May 28 (Day 1)

Yesterday's meals:

Breakfast
Fish Oil Softgels - Fish Oil
Fresh Turkey Breast Cutlets
Milk, Reduced Fat, Fluid, 2%

Lunch
Fish Oil Softgels - Fish Oil
Pork, Fresh, Loin, Sirloin (Chops)
Carrots, Baby - Raw
Brazil Nuts

Dinner
Fish Oil Softgels - Fish Oil
Beef, Top Sirloin
Cabbage - Raw
Cream, Sour, Cultured
Salad Dressing, Mayonnaise Type
Cream Top 6oz Strawberry
Rainbow Fat Free - Sherbet

Total Calories Consumed 1,721

Fat - 31.4% (60 grams)
Protein - 38.8% (167 grams)
Carbohydrates - 26.4% (114 grams)
Alcohol - 0.0%
Other - 3.4%

Daily Sodium Intake - 823 mg
Daily Sugar Intake - 87 grams
Daily Cholesterol Intake - 435 mg
Daily Saturated Fat Intake - 18 grams
Daily Fiber Intake - 9 grams

Exercise:

3 sets of Tiger Moves
2 Hour trail riding with J

Weight this morning: 199.2 (-2.6 lbs)


Holy water weight loss, Batman! I imagine I am still a little dehydrated from the long bike ride, so I imagine that will bounce up a little at some point.

I felt good all day yesterday. However, after the bike ride, I was seriously hungry. I had only eaten 780 calories at that point. I should have had a protein shake right when I got home, but it was close to dinner time, so I waited. I had my swiss steak and coleslaw and was still very hungry. I had a yogurt, which helped but only a little. Finally, after the kids were bugging me about wanting some ice cream, I had a small bowl of sherbet, which finally did it. Felt fine after that.

I think my body was craving carbs after the long ride. I was probably seriously glycogen depleted. Fortunately, in that state, carbs go straight to the muscle and not to fat, so not much harm done.

I am pretty hungry this morning again, but it is starting to pass. I will eat a little bit later, after I go down to the store to get my coffee.

Can You Dig It?

My original plan with this personal challenge was simply to "get into shape". I was originally thinking of exercise plans and such, which were originally derailed by a sore elbow and knee. Well, circumstances beyond my control have gone a long way to helping me reach that goal.

About 6-7 weeks ago, our septic system's drainfield failed. This led to several weeks of frantic digging every night after work as I installed a partial new one by hand. I had to dig up the the old pipe, widen the trench until it was 2" wide and more than 6" deeper than the original, and then add gravel and new pipe before back filling. The first couple of weeks, I was just trying to expose the old pipe in an attempt to find the ends, so that I could clean them out. When I found our drainfield is actually on the neighbor's property and in the middle of an orchard (the roots were a major part of the problem), I decided to install a new one on our property.




Between the digging and moving, loading, and dumping the rock, I managed to get into a lot better shape. I definitely added muscle to my back, shoulders and legs. I did lose a little fat but not much as I didn't want to deal with being tired from a calorie deficit. I needed the strength to keep up with the project and get it done in a decent amount of time. Besides adding muscle, I also added a lot more endurance. Some of the problems I had before, like the shortness of breath and the sore knee, are gone, but my elbow is still really bothering me.

I consider this my "bulking phase". However, now that the project is done (for now - I'll be adding some branches later, when the sand isn't so dry), I need to reduce my intake. I can also afford to have a small caloric deficit. I am still trying to train to do the 5K fun run with J, so I don't want to go too low. I would like to drop a few pounds before the run to make it easier.

Since my metabolism is ramped up now due to the amount of physical work I have been doing and the amount I have been eating, I feel it is a good time to do a quicker fat loss diet. I am going to base it Lyle McDonald's's "Guide to Flexible Dieting".

The place I failed before on it was not getting enough protein and not following Lyle's recommendation on exercise (you need to do some but not too much or you can run into problems).

So, I am starting today (May 27) at 201.8 pounds. My protein target is 155 grams a day. Calories will fall where they may, especially since I am easing into it (not going quite as low fat as recommended). I plan on going until June 27th, when we leave to go to K's folks for a week.

I will probably eat at or near maintenance for the rest of the summer after that, since we will be doing more bike riding and hiking. Depending on where I am at that point, I may go back to this again in the fall, leading up to the holidays.

New Math

I found an interesting post by Lyle McDonald on his forum and I wanted to post it here for future reference.

Originally Posted by patriots

So this again becomes an issue with lower caloric expenditure from decreased NEAT, offsetting the low cal and higher activity?

