It’s Time
I stepped on the scale.
One's mind always has an expectation, and my expectation was a whole pile lower than what the scale threw back at me. I was stunned, although in honesty, not as stunned as when I saw the pictures of myself in what used to be a lose fitting t-shirt. It is becoming more apparent that my lack of physical activity, coupled with the refined carbohydrate diet has built a load of fat up on me. I'm currenly over 280 pounds with a whopping 32.5% body fat. Calculating my BMI puts me into the Obese category, which is a far cry from the fit 210 pound rugby player that existed five years ago. I've seen friends of mine undergo massive transformations in their health and fitness and now it's my turn.
Currently I'm attacking two points of fitness. The first is my diet, and the second is fitness. I'm not going to make any drastic changes in diet, specifically in quantity, but rather on what I eat. I'm going to be cutting out refined carbohydrates, filling the void with fruits and vegetables. Eating foods that have less energy density, as well as foods that don't cause as much of an insulin response will drastically help in this area without me getting all cranky about being hungry.
The second front of attack is adding regular fitness back into my life. The key in this area is to not try and tackle a mountain at the start, instead to just add small bits regularly until it becomes routine. I'm going to be mixing in interval training and plyometrics to break up the aerobic training. If I'm too lazy to go outside, I'm going to force myself to some casual time rowing in front of the television. The key here is not to have intense workout, or even long workouts, but to get the heart rate up regularly.
The old adage is "If it can be measured, it can be improved". The first step is to know where I currently stand. It would appear I do more sitting than standing. I wore my heart rate monitor while working today and came up with a resting heart rate of 93. I'm sure my future is going to contain a database so I can track progress, and determine if I've stalled, but for now paper is sufficing. I also picked up the cute little Nike Sport pedometer, and paced out a route with my GPS to test it's accuracy. The GPS registered 2.17km for the trip, and the pedometer registered 2.14km, inside 2% even before it is calibrated. Now the largest thing to overcome: Keeping motivated.
Ash Christopher Said,
August 20, 2008 @ 5:52 am
Good luck with the regime. I started my own in January of this year, and I am now down to my goal weight of 180lbs – took me about 4 months to safely take off 30lbs.
In Calgary, I did hapkido 3-4 times a week, and soccer once a week but it wasn’t enough to lose weight. I went to a nutritionist here who informed me of my biggest fears – the key to weight loss is portion control. Portion control – I hate those words. It worked though and it was only difficult to stick to the plan for about the first 3 weeks. Now, I find it tough to eat beyond my meal plan. It really puts into perspective how much food I was eating.
My plan was this. 30g of carbohydrates in the morning. 60g for lunch. 75g for dinner and 15-30g before bed. It takes a little bit of meal creativity to stay within these limits.
For diabetics, it is really hard to lose weight because we are constantly reacting to our blood sugar. We eat too much, blood sugar goes high. We react by taking more insulin. Insulin’s job is to turn carbohydrates into fat. We work out, we burn the carbohydrates from the food we just ate but before we start burning the fat, the blood sugar goes down and we have to react by drinking juice or eating something with sugar. It’s rare that our fat stores actually get used.
Anyways, good luck and keep us informed with your progress.
Bil Said,
August 21, 2008 @ 12:05 am
How about living another 50 years, instead of another 10? Seeing your kids grow up?
You can do it. Just redirect some of your boundless energy and keep a long term focus, Wes. It took five years to add those fat cells, it’ll take some time to shrink them.
Devauld.ca » October Already Said,
October 4, 2008 @ 2:36 pm
[...] news: It has been about 8 weeks since I first stood on the scale. This morning the little guy told me I was 260 pounds with approximately 31% body fat. I feel [...]