Successes and Challenges

It's been a while. I apologize to anyone out there who might have been following.

It seems that I only post when making progress. I thought about writing many times this year but with the additional job and busy summer I found tons of excuses not to. Now that I'm making progress and constituent calls are totally caught up, no excuses come to mind. Funny how that works.

In late 2006 I weighed 389.2 and decided to do something about it. I shed fat down to a low trend weight of 249 (actual weight 244.6) on March 7. But on January 23 I stopped my regular workouts because my ankles were getting sore. All the walking that running for office entails on top of the workouts was simply too much. So, I had lost 130+ pounds but then, once off track, gained 20 back to 271 on July 21.

Then, I entered a weekly weight loss competition with a colleague. They've been doing 1000 calorie elliptical burns at the gym before doing weights. This has motivated me to get back in to my APFT routine. I'm not burning nearly as many calories but my physical and emotional energy are again good. I'm still not running the whole 30 minutes but am regularly running 2/3 of it. So what's the motivator? The loser buys lunch on weigh in day and, more importantly, bragging rights.

So far, my original opponent has been been kicking my butt more often than not. Perhaps they'll comment on the exact record to rub it in. While not exactly OK with loosing the competition, I am OK with losing fat regularly again. Over the 8 weeks thus far, I've lost 9 pounds in actual weight and the trend weight is down 3. (If you've read previous entries, you know that the trend weight more accurately indicating fat loss means more to me than the weight loss number.) I'm not exactly setting any records at this pace but am managing to lose and have the obligatory social life too. We have an additional opponent who is weighing in for the first time this week. It'll be interesting to see how the competition dynamic works out for three of us.

The goal remains 189, the trend weight is at 263.2 today, so means 75 pounds to go.