Total weight lost: 12 pounds. To put that in some perpsective, that's 1.2 sledgehammers, 8.6 Outback porterhouse steaks, or $172,064.64 in gold *lol*.
Yes, I've laid off margarine. Every one can now calm down and switch to decaf. :-) But you are right, it's a very long ingredient list, and it certainly does not belong on the border of the grocery store.
I've gotta get more weights in. Thank goodness my gym has plenty, and some useful machines. I've also found a few good weight routines in Men's Health. I hope I can move afterwards.
Thank you, God, and thank you everyone for all the support!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
I was hoping to lose 2 pounds... I lost 6 instead
Hello everyone! I hope all are well. Just wanted to drop a note to say I've lost six pounds since my quest to get skinny again started last week. I was expecting two, maybe three pounds at most would be gone, but no, I lost six. Which is way more than I've ever lost in a week.
I realize it'd be quite hard to maintain that kind of weight loss, and it may not even be the healthiest thing for me. I'll look in to that (and any input from my Facebook peeps on that issue would be much appreciated... Katie, I'm sure you're about to chime in). Still, this weight has gotta come off.
My exercise has been limited largely to cardiovascular work. I'll start to get weights in a little more often, but getting that heart rate up for 45 minutes or so five times a week is the biggest priority.
I've made some modifications to my diet. Protein and fiber are key ingredients to feeling full. The challenge, however, is finding food that'll do that without being filled with carbs, LDL cholesterol and saturated fat.
If it's green, I eat it, and I eat it with reckless abandon. Raw spinach with my mom's sharp vinaigrette is a lunch-time staple. On Saturday, after interviewing a potential new babysitter, Kimberly, Richard and I went to Ruby Tuesday for a salad and baked potato, and I found myself rather full after covering my field greens with broccoli and a few good scoops of edamame, which not only has tons of fiber, but just enough of those very handy plant fats which help you absorb more nutrients. Fat is not always a really bad thing! In fact, putting a little bit of margarine on your asparagus, green beans or what have you will allow you to absorb about 15 times more of the plants' nutrients. The key phrase in that last sentence is "a little bit."
Here's another tip for salads. Skip regular dressing and splash a good amount of balsamic vinegar on there. The flavors in your vegetables will become a lot more apparent. When you're done adding the vinegar, add just a few drops of olive oil.
Also, beans are a huge help in fighting hunger while keeping the fat down. One serving of black beans has 15 grams each of fiber and protein. I don't know of any other food - except maybe quinoa - that can do that. Anyone know any good quinoa recipes? Anyway, I've been replacing rice and such with beans instead. Kimberly made this pinto bean and spinach salad that's the bomb.
One food I've discovered over this past week is greek-style yogurt. I saw a report about the stuff's popularity while watching the news in the gym. It's got no fat at all (can't say that about my usual Yoplait), 13 to 15 grams of protein (in yogurt!!!) and barely any sugar. The downside is its fully organic status rings in at about $1.80 for one container. Yoplait is generally $0.50 - 0.60 a container. Still, I would eat two containers of Yoplait a day, as opposed to one five ounce container of greek-style yogurt, so I'm not out that much cash.
My thanks to God and to everyone for their support. With your help, I'm gonna beat this weight. Bless you all!
I realize it'd be quite hard to maintain that kind of weight loss, and it may not even be the healthiest thing for me. I'll look in to that (and any input from my Facebook peeps on that issue would be much appreciated... Katie, I'm sure you're about to chime in). Still, this weight has gotta come off.
My exercise has been limited largely to cardiovascular work. I'll start to get weights in a little more often, but getting that heart rate up for 45 minutes or so five times a week is the biggest priority.
I've made some modifications to my diet. Protein and fiber are key ingredients to feeling full. The challenge, however, is finding food that'll do that without being filled with carbs, LDL cholesterol and saturated fat.
If it's green, I eat it, and I eat it with reckless abandon. Raw spinach with my mom's sharp vinaigrette is a lunch-time staple. On Saturday, after interviewing a potential new babysitter, Kimberly, Richard and I went to Ruby Tuesday for a salad and baked potato, and I found myself rather full after covering my field greens with broccoli and a few good scoops of edamame, which not only has tons of fiber, but just enough of those very handy plant fats which help you absorb more nutrients. Fat is not always a really bad thing! In fact, putting a little bit of margarine on your asparagus, green beans or what have you will allow you to absorb about 15 times more of the plants' nutrients. The key phrase in that last sentence is "a little bit."
