Finance and Fat

Super Fatty Fat Fat — or Why it’s Time to Get Serious

Eden — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:25:21 +0000

I don’t know what’s going on lately, but every time I get on the scale I’m heavier than the last time. Today I looked on in horror as I saw 278.6 pounds displayed on the screen (and lovingly tweeted by my scale for me).

Once I recovered from the shock, I sat down and spent a little time looking over my recent weight loss efforts. Just last year, as of March 30, I was down to 248 pounds. That was a loss of 20 pounds from the start of 2011. Not record-breaking, but certainly very respectable progress by any standards. Looking back at what I was doing then, my success was all about eating a (mostly) Paleo diet and walking. I wasn’t doing any weight lifting and I didn’t stop drinking alcohol. If I had kept it up, and even if I had only lost another 20 pounds the rest of the year (that would have given me another nine months to lose 20 pounds when I had already lost 20 in three months), I’d only weigh 228 pounds today — 50 pounds less than I do right now! Sure, we can play what-if games all day long, but it’s pretty amazing to me what a huge difference a few bad choices where I let myself get derailed from doing what was working changed my life so drastically.

I guess the lesson I’m taking away from all this is diligence — I have to keep working the plan every day and not let one failure turn into another and another and snowball into nine months of failures and regrets. I have a plan. I’ve demonstrated that this plan can work. I have the resources to carry out the plan. As far as I can tell, the only thing stopping me is me. And maybe I don’t know how to fix that problem yet, but I have to try. At least I’m aware of it now, or not in denial about it anymore, and that’s where I have to start.

So that’s how I got here. Learning from the past is important, but I can’t dwell on it too long. So what are my next steps?

I put two week’s worth of my workout schedule in my calendar. Taking the time to do this really helps. I have to be realistic about my schedule and work around meetings and whatnot. I like knowing from the start of the day that I have this thing to do and I can work through the day with that in mind. It’s not magic, but it’s certainly better than just letting the day happen and thinking how I should throw in some exercise somewhere.

I’m going to purify the refrigerator and pantry today and make sure I have the ingredients on hand to eat Paleo approved meals for the next few days.

I’m going to re-read all my highlights from The Primal Blueprint, the awesome book by Mark Sisson from Mark’s Daily Apple. I highlighted a lot, so that’s no small task.

I think that’s enough for today.

Super Fatty Fat Fat — or Why it’s Time to Get Serious

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Week 2 (no)Progress Report

Eden — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:55:30 +0000

It’s been about two weeks since I started paying attention to my weight again, and about a week and a half since I wrote about getting started again, so I thought it was time to get the ball rolling with some progress reports. Unfortunately, there’s nothing good to report yet — my weight actually went up a bit from the first week of getting on the scale. Of course, weight fluctuates a lot and the first week I came back may have just been a ‘good’ week for my weight. But either way, the important part is to have a baseline and to get to work on reaching my first goal weight.

Goal #1 is to finish a week with an average weight under 260 pounds. That’s 12.7 pounds from my last single weigh-in and 13.82 pounds from my last week’s average. Not really that much weight to lose when you’re this heavy. Any decent amount of hard work and focus should make it happen. I don’t want to fail too soon though, so I’m going to give myself until the end of February, for which the last weekly average will fall on March 4th. So that gives me just under five weeks, or 34 days to lose about 14 pounds. That’s about 2.8 pounds per week — perhaps a little higher than conventional wisdom typically recommends, but not by much, and I think weight will come off more easily in the beginning as I go from nearly no effort to hopefully quite a lot more than that.

Weeks	Average	Week Change	All-time Change
Week 2:	273.82	+1.74 pounds (0.64%)	+1.74 pounds (0.64%)
Week 1:	272.08

Week 2 (no)Progress Report

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Trying Again

Eden — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:56:58 +0000

Here we are again, almost a year since the last post — Back to Blogging and Goin’ Paleo. It’s funny to read that post now. A lot has happened since I wrote it, but not much has changed — at least as far as this blog is concerned. I’m fatter today and I have roughly the same amount of debt. To be honest, I don’t care much about the debt right now — debt is a much easier problem for me to solve than fat.

