13 miles

I put in 13.3 good miles this weekend. Every bit of the runs felt great. 10K race next Sunday.

Weight Loss Part 2

Three hundred and eighty pounds, I am glad it wasn’t much more, because the scale had a 400 lb limit. Just the act of saying 380 pounds made me tired. I had tried dieting before and had limited success. At one point in 2003 I was injured at work and when I went to the doctor’s office I weighed in at a tremendous 430 pounds. So over two years I was able to take off about 50 pounds by cutting down a little bit. But exercise never really took off with me. I remember when I bought a new bike; I purchased a cheap one from Wal-Mart because I was not sure how much I was going to use it. That turned out to be a good call financially. The first time I got on it was to ride approximately 150 yards to get the mail from my mailbox. When I got to the box I had to get off the bike, sit down, and rest. It literally exhausted me to a point where I could not walk. I didn’t ride the bike again for almost a year.

As I said, I joined Weight Watcher’s and started to really investigate what their program was all about. A person starts out with so many points of food available on a daily and weekly basis. As they eat certain foods, they use up points, until ideally they have zero points left at the end of the day. As a person loses weight and reaches certain weight goals the daily available points reduce. The points are based on a formula that takes into account a foods total calories, total fat, and total dietary fiber. I started out at 34 points [One point = (calories/50) + (fat grams/12) - (min{r, 4}/5)], Where p is the number of points, c is the number of calories, f is the grams of fat, and r is the grams of dietary fiber (if the dietary fiber is greater than four, use four). As it turns out, 34 is the maximum amount of points available on this system. I would have to lose almost 50 pounds before my daily points went to 33.

I spoke to my friends about the program and they gave me several ideas about what kind of foods to eat. Basically, chicken breasts, turkey breasts, and several different kinds of fish, were best on this program. But the most important part of meal preparation was portion size. I needed to know how much of each, calories, fat, and fiber I bought a small food scale along with the food that I would be eating. For every meal I would need to weigh each food and insert that into the WWO website to get the amount of points for the meal. While this sounds tedious, weighing the food helped prepare me for what was to come better than anything else. The first week I decided to have a little fun with Dawn. I ate a little less for breakfast and lunch so I had over 25 points available for dinner. My wife was working that night so I was able to get just about anything as I would be eating alone. I went to McDonalds and ate a Double Quarter Pounder/ w cheese and a medium fries. I think it totaled out at 20 points. I remember enjoying informing Dawn that I was able to eat McDonalds and still stay on the program. Needless to say she was disgusted. I lost 5 pounds the first week.

9 Miles

Been a bit since I posted. Today has been a great day for me. I ran 9 miles for the for the first time ever today. Plus I did it in just under one hour thirty minutes. Still training for a 13.1 mile half marathon in December. More on the weight loss later.

Weight Loss Part 1

I was having the dream again. You see, for as long as I can remember I have had a recurring dream. I am outside, wearing shorts and a shirt, and I am running. Not only am I running, but I am doing so easily, and really enjoying the view while the scenery flies by. As always I awake to stark reality when I look down at my body and realize that running is in fact a dream. I roll over, see it is only two am and I get up to go to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror I see a man who just turned forty-one and has spent the last twenty of those abusing his body, this man has a huge, fat-layered, hanging over the belt line stomach. There is no way that he would ever be running. I am disgusted with this man in the mirror, how could he have let this happen? What can I do about this man?

Along with everyone else I have spent hundreds of dollars trying to lose weight, and nothing has really worked. Over the last two years I had been able to lose about fifty pounds, but I had not lost any lately. I might even have put a few pounds back on. I do know that this night when I had the dream I was morbidly obese, and realistically had only about another decade of life ahead of me. This was the day I turned forty-one, Dec 5 2005.

My mother and her husband John came down to visit us for Christmas 2005, and we had a good time. But that Christmas is very important in my life as that was the day I found out that my very good friends, Dawn and Steve, were losing weight with Weight Watcher’s Online. At the time Steve had lost about thirty pounds and Dawn was down almost forty. They were successfully losing, without completely cutting out their favorite foods. That day, as I ate my candy and drank my beer, I started to think. I thought about it for just over two weeks, and then on Jan 9, I took the plunge and joined the Weight Watcher’s Online program. I weighed myself on a good balance scale at work, and found I weighed in at 380 pounds.

Training

I started serious training for the December half-marathon this week. Saturday I did my first long run of 7.77 miles. Today I ran a fast (for me) 5 miles in 46:43. Tomorrow will be an easy day to get ready for Saturday's run.

I am feeling great right now, looking forward to the next six months of training.