Here's another tip for salads. Skip regular dressing and splash a good amount of balsamic vinegar on there. The flavors in your vegetables will become a lot more apparent. When you're done adding the vinegar, add just a few drops of olive oil.
Also, beans are a huge help in fighting hunger while keeping the fat down. One serving of black beans has 15 grams each of fiber and protein. I don't know of any other food - except maybe quinoa - that can do that. Anyone know any good quinoa recipes? Anyway, I've been replacing rice and such with beans instead. Kimberly made this pinto bean and spinach salad that's the bomb.
One food I've discovered over this past week is greek-style yogurt. I saw a report about the stuff's popularity while watching the news in the gym. It's got no fat at all (can't say that about my usual Yoplait), 13 to 15 grams of protein (in yogurt!!!) and barely any sugar. The downside is its fully organic status rings in at about $1.80 for one container. Yoplait is generally $0.50 - 0.60 a container. Still, I would eat two containers of Yoplait a day, as opposed to one five ounce container of greek-style yogurt, so I'm not out that much cash.
My thanks to God and to everyone for their support. With your help, I'm gonna beat this weight. Bless you all!
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Let's See if Jeff can be Skinny Again
I've heard about other people blogging about their weight loss efforts, and I'm hoping it will help me, too. With a little encouragement from my online peeps, I bet I'll be able to drop this weight like I cut it off with a sling blade. Some folks call it a kaiser blade, I call it a sling blade. OK. Enough.
My body looks like a pear. From my head down to the top of my abdomen, I look OK. Then I start to balloon out a little bit. Go down further, and I balloon out even more. From the side, I don't have too much of a gut, because the weight is all stored on my sides. That doesn't mean I don't have tons and tons of room to lose the gut.
I started to gain weight when I was a reporter. With the freedom to eat whatever I wanted... well, I ate whatever I wanted. Plus, I got home way too late at night, and ate then, rather than bringing my dinner to work with me as well as my lunch (reporters tend to work real late, in case you're scratching your head right now).
Now let's get something straight. Eating what I wanted didn't mean I was scarfing down thrice-fried chicken thighs and 55-gallon drums of Coca Cola every day. I was eating too much and I was eating too fast. Oh, a banana? It's good for me. I'll eat the whole bunch. Apples? Awesome! I'll eat three. Chicken breasts! I'll take two! Corn on the cob? Well, I can't stop at just one.
I needed to slow down and chew my food a lot more. You fill up faster that way. I don't know why I ate (and usually still eat, unfortunately) too fast. I think it may stem from my days before college when I was a favorite bullying target (which deserves a separate blog on its own). The gigantic jock types would steal food from me, and I was too scared and lanky to do anything about it. So, I ate as fast as I could so there was nothing to steal. I feel marginally better about this now that I know these guys are all still in Botetourt County, making 1/5th the money I do and cruising the high school football games for chicks a few days before their court dates for whatever misdemeanors you can imagine.
Another cause of my weight gain is my love for the taste of beer. I still believe light beer is nasty, but I was drinking way too much of the stuff I thought tasted good. Newcastle, Lowenbrau, Sam Adams... the list goes on. In retrospect, I didn't make enough money reporting to afford beer that costs $9/six pack, but there are some things that are worth a little more money.
About 17 months after being on my own, I was trying on jeans one day at Marshall's, and I got a bad case of muffin top. You all know what that is, and if it's ever happened to you, it doesn't feel good.
With heart disease and cancer in my family, I knew I had to do something. So I started trying my best to eat a lot less.
Again, understand I am not one of those people who hates vegetables. I love them. I love them raw, grilled, or steamed. I don't much care for them boiled into unrecognizable mush. I relish a great salad (but I hate iceberg lettuce, so I use field greens or spinach). I love grilled, steamed or baked fish. I love sweet potatoes baked, opened, and eaten (hold the marshmallows). I didn't grow up eating garbage. So, the food I eat isn't so much what needs to change now as much as the amount I move.
