My good days, my bad days, my random thoughts

Egads, I've been slacking at updating my journal. Until this past weekend I'd been doing great. Hitting the gym still... today was start of week 3. Last workout I did my first unassisted pull-up and today, my first unassisted dip! That was exciting. For three weeks I'd not been able to do a single unassisted dip, pull-up or chin-up. I've now built up my first rep (or more) in the dip and pull-up. Thursday I will be seeing if I can have similar luck with the chin-up.

My diet for the past week was atrocious. Friday, several beers and some salsa and nachos, Saturday I went ape shit at a Greek festival and yesterday... all-you-can-eat ribs. Today I'm back on track.

I've got to start running again. I've figured it out, I just need to figure out how to do it and keep the pain to a minimum. Meh. At least I'm getting my walks with the dog and gym 3x per week. Could be worse.
 
Damn, Fish. All you can eat is not a good thing for me. It's not all you want, but all you can eat, and I can eat a lot of ribs.

Congrats on the chin up and dip. Did you find if your gym has one of those assist machines? One thing you can do if they have one is set it to the assist and then do one unassisted and finish out the set with assist.
 
Yeah, I did find it. It was around the corner from the unassisted station. But every time I was going for it there was someone there. I did get to use it last week to do an assisted set of pull-ups. What I did instead of the assisted was negatives. Those helped. And only two weeks later I can now do at least one rep. That's all I wanted. Now it's work up to 10. Three sets of 10.

It's nice to see some progress. Because I've not yet reached failure weights on any of my lifts so I wasn't seeing myself progress, you know? The only failures I had were in those three movements.

I suspect I'm about to hit failure next time around on the overhead press, barbell row and possibly squat. We'll see.
 
Good morning, Ang! Hope you had a good weekend! I had last week off so today is first day back which kind of sucks... but I also kind of like it. During my week off my routine went to shit. I was eating whenever with very little planning ahead... some days ended up too high, some too low, horrible macros... all kinds of problems. At least when I'm working everything nicely falls into place where it should. Up at the same time, eat at the same time, gym at the same time.

I've been increasing my calories again lately. I had dropped my calories down to 1900/day, but since hitting the gym I decided to bump it back up to 2400 (where I started) and see what happens as far as fat loss after a month. I would really like to stay as close as I can to the weight I'm at right now... try to match fat loss with muscle gain. Probably won't happen, but that'd be ideal.

This is week three of my gym routine. After one month I will post the results of the routine and calorie increase. I'm also going to add running back into my routine to see if it feels any better now that I've dropped some 30lbs.

I really hope it does go better. I want to run that 8-miler in September so bad.

I guess I should post my diet numbers (actually over the past 2 weeks they're not as bad as I thought): 2455 calories per day, 29f/44c/25p (2% alcohol)

My protein has been above 140g/day giving me my 1g/lean lb. I've added fish oil to my diet recently which is probably where the fat increase is coming from... plus I've been eating a lot more PB&J. MMMmmmmMMMMMmmmmmm PB&J.

As for the gym, I have not yet hit failure in the overhead press, row or squat. So I'm happy about that and I managed to push out 5 bodyweight dips yesterday... 2 more than last time I did them. Woot for progress.

So I guess all in all, things are going well... if not a little scatterbrained as of late.
 
That is so great that you have a goal to run 8-miles in Sept. How many can you run right now? I'm going to think of you when I'm struggling to up my running up to 10 street lights lol

It sounds like they gym is going great woohoo :)
 
HAHA currently, zero. :D I tried running a few months back but it was killing my Achilles and to a lesser extent my knees and shins. So I stopped. I'm hoping that now, with less stress on the joints and whatnot that I can pull it off. I'm going to start with 2 miles since that's a nice run around the block. Then I'll work up from there.

On the weight front I put a little less than a pound in the last week, but my body fat is down so it's all good. I would love to stay at this weight while dropping the body fat consistently. So we'll see if I can keep that up.
 
wow. Now I feel like wimp. 2 miles kicks my butt, and it's sure is a lot longer than around the block.... but it's no secret I'm pretty out of shape.

when are you doing your first run? I'm sure you'll do great, because you seem to be in pretty good shape now. Hopefully your Achilles is better:)
 
When are you going to start running Brad? Im having trouble with my artificial leg. Ive lost so much weight that it doesnt fit at all. It makes it hard to run, now.
 
OOF! I absolutely can't stand to run! More power to you though! I actually jogged 20 minutes this morning... that was a REAL success for me lol! Good to see your bodyfat is dropping! You're doin' great Fish! :D
 
Went out for my first run in a couple months. Ran the 2-mile route I mentioned above. It went really well. Did some stretching before heading out, ran the stairs down to get warmed up some and started the run.

I stopped to walk twice. Once for about 10-15 seconds after the first mile to check my timer to see how I was doing and then again not long after that as I was getting quite winded. I'd say I walked a few minutes... about half a kilometer (.37 miles) and then finished the rest off running.