The scale told me a horrifying story this morning — 273.3 pounds. That’s the most I’ve ever weighed. Even though it’s not that much more than I weighed a year ago, seeing a number over 270 is kind of shocking.

I really was on the right track last year. I briefly dropped under 240 pounds — thanks to a mostly-Paleo diet and somewhat regular walking. However, I had given it all up by the middle of 2011. We had some big things happen in our lives last year. The biggest being that I’m now a father (which is awesome), but I don’t want to hide behind excuses. I chose to do something else when I could have exercised and I chose to eat the foods I knew I should avoid. Understanding the problem isn’t difficult. It’s actually putting what I know into practice when I fail to succeed.

I don’t remember when I last exercised, other than a round of golf this year, it must have been sometime before Christmas. My diet is bad — I mostly just eat what I want, particularly lots of carbohydrates neatly packaged in the form of delicious bread. Oh, how I love bread — giving up bread is definitely the hardest part about going Paleo, but obviously a big reason why it works. I’m going to try again. I haven’t cleared out the cabinets yet, but I’m getting closer.

One of my plans for 2012 is to get back into writing this blog regularly. I think the focused effort and accountability it creates makes a big difference. Of course, looking at my past efforts to start blogging again, the odds of me following through aren’t very good. Other than that, I’m going to get started by going for a walk today.

Trying Again

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No related posts

Back to Blogging and Goin’ Paleo

Eden — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 04:55:59 +0000

I’m still here. I’ve been tempted to kill the site and forget about it, but funnily enough traffic continues to increase even as I leave the site mostly abandoned. Not that I’m in it for the money (hey that $2 the site earned last month could buy me half a latte), but I enjoy writing and I want to do more of it this year.

Not much has happened since the last post I wrote back in August, 2010. I guess I was about 259 pounds then. I finished 2010 at 265 pounds. I think I hit 267 before Christmas. Amazingly, I actually started exercising and trying to do better the week after Christmas and I’ve been on a nice trend since then—weighing in around 252 pounds today and the last couple of days. That’s a solid loss of 13 pounds so far this year and 15 since Christmas. Not too shabby, and if I’m honest about it, I haven’t really even worked very hard at it.

Not to imply I’ve been sitting around playing World of Warcraft (that game really killed me with the expansion in early December), because I haven’t; I’ve quit that again, something I seem to do about twice a year or so. I’ve done a fair amount of walking in 2011. That’s been my primary source of exercise. I walked 39 miles in January and 36 in February. I tried mixing in some jogging too, but decided to stick with walking until I lose more weight. I really want to take it slow and avoid injuries. And I actually have avoided injuries thus far and I don’t want that to change. I’ve considered 230 pounds to be the starting point for adding some jogging to my routine. I’d still like to run a 5K some day. I don’t know if I really do, but I still tell myself that.

Other than walking, the other major change I’ve made is switching to a Paleo diet. I was learning about Paleo in January and so not really following it until the end of the month. Just about all of February was Paleo compliant (I’d say I’m 80-90% Paleo) and that’s when my weight really started dropping. I can only describe it as effortless weight loss. No doubt that the walking helps, but I had months in 2010 where I logged the same kind of miles I do now and didn’t have nearly the same weight loss.

I’ll share more about Paleo in the future. If you’re curious, here’s a couple of great getting started resources:

Primal Blueprint 101 from Mark’s Daily Apple
Paleo FAQ from Robb Wolf

Back to Blogging and Goin’ Paleo

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This Year Ain’t Over – 2010 Weight Loss Update

Eden — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:27:58 +0000

And I’m back. August 4th seems like as good a day as any for the first progress update to my 2010 Weight Loss Goals, written way back on Saturday, January 16th, 2010. Boy, things sure were different back then. I had hope for the New Year! Now it’s just another New Year of Regret. I’m joking of course, I don’t regret things much—maybe I should? I see that I even created a fancy little Google Spreadsheet for tracking all of my amazing progress back then! Funny thing is, I forgot I had done that until today. I’ll see if I can update it, but I’m probably lacking most of the data points needed.

