After week 10

I guess the one bad thing about Sunday being my writing night is that it makes it that much harder to get up on Monday. But, that's okay, because it was a great writing night. Things were flowing pretty good and I spent time outlining as well as writing and made good progress on both. It was a lot of fun!

Eating this week was good and bad. When I focused, I did horrible. When I just worked on other stuff and let food be an afterthought. I did a lot better. Interesting.

It was a busy work week last week and promises more of the same this week, although there is all kinds of juicy political stuff to blog about. Something about dumb politicians bashing small town people that just gets me smiling in the morning.

Here is the breakdown for the week:
Weight: 237 lbs, 67 lbs to go
Writing: 5 pages, 11 pages total

After week 9

So, the flavor of the month/week/day/hour :) is this. First of all after starting the week horribly I decided that I should not eat fast food if I'm alone. I say that because I usually grab fast food at lunch as a quick thing and end up eating too much through the drive through window. As a family, we really don't eat it that often, so I thought that would be a good way to moderate how much fast/unhealthy food I was eating. So that's the first thing.

Then I started watching the way my kids ate. Kyle is a snacker and a pretty good snacker at that. He loves fruit and cheese. We've even found an empty bag of chocolate chips on more than one occasion. Pretty sneaky considering it was a big bag and we never really caught on. Hmmm.... got to watch that kid. Hunter is more like me, he eats what you put in front of him. If he likes it, he eats a lot of it. Fortunately his metabolism can take it right now and if he keeps this up he'll be about 6'4'' tall and he'll still be able to eat quite a bit. The one I found intriguing was Jacob. He eats an enormous breakfast, for instance, yesterday I made french bread french toast and bacon for breakfast. Jacob ate four full pieces of the toast (I ate two) and four pieces of bacon, plus a glass of milk. Lunch, he backs off quite a bit and he hardly eats ANYTHING for dinner. That's just what he does day in and day out naturally, but it seems like a pretty good plan.

So... my current deal is:
- no candy, no ice cream for 2008 (my new year's resolution)
- no fast food while I'm by myself (this means bringing lunch from home)
- Big breakfast, small lunch, small dinner
- no snacking
- no eating after 8pm (period)

I have been doing this for about three days (laugh here). I was up a few pounds for the week when I started, but after the last three days, ended a pound down for the week. We'll see how long it lasts, but right now it doesn't seem too bad. I really get to eat at breakfast, but have to behave at lunch and only really feel the pinch in the late afternoon and then again when I get my late night cravings.

Anyway, that's for the eating. The writing... that definitely took a hit this week. We started a small group on Thursday evenings to go through a marriage study, which meant that my normal writing night was spent cleaning, sweeping and mopping. I thought I would move my writing night to Sunday nights, since I never like to go to bed on Sundays anyway (you know, because if you go to bed that means that you have to get up and go to work on Monday, it's a denial thing). Unfortunately that didn't happen last night because of some of some other stuff going on.

Weigh in: 238 lbs 68 lbs to go
Writing: 0 pages, 6 pages total

After week 8

It was a challenging week. I went a little too crazy with the soda and WAY to crazy with eating out at fast food. I managed to stay true to the no candy/no ice cream pledge, but I can say that I definitely substituted this week with additional other junk.

I kind of restarted on the writing. I just didn’t like the previous start, it really didn’t flow and the beginning dialog came off really cheesy. I think the new start that I did this week was a lot better. At least it feels that way to me. I’m very excited for my writing day this week, I think I just need to stay up as late as I need and just keep going with it. Maybe I should set some crazy goal like 10 pages or something.

We’ll see.

Weight: 239 lbs, 69 lbs to go. Getting stagnant here. No bueno.
Writing: 3 pages, 6 total, but the 3 replaced the previous 3, so really 3 total.

After week 7

Today is the first day back from vacation. I'm just digging out of the deluge of email and scraping the surface of the political news. I thought about not doing this update today, but instead waiting until tomorrow... but, I thought it would be an interesting data point.

Okay, my goals for vacation included:
- Cleaning out the garages (DONE: I even got BOTH cars in! Very exciting)
- work on the laundry room (DONE: with some help from B, SO much better)
- take kids to pool. (Too cold, but B took them to a movie while I worked on the garages. I may squeeze this one in this week since it is MUCH warmer)
- Take B on a date! (DONE: Always good to spend time with my amazing wife who puts up with quite a bit from me.)
- Write 20 pages ( No bueno. No progress. I left the laptop in the bag except for a couple of days)

So to make up some headway on writing I am going to add a writing night this week.

Before I give you my weight for the week, remember yesterday was Easter, and for our celebration I experimented and smoked a turkey, and a 20 pounder at that. For my first go, I would say it was pretty good. Not too much smoke flavor, but VERY juicy. It was eaten much better than the ham that was also available. There were at least four desserts there, two of which were made by my talented wife. She also made fresh chala bread with cinnamon, honey butter. Oh my. People were practically eating that stuff by the spoonfull. Just to be fair I also had a piece of my sister-in-law's Butterfinger cake. Very good. Just keep that in mind. :)

Weight: 240.5 lbs. 70.5 lbs to go.
Writing: 0 pages. :( 3 total.