I have, however, cut back significantly on my beer intake. I have maybe one or two a week now, and it's usually a Guiness Draught, which, believe it or not, has fewer calories than all those carbonated spit-and-urine beers so many people think are so great. Liquor is a rare treat. Plus, I've axed all the excess sugar I can in my diet. Have any of you had Coke Zero? I can't believe how good that stuff is to have no calories at all. Diet Mountain Dew still has quite a bit of bite, as well, as does the Black Cherry Citrus version of Fresca. If I'm feeling totally drained from nights the baby doesn't sleep well or just plain run down, I grab a sugar-free Red Bull. I also eat fat-free ice cream now, but only maybe three nights a week. I still can't bring myself to try sugar-free, fat-free ice cream. I think that'd be like buying a Lamborghini with the V-12 removed and replaced with a four-banger from a '97 Toyota Camry. I've also discovered the glory of Jimmy Dean D-Light breakfast sandwiches which gives me some protein to smack that sluggish metabolism around. There are a few gutbomb splurges, but I will swear on a stack they are few and far between. Plus, if you don't eat something fattening every once in a while, when you find it's your only choice, you'll also find yourself binging on it when the satiety hits you.
So, the real change: exercise. I was a regular exerciser up until around November 2004, when graduate school got nuts, then finding a job after graduate school about killed me, as I decided mid-way through graduate school I would not pursue broadcast journalism, but use my degree towards a related profession. I got back on the wagon around 2006 with Weight Watchers, but then I got married to my beautiful wife, and our lives got crazy. Good, my dear Kimberly, very, very good. But crazy. I tried NutriSystem for a few weeks, but that food, no matter what they tell you on TV, is absolutely horrible. It's really the worst food I've ever had. The packaging it comes in would be more palatable. Becoming a parent also leaves little to no time to take care of yourself. But for the sake of my wife and my son, I've gotta get this weight off.
Kimberly has been nothing less than fantastically supportive. When she gets home, she lets me take an hour or so break from being a "manny" and go to the gym. Generally, I knock out about 600 calories or so with a combination of weight lifting, body weight exercises, and intense cardiovascular work on an elliptical machine. My HOA fees paid, for a while, for a personal trainer, but my community decided not to renew his contract, so I'm trying to remember the lessons he taught me.
What I'll try to do as well is post my calorie burning total after each workout on Facebook (I hope I can do that through my BlackBerry and not through a status update) and post total weight loss at the beginning of each week. I'm not going to post my current weight until I'm where I want to be. I realize that could take a year, maybe more, with my new habits. Y'all can just do the math if you're really curious about how much thunder my thighs really made. *Pause* Wow, that sounded really awful.
Anyway, I'm tagging all Facebook friends to this post because I want everyone to know this problem can happen to anyone. If currently you're at where I want to be, thank God every day for it, and pray for the strength to stay there. If you're not where you want to be, pray for the strength to get there.
Blessings, and be well.
My body looks like a pear. From my head down to the top of my abdomen, I look OK. Then I start to balloon out a little bit. Go down further, and I balloon out even more. From the side, I don't have too much of a gut, because the weight is all stored on my sides. That doesn't mean I don't have tons and tons of room to lose the gut.
I started to gain weight when I was a reporter. With the freedom to eat whatever I wanted... well, I ate whatever I wanted. Plus, I got home way too late at night, and ate then, rather than bringing my dinner to work with me as well as my lunch (reporters tend to work real late, in case you're scratching your head right now).
Now let's get something straight. Eating what I wanted didn't mean I was scarfing down thrice-fried chicken thighs and 55-gallon drums of Coca Cola every day. I was eating too much and I was eating too fast. Oh, a banana? It's good for me. I'll eat the whole bunch. Apples? Awesome! I'll eat three. Chicken breasts! I'll take two! Corn on the cob? Well, I can't stop at just one.
I needed to slow down and chew my food a lot more. You fill up faster that way. I don't know why I ate (and usually still eat, unfortunately) too fast. I think it may stem from my days before college when I was a favorite bullying target (which deserves a separate blog on its own). The gigantic jock types would steal food from me, and I was too scared and lanky to do anything about it. So, I ate as fast as I could so there was nothing to steal. I feel marginally better about this now that I know these guys are all still in Botetourt County, making 1/5th the money I do and cruising the high school football games for chicks a few days before their court dates for whatever misdemeanors you can imagine.