Originally Posted by lylemcd

again, I think that may be part of what's going on, yeah

this has been discussed before although usually in a different context when people try to claim that thermodynamcis doesn't apply because the math doesn't work. the problem is usually that they are treating the system as unvarying on the output end

so for input we have food

on the output end we have
BMR: marginally variable for people at the same weight, can adjust slightly to changes in food intake (up or down). will generally adjust downwards to some small degree with food restriction/fat loss

thermic effect of food: fairly consistent although insulin resistant people show half the response of insulin sensitive. clearly this goes down as you eat less food

thermic effect of activity: this is formal exericse. there might be changes in efficiency/caloric expenditure during dieting, Im tryign to remember what I'e seen in the liteature and none of it comes to mine

NEAT/SPA: the big crapshoot. as the bugg users are finding out, non-exercise activity expenditure plays a MUCH larger role than any non-excessive exercise bout. simply moving from sitting to standing for many hours burns considerably more calorie and this will tend to adjust itself downwards with dieting.

so at least part of this is that you have a situation where, say at maintenance, your total energy expenditure is 3000 calorie. that includes everything above

now you reduce to 2500 calories per day. BMR may come down a bit in a while (depending on such things as deficit, iniial bodyfat percentage, etc), TEA may go down, TEF goes down (only about 50 calories), NEAT/SPA may come down.

suddenly your lovely 500 cal/day deficit has been offset coming out of the starting gate and the math stops adding up. what should have been a 1 lb/week fat loss is now 0.5 lbs/week becuase of the output adjustments. and 2 pounds per week can easily be masked by a touch of water retention

suddenly, nothing is making sense anymore and the 'math doesn't work'. except that

a. yes it does
b. water doesn't have calories

Walking

I was flipping channels last week and came across the show I Can Make You Thin, with Phil McKenna. It's about 75% hoakum but I TiVo-ed it and went back and watched some of it later because he was talking about "super charging your metabolism" and I was curious about what he would say about it.

Well, thank God for TiVo, since I had to fast forward through most of the show (and his visualization crapola) before I got to it, which was basically what I have already talked about with respect to increasing the daily activity levels vs some kind of formal workout program.

He said that overweight people tend to only take 4000 steps a day, where thin people tend to take 6000 or better. McKenna would then hand out a pedometer to some overweight person and tell them to make sure they get at least 6000 steps a day (never mind that it's a bit of a simplification and there is certainly more to it than that).

Just out of curiosity, I bought a cheap-o pedometer to see where I was at. I couldn't believe it when I got home from work in the evening and was only at 2500 for the day. And that was with a walk down to the corner store that I don't normally make. I have found that I will add about 1000 more in the evening, so normally I am lucky to be at around 3000 steps for a work day. For all of my talk about increasing activity, I sure wasn't doing it.

I am working on bumping that up but it is hard when I sit on my butt at work for 10 hours a day. Weekends aren't nearly as bad and I found I hit that 6000 steps pretty easily.

Aargh!

I was on my last set of the 1/2 squats from the Tiger Moves last Tuesday and a pretty sharp pain flared up in my right knee. It wasn't debilitating, just painful, so I stupidly finished out the last three reps of the set and just kind of ignored it. It got progressively painful through the rest of the day and was really sore that night.

The next morning, it was really bad. I could barely get down the stairs. It didn't hurt to walk or stand on it but was extremely painful to bend it. I found when I got to work that it also really hurt to sit at my desk. Having it bent, even with no weight on it, made it sore.

The pain is centered under the kneecap. It particularly hurts to press on the kneecap, both down into my leg as well as towards my foot. I did some research on-line, and, best as I can tell, it is patellar tendinitis. It fits in location and how it feels. My knee isn't loose and isn't swollen.

The only way to treat it is RICE (rest, ice, compression and elevation). About mid-morning, I ran to Wal-Mart and bought some ibuprofen and a knee brace. I put the knee brace on and made it through the rest of the day. I then went home and put my leg up and iced it for a long time. I even wore my brace to bed (which was good when I had to jump and grab the cleaning stuff when Pearl yakked in the hallway at 2 AM).

This morning my knee felt 100% better. I still can't bend it with my weight on it, but it doesn't hurt to sit or have it bent unloaded. I think a couple more days of RICE and I should be okay. I need to get the muscles around it stronger and get in the habit of stretching, even with the Tiger Moves.

Okay, it's not like I blew an ACL or something, but I have been extremely frustrated lately. I have never been so motivated to get into good shape before. I have so much I want to do with my family - trail riding, hiking, running a 5K with J in June, etc. I keep running up into all these stupid little injuries though and I am running out of time.

I'm thinking that I am just going to have to focus on diet for now while I let this and my elbow rest. Losing 20 pounds would go a long ways to making it easier to run or ride. I also need to find some exercises to strengthen my joints.

