Lose It - Another reason to own an iPhone

Big news! I survived Thanksgiving Day (1). My went to my wife's Mom's house yesterday for one fantastic meal. Turkey, mashed potatoes, all the fixin's...and I'm still under 250! W00T! W00T!

Today, the first day after eating enough calories to light a small village, I still got my butt out of the house and went to the downtown version of our Healthy Living Center we go to at work. Downtown is amazing. There is even a pretty nice daycare facility there. OhPrincess2 loved it. Unfortunately, OhPrincess1 can't go. The top age limit is 8. D'oh!

But what's up withe this post? Today, my work out buddy and good friend Mark introduced me to a new app for my iPhone. It's called Lose It!. A newish free app in the iTunes App Store.

What is it?

Set goals and establish a daily calorie budget that enables you to meet them. Stay on track each day by recording your food and exercise and staying within your budget.

Enter food and exercise easily using a searchable database. Quickly re-enter foods and meals you've had in the past. Lose It! is the most complete and streamlined weight loss application available for the iPhone.

Lose It! will be available for free during the first six months of its release.
Get it now while it's still hot!

I shameless stole that from their website. I've tried using it and it's fantastic! This is the first diet and workout log that really seems to have it all put together. The database of food items really seems to be up to date but the best part is that the stuff I regularly eat in the cafeteria can be added by hand right from the nutritional guide. SaaaWeeeet!

We should be able to add our workout information just like it is when it comes off the machine. It also includes a lot of listings for common home based activities as well. Very cool.

I think this app should work just fine on the iPod Touch as well. It doesn't seem to have any connections to communications or microphone functions.

Tomorrow is round 2 of Thanksgiving. My parents home. I'm looking forward to it! I'm feeling pretty good about my attitude to the holiday. I'm not denying myself any of the foods I love. That's just crazy...why go on living? But instead, I've been focusing on just doing it smarter. I take a small amount of everything I want, and then find that I'm quite full.  No need to keep shoving, I've had what I wanted.

Stay tuned!

A new morning habit

There aren't many products that I would blog about glowingly without some ad revenue. I'll complain about things, I'm good at that, but if you want me to shmooze...

Cranergy is a little different. This is one addition to my lifestyle change I think is important enough to tell you about.

My wife and I spotted these at the local warehouse club. I love cranberry juice. I always have. This was a little different. They've blended it with green tea to make a morning pick-me-up beverage that tastes fantastic. All the benefits of cranberry juice and green tea with the added morning caffine I'm used to.

I used to drink a can of pop for breakfast, I'm now drinking these instead. Not sure if it's really doing anything positive, but it's kinda nice to eliminate one more can of pop from my day.

It's fun when you get noticed!

My wife has noticed. Some of my friends have noticed. Heck, I can tell the difference in the way my clothes fit, things are starting to get baggy!

Yeah me!

Something completely new happened on Friday. While going to lunch with one of my workout buddies, we approached the cafeteria checkout lines to sneak in and get our food. In line, was one of the regular bodybuilders who works out at the same time we do. This is a big guy. As we approached, he looks and points at as and says "Hey! Where were you guys today?"

We had played hooky from working out on Friday to finish up a fairly urgent coding project.

How cool is that? The regulars at the gym noticed we missed a day. How things are changing.

Feelin' the Burn

I'm still working out 3-4 times a week; some at home but mostly here at work. Like I've said, we use part of our lunch to hit the Healthy Living Center located on the campus of this hospital.

At left is a picture I shot with my phone of my ride today. I've been trying to mix up the rides for two reason. 1) to keep me interested and 2) somedays I have more gusto then others.

Today's route was a flat one. I felt like riding at one consistent level. I try to shoot for rides that are between 20 and 30 minutes. This one was listed as between 20 and 25 minutes. As you can see, I did it in 17:43. *sigh. I made up the difference by riding it a little longer to get over the hump.

The other thing you should notice from the picture is how it records your achievements. You start with a goal of making the equivalent of a marathon, then a double marathon and it would appear now that I'm shooting for the century mark. My guess is that I have logged 67 miles so far on this machine. No wonder my knee hurts.

The diet continues to go pretty well. I might just need to write a book about it. The "Soup for Lunch" diet is the bomb! I stick to soup in the cafeteria almost every day. I think the real key to this is just making better choices. Soup is usually pretty low cal, heck even the fatty ones aren't as bad as some of the entrees. Yesterdays soup was one of my favorites: Bow tie Turkey. A turkey soup with bow tie noodles. When they prepare it here, it tops out at 99 calories a bowel. Sweet! Today's soup was another winner for me...Hamburger Rice. 190 calories/bowel. The great thing about soup is that you get that nice warm feeling in your tummy that stays with you for most of the afternoon. A light snack later and I'm good to supper.

