. I've averaged my weight and fat percentage as reported by my scale over the week, and I'll be comparing those numbers to the previous week (once available). I've also included the measurements of various portions of my body. I expect some of those numbers to shrink, and some to grow. My waist and hips should go down as I drop fat since that's where it seems to concentrate on my body. Oddly enough my calves and thighs will probably grow as I store little fat there but will definitely put on muscle in the coming months.

Since this is a weekly review I thought instead of a topical blog post like I've been doing, I would assess my performance and plan for the future. To do that I think I'll ask myself a series of questions:

So what have I accomplished so far?

The biggest and most important accomplishment is simply the creation of this site, No More Being Fat. By giving myself a commitment to updating this site with my progress and what I've learned, I have created the means to stay motivated and interested. Instead of diet and exercise being the last priorities on my list, updating this site forces me to push those priorities up there where they belong. Not at the top; my career and relationships are important to me. But my health and well being are more important than keeping my desk clean, playing computer games, surfing the internet, watching movies and television, and any of the thousand other projects that held my interest but weren't necessarily deserving of it.

The second thing I've been doing is creating a means of tracking my progress. I'm weighing myself daily, taking pictures and every week I'll be recording various measurements. This is probably going overboard, but I want to show not only myself, but everyone reading this that weight loss and body transformation don't happen overnight. They're slow but steady processes that can't often be seen immediately, but over time become more and more noticable. My motto is and always has been: More data!

Thirdly, I've been doing 30 minutes of cardio in the form of running on the treadmill. I've been doing fairly light intensity, by design. On my treadmill, level 2 of the weight loss program alternates between 2.5mph and 4.5mph in thirty second, half mph increments and back. I can walk everything but the 4.5, although 4.0 is a brisk walk. This means that for every 4 minutes I'm walking 3:30 and jogging for 0:30. I'd say the intensity of the workout is somewhere between 40% on the low end and 60% on the high end.

Starting today I've switched to level 3 which bumps everything up by half a mile per hour. Essentially I'm be jogging for 1.5 minutes out of every 4 minute cycle, with a slightly brisker walk/jog overall. This is well within my capability and should still not be too intense for me. I'm probably capable of increasing the time to 45 minutes at level 4 or sticking with 30 minutes of level 5 without too much difficulty, but my goal for these first two weeks is to ease back into working out with an eye on the long term instead of working too hard and burning out in a few weeks like I have so often in the past.

What do I still have to do?

Obviously the "Meals" portion of my metrics remains blank thus far. I still haven't finished my research into the right diet plan and I'm continuing to eat the same old crap that I normally eat. Most likely I've done some calorie reduction without planning to. After all, with so much focus on working out every day and posting my pictures and weight to this website, grabbing that huge midnight snack or super-sizing my meals just isn't nearly as desirable as it has been in the past. Starving myself is something that I haven't done, and I'll elaborate why in a separate post, but for now I'm trying to eat as "normal" as I usually do.

Strength training is also on my list of things I need to start doing. The desire to work hard and see results is really making me anxious, but I'd like to spend some time and determine the best way to go about building my muscles. I've never been as much of a weight lifter as I have been a runner, so I need to research this more so I can decide what muscle groups, which exercises, what equipment, etc, etc. I've also done kettlebell which provides a nice mixed workout, and even includes a bit of cardio. I think to start off though I want to do some more traditional exercises with barbells and think about strengthening my core before returning to kettlebell, so I can avoid that nasty back pain I had last time.

What is your progress so far?

Well, as you can see above, as of today I've lost 2.6 pounds from my starting weight which is actually slightly less than yesterday. Considering the rather small amount of work I've done so far (a little cardio and thought a bit more about my portions/meals), I'm pretty happy with this progress. Watching The Biggest Loser really sets some horrible expectations as viewers watch these people that are disappointed about losing only 7 pounds this week. I consider 1-2 pounds per week to be a much more realistic number, especially if you aren't starting out with an insane fat percentage or you have a job other than "lose weight".

That being said, I'm not all that excited about this number. Don't get me wrong, losing weight is a good thing, in fact it's one of my primary goals. But rather than get all excited I've thought about my past attempts in which I've found that I would have a pretty rapid weight loss in week one, followed by a much slower decline. Five pounds seems like such a great start and you start extrapolating thinking that at that rate, you'll be skinny in no time. And then the following week, you weigh almost the same. And then the next week you've lost maybe a pound more. Or maybe less, it's so hard to tell when those scale numbers go up and down. I don't know about you, but my resistance to temptation after a few weeks of middling success after that first big gain goes down considerably, and working out suddenly goes from this great thing I'm doing for my health to a waste of time and energy that I could spend somewhere else.

My theory is that most of that first week of weight loss has more to do with changes in water retention than actual fat loss. You're sweating more, breathing harder, and hopefully drinking more water to replace it. Instead of hoarding water, your body is now disposing of some of its stores. If you've been eating healthier, that changes your body chemistry and increases the process. So instead of holding onto pounds of water, your body expells it and you look at the scale and think about how fantastic you're doing. Remember that small changes in weight in either direction can represent little more than a few pounds of water retained or lost.

I've also dropped 3.9% in fat percentage, but I don't think this number is very accurate. I've been relying on my scale to come up with this number and the method by which it measures it isn't quite accurate. There's a lot of science that goes into measuring body fat, and the tests can get very expensive and cumbersome. My scale simply allows me to record a relative number that will show that I'm making progress. In the future I'll probably invest in a better measurement system but for now I'm not going to get too excited about the actual numbers.

Additionally, the first number I recorded seems to be much higher (39.3) than the other numbers I've recorded.(36.3, 37.0, 36.5, 36.4, 34.9 and 35.4). That is 2.3 higher than the other six number which range 2.1 from the highest (37.0) to lowest (34.9).When you have a number that seems like such an outlier, you usually throw it away, but I'm keeping it here both because it makes me feel better to drop from a higher number and because I don't want to fudge the numbers based on my perception.

How do you feel?

Pretty good actually. I feel like I've accomplished a lot, especially with regards to setting up this website, while simultaneously I feel like I've barely done anything. Starting slow and building momentum is the most important thing for me at this stage and I feel like I've got a good beginning to that. I don't feel I'm being overly optimistic or unrealistic about the work that lies ahead of me, and I'm really looking to the long term instead of worrying about meeting my goals today. Heck, I still haven't officially set any goals yet!

I'm a bit concerned about the amount of time I'm spending so far between working out daily and recording everything on the blog. But many of the habits I'm forming get easier and quicker over time, and research is generally front-loaded. Meaning that most of my studying is being done in these first weeks while I plan my diet and exercise programs, and requires less time to keep up with new ideas and whatnot.

Also, I suspect my blogging isn't always going to be quite so wordy in the future. I feel so full of information at this point and I want to get it all out for my benefit and others. In the future I suspect that I'll spend less time analyzing at length and more just reporting.