After week 6

It was a better week. Not great but better. Of course, you add in the intestinal/stomach thing that I had where I dropped four pounds in one day, and it's looking pretty good!

The fact that I managed to keep most of that one day loss, to me, is a success.

I also spent part of Wednesday evening writing! Yeah! Go me! Of course, I only got three pages written, but I made progress. I was a little frustrated during that time with the way things were going. I didn't like the dialog, it came across pretty cheesy. Fortunately I had a good idea yesterday while getting ready for church on how to change it up.

I'm on vacation starting tomorrow and won't be back at On until NEXT Monday (SWEET). I have a whole list of goals to achieve on my vacation. The first of all is cleaning out the garages. Way over due. But I am also shooting for 20 pages of writing!

It's forced vacation, but I'm trying to make the most of it. So:

Weight: 235.5 lbs. 65.5 lbs to go
Pages: 3 pages.

After week 5

It was a bad week, which is why I needed the refocus at the end of it. Too many bad weeks in a row. The refocus was good. I had a productive weekend. I was pretty grumpy for a good part of it. But I finally came down to what I considered an interesting realization.

While I was a student, I always felt like I was working toward something. Well, now that I've graduated (I know, it's been like a decade), I'm been working in an engineering job where I will probably NEVER have any ambition, I'm happily married to a wonderful wife, I've got four awesome kids and a house and all that. I feel like I've stagnated. Don't get me wrong. I have a wonderful life. I even took a day off last week and took the older three up to play in the snow. Wow, what a GREAT time. But I don't feel like I'm working toward something.

So I need to.

My goal now, which will be the best thing for me, my wife and my kids, is to be able to work from home. I've been thinking about it for a long time. Now I need to work towards it.

So.

Either I need to win the lottery, get a different job that allows me to work from home (like writing), or ... I don't know. Any ideas?

So, this is my deal. I like writing. Fiction writing actually. Kind of funny because I don't really read fiction, a lot of non-fiction, but not much fiction. Anyway, I've been thinking and talking about this for a long time and I just need to get going on it. My goal is to write one chapter in the next two weeks. That means that next week's report will have my weight AND how much of my chapter I've completed.

238.5 lbs. 68.5 lbs to go.

After week 4

This was a bad week.

Just bad.

My feet are killing me. We had a father-son flag football game on Friday night to finish up the flag football season. It was a blast.

Until Saturday morning when I could barely walk.

No bueno.

Stats for the week:

239 lbs (up 2... ouch) 69 lbs to go

After week 3

The first part of the week went pretty good.

The last part... not so good.

The weekend was so, so.

I didn't exercise much and I really think this is what got me into trouble. I ran into a couple of days with UNBELIEVABLE cravings just to stuff my face with everything in site. Not a good feeling. Of course, the more you give into the feeling, the worse the cravings get. Nice like that, eh?

I've read all the books that talk about the blood sugar levels and how the spikes and valleys cause you to crave food more, even though you just ate... blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The fact is it comes down to self discipline and whether or not you have it. I don't yet. I'm working on it. It sounds like it should be easy. Of course if it was, they probably wouldn't call it discipline.

This week when I get the cravings I'm going to:
#1 -> Pray for strength
#2 -> Exercise

Weigh in for the week. Down one pound (not too bad considering).
237 lbs. 67 lbs to go.

After week 2

I was very determined this week. I did really good not snacking. With Valentine's Day it was kind of hard to control portion size, but I still did pretty good. Brandi did make this massive batch of her INCREDIBLE home made spaghetti and garlic bread. The fact that I didn't gain 15 pounds this week was, to me at least, very impressive.

And actually, it turned out to be a good week.

Weigh in: 238 lbs. 68 lbs to go.

After week 1

Well, this is the first weigh in here of trying to lose weight. I have to say "trying" is a pretty loose term. I had one day where I ate 7 twinkies. I polished off close to two dozen oranges for the week. It wasn't real good.

Then yesterday we had an extra kid for the day, so after church we went to the park and played some flag football. It was a great time! We came home and played some Mario Cart and then I kicked back and watched the kids play for a while.

Then I tried to get up.

Evidently while I was resting some invisible elves came and beat my right foot with a pick axe, or at least that's what it felt like. Just killing me! Every step.

I have bad feet anyway, well, at least I've had bad feet since I've been fat. I have issues with my plantar fascia and also tendonitis in my Achilles tendons... that's right, both of them. Nice, eh?

I'm taking it as motivation, my body's way of saying, "do you really think you were MEANT to be this fat?!" I mean, really, I should be able to play football with my boys without hobbling around like some decrepit old man!

Looking at the various charts and things I should probably be in the 160-180 range. So I'll shoot for 170.

So... after my weigh in this morning... 242.5 lbs I only have 72.5 lbs to go.

Ouch! No, not the weight, just my foot again. I just keep thinking... MOTIVATION!