What are things that you have changed to make yourself healthier? Are you on any diet or winging it like me? Is it possible to enjoy Thanksgiving without eating too much or shouldn't I really care? (I'm voting for not really caring)

I'd love to hear stories about positive changes people are making. There is always ways we can improve. Let me hear it!

Where did everyone go?

We had a good start, but it seems the follow ups are slow in coming. Even for me!

Here's where I'm at. Last week, my knee got really sore again on Monday. Rested it until Friday. Stayed fairly close to my diet, but like I've said before, I'm not here to give up on life.

We had friends come to visit us this weekend. This is never good for a diet. When we host, our guests and our family, never go hungry. We even made the most amazing chocolate fondue:

• 6 ounces of dark chocolate
• 6 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate
• 4 ounces of milk chocolate
• 1/2 pint heavy whipping cream
• 3 tbls hazelnut flavoring
• 1/3 cup Carmel topping

That can't possibly be good for you, but we did dunk large quantities of fruit in it :-)

Even during this weekend, I really tried to make sure to limit my decadence. Mixing in water, diet soda with the occasional beer. All in all, the results are in...I still have a net loss of weight week over week!

All in all, I'm down 16 pounds from when this adventure began. I'm a long way from my goal, but I'm still making progress. Whew!

My next big challenge? To make it through Thanksgiving Weekend without gaining it all back. I love the turkey, the dressing, the sweet potatoes, the lefsa...yikes.

In case you are scoring at him. My highest weight at the start was 266.8 pounds. As of this morning, I'm now at 250.0...almost knocked off another tens digit...I'm heading to the gym right now.  Happy health!

What does he do each day?

I figured something I could share is what I've been doing 3-4 days a week to get myself more healthy.

Like I mentioned in my last post, I've been going to the Dan Abrahams Healthy Living Center (DAHLC) 3 to 4 days per week for a bit over a month.

I decided early on to really focus on cardio and losing weight. There is something to be gained by building muscle, but working with a trainer, he said that I'm still developing muscle while I ride the bike.

This is the view of the bike I shared with you a few posts ago. To me, this is really cool. The only thing that would make it better would be to find a way to get the wind blowing through your hair.


Today, I rode a 2 minute warm-up and a 2 minute cool down but this view is of the status of my main ride. Almost 7 miles! I'm beat!

I followed this up with 15 minutes of walking on the track and then a small amount of upper body weights.

As I get closer to my goals, I'll start mixing this up more, but until then, I'm really excited about my progress. 

The machines report to a central server to record your progress. Late last week it informed me that since starting, I had ridden the equivalent of a marathon! 26.2 miles! W00T! W00T!

Peer Pressure

Let's not quibble about why I want to be a part of this blog. It's peer pressure.

Growing up a competitive swimmer left me with the skills needed to over eat. Michael Phelps eats 15,000 calories a day when he's training. 15,000. That's 13,000 calories about the average recommended diet of an adult. And you know what, swimmer can eat like that because those 13,000 extra calories are burned off swimming 5 hours a day.

Well, I don't need to eat like that any more.

Peer pressure is defined by Wikipedia as:

... to the influence exerted by a peer group in encouraging a person to change his or her attitudes, values, or behavior in order to conform to the group.

I'm trying to surround myself with peers that I know have the same or similar goals as mine. This blog is just one of the ways I've been doing it. I know, that I have opened to the world a desire to lose weight and get healthy. 6.5 billion people have the opportunity to see this and know. I hear you breathing down my neck and you know what...it really helps!

Another peer pressure system I am using is at work. I work with two of my greatest friends, let's call them Bodie25 and Mumblingsages. We've agreed to go work out 3-4 days per week in the one of the two health clubs at our workplace. We do this together. If one of doesn't go, we have to explain it to the others. Granted, we can use the "work" card, but two of us work together on the same team...we'll know if it's a ruse.

Trust me, forgetting your work out clothes is not met with much less than ridicule and I've done it twice.

For the most part, I really do enjoy going to the gym in the middle of the day. It has surprisingly made me more productive in the afternoon. My head is clear and it does a fair bit of burning off stress.

I haven't been hitting this blog up as often as I'd hoped. This is blog number 4 for me and frankly, the other blogs are being neglected too. The last few weekends have been packed to the rafters with either the last few fun outdoor things left or getting the outside and inside of the house ready for winter.

My weight has been mostly stable as of late and I have started upping the work outs at lunch to try and kick start them again. The last two session were all bike. The knee is doing better but I think I might add some cross trainer machine time in now as well. I can definitely say I'm starting to feel more fit.

The good news is I have been joined by several family members. This has gotten me really excited. Be sure to drop them a line of encouragement!