Total time: 18 mins 12 secs

I was pretty pleased with the overall run. No leg problems to speak of during this first run which rocks. Averaging 9 minutes and 6 seconds per mile is decent. I finished the first mile in 7:50 but lost a good chunk of time walking those few minutes to get back enough gas to finish the run off.

I'll be back out to do it again this weekend... probably Sunday since Saturday is gym day and I don't want to do all that running after all that squatting.

Diet-wise I've made some changes.

Three weeks ago I was doing about 1900 calories/day. Since I've started the gym routine I've ramped up quite a bit. I'm now at around 2800/day. I'm going to stick with this for a few weeks and see what happens. I could lose a little ground but I want to maximize my workouts and you can't grow muscle if you don't feed them.

In a few weeks I will see what my body fat is doing and adjust accordingly. If I'm still losing (body fat) substantially I'll ramp up some more... if I'm losing slowly I'll stick with the 2800 for the time being and if I'm gaining then I'll slowly cut back.

While pushing the calories up I've still been posting fat loss, but I just arrived at the 2800 this week so I don't know if it'll pan out long term.

Keeping it interesting. :D
 
3rd monthly progress report is in and things are looking good.

Apr 18 2008: 206.8 lbs, 31.9% bf, 140.8 lbs lean
May 15 2008: 196.6 lbs, 29.1% bf, 139.4 lbs lean
Jun 12 2008: 189.4 lbs, 26.2% bf, 141.7 lbs lean
Jul 10 2008: 186.1 lbs, 24.5% bf, 140.5 lbs lean

Difference: 20.7 lbs, 7.4% bf, 0.3 lbs muscle lost

I'm excited that I have managed to hold on to most of my muscle over the course of this. That was probably my biggest concern when I began. It's amazing for me to look at those April numbers, and to think they were higher before that... I just hadn't started keeping track of my numbers by that point.

Hope everyone has a good day. I'm off to the gym.
 
Fish, Great job with the run. You are going faster to start then I've been able to work up to. Keep kicking my ass. :hurray:
 
Thanks, Trops. Next run will be Saturday afternoon. Not looking forward to it. I do not look forward to running.

There's been a nice side effect with my weight loss... it appears that I've improved my fuel economy! I drive a shitload... averaging just shy of 1000km (621 miles) a week since I bought the car. And I'm cheap so I keep an eye on my fuel economy. Before I was getting about 3.5L/100km (67 MPG). That was cool but I was still having to fill up every 3 days.

This week, I went 4 days on one fill up! Calculated my mileage at 3.27L/100km (72 MPG)! At $1.43/L and driving 1000km/week, that's going to save me some money over the long haul. And I dig that.

Off to bed... 5am comes mighty quick these days.
 
HAHA but a weeeeee little car that y'all will likely laugh your ass off at.

This is what my car looks like:

Here's a size comparison (mine is actually a few inches shorter than the model in this photo):

It's tiny but it holds up pretty well in collisions and has been a great little car for me. Very, very few problems... 120km (74.5K miles) and I've only had a fan belt and my A/C needing to be refilled. Going to have to get my brakes done in the next 10K km but they've held up very well so far.
 
I LOVE the smart car! Everytime we see one I point it out to the kids. I'd probably buy one but I'm real cheap when it comes to cars, and they don't have enough seats for me. Very cool.

When I can, I'll probably buy an electric car. My commute is only 12 miles, so I don't do all that much driving.
 
I'd love a car like that. I have to drive an SUV with toting the kids around all the time. It's a Honda CRV, so the milage isn't bad, but that would be sweet to get what you're getting--it's at least triple mine.....

I really hate running too, but I've seen it work so well with so many people
 
Went out for my second run yesterday... 18:02. Not much of an improvement but I also made a conscious decision to slow it down so I wouldn't have to walk at all or as much. Turned out to be an 'as much'. I took a minute or two to catch my breath about 3/4 of the way through. Still managed to beat my last time so that's better than a stick in the eye... I'd just like to have done it in under 18:00.

My diet has been steady this past week averaging 2798/day (25f/48c/27p) and I've been hitting the gym as scheduled. It's going well. The weights are really, really starting to get heavy for me so I'm definitely working much harder than when I started.

I'm posting a 0.1 lb loss today for the week, but also posting a 0.5% fat loss.

I did some calculating based on my past month's numbers and if I keep at this and work my ass off there's a good chance I'll never see that 170 I have posted up in my ticker. I will, however be at 15% bf sometime in November, I'll have added 10 lbs of muscle and will be sitting around the 178 mark.

It's a much, much slower process than before which I guess I could speed up by cutting my calories some but I'm not concerned with timelines. I have my goals and I'll just continue to work towards them however long it takes me to do it right. Rather than fight to maintain muscle I'll just fight to put it on, albeit at a slower pace which still allows me to burn off the bulge.

I'll have to figure out how I want to change my ticker now.

My new goal is for under 23% by the end of the month.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top