March Update

Normally I want to post an update every month. I didn't do it this month because I was in the throes of apathy. I had done really well the first month. I had lost five pounds and was making strides with my exercise program. Then in mid-February, I went to my folks for the weekend to celebrate some birthdays (mine, my mom's and my grandpa's). I didn't worry about my eating while there and was just planning on dropping back into my eating plan when I got back. However, I instead used it as an excuse to go face first into the V Day and Easter candy. Also around this time I dropped most of my exercise program because of the aforementioned sore elbow and knee. The results weren't pretty.

I regained the weight I lost and felt terrible. I was tired all of the time and wasn't feeling well. After two or three weeks of being in a carb coma, I decided that I needed to do something different. I wanted to completely eliminate sugar for a couple of weeks to see how I felt and I added back in a workout of three sets of Tiger Moves.

I felt a lot better off off the sugar and I started making strides on the exercise front. I still need to go back to the diet stage to actually drop fat and I plan on doing that next week (too many birthdays and anniversaries as well as another trip to the folks' this week). I feel that I am getting back on track, though I feel like I wasted a month. I'll just have to chalk it up to the education account.

So, wot's th' plan, eh? Part 2 - Exercise

I am doing a mixed exercise plan to tackle the weight loss and fitness gain.

One of my main goals is to simply be more active in general. Calorie burn is significantly increased over what is burned by sitting just by moving around more. Puttering around the yard or house instead of sitting and watching TV, walking more instead of driving, even just frequently getting up and stretching at work instead of sitting all day adds up over time. I was inspired by a recent thread on Lyle McDonald's "secret" forum that discussed the Bodybugg, a device that you wear on your arm and it tells you your calorie burn throughout the day. The people using it found that simple housework burned more calories than an equal time of weight lifting.

I am not talking about doing this instead of an exercise program; I am just incorporating the extra movement into my life.

As for more formal cardio, I recently bought a new bike - a 2007 Jamis Durango 1.0.



It's an entry level hardtail but good quality and has been a lot of fun to ride so far. I haven't tackled any trails yet since they are still snow covered.

I have also started doing some walking combined with a little running after work. I needed to start doing this if I am going to hit my goal of running the local 5K fun run the first weekend of June. It's a little dodgey at the moment as I haven't been able to find a decent pair of running shoes that actually fit.

I also have a Concept 2 rowing machine in the house for when the weather gets bad but I haven't been using it much lately. It gets a little boring and it has been aggravating a sore elbow that I have been dealing with lately.

On the strength training front, I started out with a mixture of calisthenics, isometric exercise and DVR's. DVR's are a type of exercise where you move against your own muscle resistance. An example would be to pretend that you are going to do a curl with the heaviest weight you can imagine. Really flex the muscles in your biceps and forearm as you prepare to lift. Keeping the tension in the muscle, slowly perform the curl against that tension, keeping the tension through-out the movement. On the way down, transfer the tension to the triceps. A much better explanation as well as a description of the seven Tiger Moves routine that is my mainstay routine, can be found in the book The Miracle Seven by John Peterson.

For the first month, my routine was to do one set of ten of each of the Tiger Moves, two sets of what John Peterson calls the Panther Stretch push-up (it is also known as the fifth move of the Five Tibetans ), two sets of Hindu squats and two sets of an exercise we did in the army that I don't know the name of (basically stand feet shoulder width apart with arms straight overhead, then lean forward while keeping the legs straight and reach and touch the ground as far back as possible, then return to starting position). I eventually added in two sets of Hindu Push-ups (about 20 total).

I did this routine earlier in the day, usually during my lunch break. When I got home, I would then do one of the isometric workouts from the book Isometric Power Revolution, also by John Peterson. I also did one set of Tiger Moves and then rowed for awhile after the workout.

I made a lot of progress with this routine. However, the exercises were aggravating a sore elbow and balky knee that I had been fighting since last summer. It got to the point where I finally just stopped out of frustration and did nothing but ride occasionally the last half of February. Combined with falling off of the food wagon, I gained back everything I had lost and basically felt terrible.

After a couple weeks of inactivity, I figured that I should be doing something and so started back on the only thing that didn't bother my elbow - the Tiger Moves. I started doing a full three sets of ten on my lunch break and rode or walked after work. It has made a large difference. I am getting noticeably stronger and adding muscle, particularly in my arms, back and chest.

My elbow is starting to respond to some trigger point therapy that I started on it and I am hopeful that I can add back in some calisthenics and isometrics soon.

I really like the DVR's and isometrics. They can be done anywhere, anytime and need no equipment or gym membership. They are by no means easy (effort-wise) but aren't as taxing as weights. I never felt well after lifting - kind of drained and sore. I get tired after my routine but also strangely energetic. They are also much easier on the joints which, unfortunately, is getting more important as I get older.