Need to get a move on it

At the beginning of the year I set myself a goal of trying to get my weight back down to 170 pounds by the end of the year, I started on a strong note and was able to get my weight down to 193 pounds but everything since then has gone to hell and because of this I have to admit that I have been going backwards instead of forwards. Since mid February I have had one illness after another and because of this I have not step inside a gym for almost two months.

I know the first thing that everyone will be saying is that I failed at my New Year’s Resolution to lose weight and to a point I would have to agree with you but then on the flip side I now have to look at what am I going to do now to get myself back on track and were I should be.

The first thing that I am going to have to do is to get back on to the whole calorie counting track, the reason that I am doing this first is because it was the last thing that I gave up on while I was ill. The last time that I filled in my calorie tracker was just over three weeks ago but even then I was neglecting to add some of the condiments that I would be having with my meals along with some of the drinks.

An example of this would be the fact that I would not be putting in any of the cups of tea that I would drink within a day and with a each cup of tea coming in at around 15 calorie and with me normal drinking from five to ten cups of tea a day that’s a lot of extra calories that I am missing out on.

The other part that I need to start doing is going back to the gym, it may seem like one of the easiest things to say but doing it can be the hardest, the reason that it has become so hard is the fact that I have not been for so long.

My plan of action will be make up of two steps, step one is to restart the calorie counting and start going back to the gym, when it comes to going to the gym I will start off slow and then work my way up. I will first start with twenty minutes on the excise bike for the first day and then follow it up on the second day by doing five minutes on the cross-trainer. For the next three days afterwards I will then add an extra five minutes each day on to the cross-trainer until I reach twenty minutes in total. Upon competing that I will then finish up by getting on the rowing machine and completing five minutes on the first day and then taking it up to a total of ten minutes.

Once I have completed step one I can then move onto step two. Step two is to try and not make the gym boring so that I won’t give up and the way in which I will go about this is by doing weight training every other day. I hope to us this as away to keep the gym fresh and to allow me to tone up, the last part of step two will be to start decreasing my meal size so that I am eating less while excising.

So that is going to be my plan going forward and hopefully the goal that I set myself at the beginning of the year of losing 30 pounds can be done, I know that it may not be the easier way to achieve my goal but when I look back at the pictures of me when I was a lighter it gives me the motivation to get back into shape.

Until Next Time.

Let the diet begin.

With Christmas, New Year and resolution all out of the way I wasn’t quite sure what this week’s topic should be about but after some careful through I came to the conclusion that the best way to start this week’s blog would also be a good way to example in a bit more detail about one of my New Year’s resolutions.

The one that I will be looking at this week will be weight loss and the reason why I decided to lose weight and the shock that I discovered today when I got on the scales.

Now the story of my weight lost can be traced all the way back to August last year where I believed that the best way to lose weight was to continue to eat the same food that I have always been eating but to make sure that I at least go to the gym from two hours a week, it wasn’t until November that I then ran into a road block which was shouted at me that I wasn’t losing any weight but instead was putting it on.

That was when I went out and bought myself a pair of scales to weight myself and find out how heavy I was. As I got on them I was shocked to learn that I now weight in at 218lbs (15.42 stones or 98.88KG) at this point I knew that I had to do more if I wanted to lose weight.

The only way that I could see myself losing weight was to try and go on a calorie controlled diet, at that moment I remembered that my other half had at one point downloaded an application for her Iphone which I decided to do as well. The application is My Fitness Pal and it is free for everyone to download and of you haven’t got an Iphone, you can always go on to their website and join up.

Now the way in which My Fitness Pal works is that you will need to create an account with them tell them how heavy you are now, what your weight goal is, how tall you and what you believe to be your working conditions (do you have a job in which you are seating down all day or moving round a lot). The last think that your will have to complete before starting your account is how much weight you would like to lose over a week, they recommend that you lose 1 pound a week which is what I have done but you can lose more if you wish to. With your account created it will then tell you what your daily calorie count is for each day alone with how much carbohydrates, fat and protein you are allowed to consume each day too.

With my account created and application loaded on my phone I now started to place everything that I had eaten for the day into the application and too my horror I knew straight away that both my lunch and dinner were over by daily allowance of calories. Now just as I was about to start changing my diet I then ran into a little problem called the vomiting and diarrhoea bug (I very rarely get ill and when I do it always tens to be the bad ones) which knocked me out cold for a two weeks.

Now having this bug was good and bad mainly because it meant that I wasn’t eating a lot of food and when I was eating it always ended up being soup or a very small amount of dinner. The second problem that came with it was the fact that I didn’t have the energy or the will power to go to the gym. By the time the bug had cleared my system I decided that it was time to start my dieting again and also took it upon myself not to weight myself due to the fact that I felt like I hadn’t lost any weight (this was where I was wrong). On the 23^rd of December I decided that it was time to jump on the scales and see how much I weight I had lost and to my shock I found out that I now weight in at 200 pounds (14.28 stones 90.71 kg) and I believe that this large weight loss was due to me being ill and not being able to eat a lot of food for almost two weeks.

Now this one is the kicker, we all know that over Christmas and New Year we all eat a hell of a lot of food and I will be honest and tell you that Christmas and the summer are the two times of the year that I love food the most because Christmas brings so many different types of food and in the summer it is all about the Barbecue and cooking your own food outside and so some reason it always taste so much better.

Sorry about that little detour there. Now I knew that over Christmas I tried to keep track of everything that I was eating and I will be honest that on Christmas Day and New Years Day I did miss some of the entries for those two days but at the same time I knew that I was going to be over anyway so I made sure that I was over my allowance for both those days.

With the New Year out of the way I decided that I would give everything that I had to start losing weight and I believed that having a pedometer on me at all times, apart from the gym would be a good idea. I am also trying to make sure that I at least go to the gym three to four times a week, which would be about an hour per visit at the gym.

Now that we are now fourteen days into the New Year I took it upon myself to weight myself to get some idea as to how must heavy or lighter I am. To my luck it would seem that I everything has been working for me because now I weight only 193 pounds (13.78 Stone and 87.54 KG’s).

So you can see the weight loss has already began and to lose 7 pounds (0.5 Stones 3.17 KGs) in just over three weeks with Christmas and New Year in that time frame is very impressive and I do hope that I can continue to lose the same amount of weight within the next three weeks or so weeks.

As long as you put your mind towards it anything can happen.

Until next time.