Another cause of my weight gain is my love for the taste of beer. I still believe light beer is nasty, but I was drinking way too much of the stuff I thought tasted good. Newcastle, Lowenbrau, Sam Adams... the list goes on. In retrospect, I didn't make enough money reporting to afford beer that costs $9/six pack, but there are some things that are worth a little more money.
About 17 months after being on my own, I was trying on jeans one day at Marshall's, and I got a bad case of muffin top. You all know what that is, and if it's ever happened to you, it doesn't feel good.
With heart disease and cancer in my family, I knew I had to do something. So I started trying my best to eat a lot less.
Again, understand I am not one of those people who hates vegetables. I love them. I love them raw, grilled, or steamed. I don't much care for them boiled into unrecognizable mush. I relish a great salad (but I hate iceberg lettuce, so I use field greens or spinach). I love grilled, steamed or baked fish. I love sweet potatoes baked, opened, and eaten (hold the marshmallows). I didn't grow up eating garbage. So, the food I eat isn't so much what needs to change now as much as the amount I move.
I have, however, cut back significantly on my beer intake. I have maybe one or two a week now, and it's usually a Guiness Draught, which, believe it or not, has fewer calories than all those carbonated spit-and-urine beers so many people think are so great. Liquor is a rare treat. Plus, I've axed all the excess sugar I can in my diet. Have any of you had Coke Zero? I can't believe how good that stuff is to have no calories at all. Diet Mountain Dew still has quite a bit of bite, as well, as does the Black Cherry Citrus version of Fresca. If I'm feeling totally drained from nights the baby doesn't sleep well or just plain run down, I grab a sugar-free Red Bull. I also eat fat-free ice cream now, but only maybe three nights a week. I still can't bring myself to try sugar-free, fat-free ice cream. I think that'd be like buying a Lamborghini with the V-12 removed and replaced with a four-banger from a '97 Toyota Camry. I've also discovered the glory of Jimmy Dean D-Light breakfast sandwiches which gives me some protein to smack that sluggish metabolism around. There are a few gutbomb splurges, but I will swear on a stack they are few and far between. Plus, if you don't eat something fattening every once in a while, when you find it's your only choice, you'll also find yourself binging on it when the satiety hits you.
So, the real change: exercise. I was a regular exerciser up until around November 2004, when graduate school got nuts, then finding a job after graduate school about killed me, as I decided mid-way through graduate school I would not pursue broadcast journalism, but use my degree towards a related profession. I got back on the wagon around 2006 with Weight Watchers, but then I got married to my beautiful wife, and our lives got crazy. Good, my dear Kimberly, very, very good. But crazy. I tried NutriSystem for a few weeks, but that food, no matter what they tell you on TV, is absolutely horrible. It's really the worst food I've ever had. The packaging it comes in would be more palatable. Becoming a parent also leaves little to no time to take care of yourself. But for the sake of my wife and my son, I've gotta get this weight off.
Kimberly has been nothing less than fantastically supportive. When she gets home, she lets me take an hour or so break from being a "manny" and go to the gym. Generally, I knock out about 600 calories or so with a combination of weight lifting, body weight exercises, and intense cardiovascular work on an elliptical machine. My HOA fees paid, for a while, for a personal trainer, but my community decided not to renew his contract, so I'm trying to remember the lessons he taught me.
What I'll try to do as well is post my calorie burning total after each workout on Facebook (I hope I can do that through my BlackBerry and not through a status update) and post total weight loss at the beginning of each week. I'm not going to post my current weight until I'm where I want to be. I realize that could take a year, maybe more, with my new habits. Y'all can just do the math if you're really curious about how much thunder my thighs really made. *Pause* Wow, that sounded really awful.
Anyway, I'm tagging all Facebook friends to this post because I want everyone to know this problem can happen to anyone. If currently you're at where I want to be, thank God every day for it, and pray for the strength to stay there. If you're not where you want to be, pray for the strength to get there.
Blessings, and be well.
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