Good weekend

Today's Weigh-In: 210.6

Average: 211.4

A new week, and good news to report. I didn't fall off the wagon this weekend. I mentioned on Thursday that I would be going out that night, which could have started the weekend off badly, but I didn't let it. I had some beers, then got right back on track the next day with perfect eating. Ate perfectly all weekend as well, even forgoing my dad's homebrewed beer on Sunday. Now I officially have a full week of good eating behind me, and the momentum is building. I've been using physicsdiet.com (almost wanted to write Science Diet, but that's pet food) to track my weight on a daily basis. It uses a weighted average to compute a more realistic average weight without the huge fluctuations that a 5-day average can have.

I'm down almost 3 pounds since last Monday, which is great. I don't expect that kind of loss to continue but it's a good mental boost. I'm doing a bit of intermittent fasting today, so I'll only be eating between 1pm and 9pm, which works out well for my schedule. Workouts are planned for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday this week. Everything is on track to finally get rid of this last 20 pounds and finally be lean.

Doing great

Today's Weigh-In: 212.6

Weight is down a bit, though not as much as I expected seeing as my carb intake has drastically been reduced. I've continued to be spot-on with my diet and exercise. Today is a rest day from workouts, and I need it bad. I'm going out with an old friend tonight, so I'll have a few beers with him, but I've planned it so that I can get right back into strict eating tomorrow without falling off the wagon. I can feel myself building some good momentum in the right direction so I've gotta ride this all the way.

Quick post

Today's Weigh-In: 213.4 lbs.

Okay, so the weight's a bit high, but not too bad. I ate really clean yesterday, got a good workout, and I can feel my body recovering from the lack of nutrition, so I feel like I'm on the right path. I've got all good foods lined up for today, and another hard workout this evening. I'm still a bit bloated from the bad stuff, so I'll probably drop a few pounds in the next few days simply by cutting out starches and alcohol. We'll see.

Crap food, good fun, going clean

Hey there. So I come in here and make a big deal about being back in the game, then I'm gone for two weeks. Sorry about that! I've just been really busy at work and traveling, but I'll try to give a little more focus to this now that I'm back and not overly taxed.

I don't have a lot of time today, but I just wanted to post something. I went to Davis this past weekend for my brother's graduation, which was really fun, but man, I did not eat right. We stayed in a hotel without a fridge, so pretty much all of our meals were eaten out. I had pizza, pasta, ice cream, cinnamon rolls, granola, crepes, basically all the crap I don't eat in my every day life. Not a whole lot of other options were available, unfortunately, but I definitely could have tried to make some better decisions. But what's done is done.

The 4-day crapfest also made me feel like crap, and I (once again) understand how my food quality affects my quality of life and energy levels. I'm all crapped out, so to speak. Eating badly for that long caused my body to crave healthy foods like fruit and healthy meat, so that's what I'm giving it now. And I'm going to keep giving it those things because I know that's what my body and mind need. I don't have any crap food in my house, and I made a 4-pound grassfed beef pot-roast last night, so I don't even have any excuses. Just gotta get momentum going.

I got 1 workout in over the weekend, which was less than I would have liked but we were still pretty active, with lots of walking and swimming. My brother (who is going to Physical Therapy school in the Fall) helped me out with a shoulder issue that I didn't even know I had, but was limiting my ability and range of motion, which is awesome. He fixed it up with some stretches and I banged out my first muscle-ups (on a pull-up bar) in over a year. I mentioned in my last post that my goal is to get a ring muscle-up, so now I'm one step closer, and I hope to get one this week. Woo-hoo.

First weigh-in of summer

Today's Weigh-in: 212.4 lbs.

Looks like my estimate for my weight from yesterday was accurate. Which means by July 1st I need to weigh in at less than 208.4 lbs. to reach my goal.

If anyone is interested in what my workouts look like you can check out the twitter feed on the right-hand side of the blog. It's linked to my beyondthewhiteboard account, so whenever I post a workout on there it gets tweeted. I'm pretty much just doing the workouts from the crossfit.com main-site, with a few other workouts on main-site rest days.

I skipped breakfast this morning as I wasn't particularly hungry, but I've got some homemade carnitas and guacamole for lunch, along with fresh strawberries and a cabbage/cucumber/bell pepper salad. I've also made sure I have healthy snacks (nuts and jerky) in my truck for after workouts so I won't be tempted to stop at any fast food places on the way home.

I think I've got my bases covered, so hopefully I can crush this goal and build some nice momentum.

Time to get back on track

In response to Kevin's call for former FATties to get back to business, I'm back. It's been six weeks since my last post, and I've been doing alright. I haven't weighed myself in the past few days but I think I'm somewhere between 211 and 213. I went to Chicago a couple weeks ago and ate out every day, so I did gain a pound or two there. However I am still very active with my Crossfit workouts, and I'm setting new personal records almost every time I do a workout. For me, focusing on performance goals has allowed me to increase my strength and endurance while allowing me to eat a bit more and still maintain my weight. But that's the problem. I don't want to maintain my weight. I want to continue to lean out, but my head has not been in it from a diet perspective.

I've started using Sparkpeople again to track my daily intake. Yesterday I had 2600 calories, which is just a few hundred too high to lose weight at a steady pace. I can maintain weight on around 3000 calories without much trouble, so I want to be around 2400 per day to maintain a nice 1 lb./week loss. Just cutting out one serving of almonds or a glass of wine should get me there pretty easily, I've just gotta watch out for temptations at work, where there is a constant influx of crap food available for free. I'm pretty good at resisting those temptations, simply from doing it so much the past few years, so I definitely think it's doable.

I've been a little lax on the Paleo front recently, but I've begun tightening that up as well. I've found that some things, like rice, don't seem to bother me or affect my performance, but any sugar or refined grains send me into a gnarly sugar-craving cycle. That means that if I cheat with those things I'm much more likely to continue cheating, rather than just having one serving and being done. So my cheats need to be smart, and infrequent.

So what are my goals? Lose 4 pounds by July 1st, for starters. Simple, concise, doable. I'm going to take this in small steps. My ultimate goal is to weigh 190, but if I focus on "lose 2 pounds here, 3 pounds there" I think I'll get there a lot faster than thinking over a longer term. Looking back on my older posts it seems that's what has worked for me in the past. Other goals include entering everything I eat into Sparkpeople, even if it's bad. As far as my fitness goals, right now my main goal is to finally get a muscle-up on the gymnastics rings. It's the only basic Crossfit skill that I still cannot do (not counting one-legged squats, which don't come up too often). I'm currently in training to become a part-time trainer at my Crossfit gym, and one of the requirements is to be able to demonstrate the basic movements, so that's the one I'm gonna focus on.

I'll post a weigh-in tomorrow, and shoot for at least 3 new posts a week. Anyone else out there who wants to join in on the summer fun please feel free.

Paleo challenge wrap-up

Today's Weigh-In: 210 lbs.

So we finished up our 6 week Paleo challenge on Monday, and I officially lost 4 pounds, but I was weighing heavy on Monday and have since dropped another 3 pounds (water, food, etc.), so I'm pretty happy with the results. My average weight (using physicsdiet.com now) is 211, so I'm legitimately down 5 pounds since late February. My body fat was calipered at 18.1% as well.

I thought that once the challenge was over I would be really tempted to eat non-Paleo stuff, but it turns out that I'm really not. I did cheat a couple of times during the challenge, and it always made me feel awful. I don't like feeling awful, so that keeps me from cheating. I'm just going to keep eating as Paleo as I can as much as I can, and splurge a little here and there as needed. I'm definitely avoiding low-quality crap such as fast food and baked goods, because they just make me feel terrible, but other things like good ice cream or quality beer are not off the table.

I also have a new goal: 205 pounds and 15% body-fat by June 1st. I have 6 weeks to get there, which is doable. I've been monitoring my calories for the past few days, making sure I get enough to fuel my workouts but not slow down the fat loss.

In performance news, we did a workout on the first day of the Paleo challenge, which we then repeated after we were done, to compare how eating real food affects performance. I dropped my time by over 2 minutes from the initial assessment, and this was after having a terrible cold during the 2nd and 3rd weeks of the challenge which cost me a lot of cardiovascular capacity. If anyone is skeptical about Paleo eating, I can tell you that it works very, very well.