In case you can’t tell from the tone of the above paragraph, things haven’t gone well this year. In fact, as things stand today, I’m a big fat zero on the progress chart for 2010. Seven months later and I stand exactly where I did when I was full of optimism and hope for the New Year. Oh well, that’s pretty much standard operating procedure for me over the past few years (as you can see if you check any of the weight loss archives around here).

But it’s all in the past now. That’s the funny thing about me. I must be too dumb to give up because I’m always optimistic that I can turn things around and lose 50 pounds before the year is over. Well, 50 might be rough, but I’d be happy with 30. In fact, that is my new goal! Look, a shiny new goal! Surely everything will be better now.

Okay, so things probably won’t be better now, but I’m going to try. I really am. I learned a couple of things this year. Like when I was walking regularly and eating lots of vegetables my weight was going down. The one month I managed to do both at the same time, I had lost about nine pounds. So there is hope, and at least I have a simple way to get started. Just some vegetables and some walking…that shouldn’t be too hard, even for me. Only time will tell of course. Hopefully I’ll be back to update this in less than seven months.

This Year Ain’t Over – 2010 Weight Loss Update

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2010 Weight Loss Goals

Eden — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:43:45 +0000

It’s that time of year again! The time of year I pretend to turn over a new leaf and fool myself into thinking I can be productive and fix all the mistakes of the previous year. Of course, I still believe that I can really do it so maybe one year things will come together as planned (I’m hoping it’s this year!).

I’m starting 2010 at about 259 pounds. That’s 8 pounds less than I started 2009. Certainly not good progress, but it beats gaining 8 pounds so I’ll take it. My goal for 2010 is to get down to 219 pounds. That seems to be a long way from 259, and especially considering my poor efforts in 2009, but I believe I can do it.

Here’s my approach for 2010. I’m breaking my annual goal into quarterly goals. So the first milestone is weighing in at (or below) 249 pounds by April 1st. This works out to 10 pounds per quarter, figure about 12 weeks per quarter and I can reach my goals while losing less than 1 pound per week (about .83 pounds per week if I used the calculator properly).

We’re already a couple of weeks into January and my weight is basically unchanged, fluctuating up and down by 1-2 pounds each week so far. Not the most promising start, but these pounds should be the easiest to lose so I’m still confident I can reach the April 1st deadline. There’s probably some irony in choosing April 1st as my first milestone, but that’s just how it worked out so I’m going to go with it.

Look for more regular updates on my progress this year and probably even more frequent updates on Twitter (follow @financeandfat if you’re into that Twitter thing). By the way, I’ll be tracking my progress on a publicly visible Google Spreadsheet.

2010 Weight Loss Goals

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Monthly Weight Loss Report, August 2009

Eden — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:17:04 +0000

Regular readers may have noticed the weekly weight loss report has changed to monthly. On the other hand, the weekly reports haven’t happened much at all lately, so I’m not really missing out on anything here.

My weight loss efforts have been a total failure over the past few months. I weighed in at 265 pounds today, which is within two pounds of my all time high (where I started this year). I guess the silver lining is that I’m at least down two pounds for the year. But with so much weight to lose, I really need to be making faster progress than that.

My iPhone challenge hasn’t helped at all either. Frankly, I think it’s made me not even care about an iPhone anymore! I suppose that’s a good thing, but I’d feel better if it was motivating me to exercise more.

It’s not all bad news though. I actually went out for a run today. I’m running a 5K in December and I finally started training today. I’m doing the Couch to 5K Running Plan. The plan is intended to get a sedentary person off the couch and ready to run a 5K in nine weeks. I’m happy with day one. It was challenging, but not too tough that I felt like I couldn’t finish it. Today’s workout consisted of a five minute walking warmup, followed by intervals of sixty seconds of jogging and ninety seconds of walking. The intervals last for twenty minutes and finish off with a five minute walking cool down.

As usual, I feel great after finally getting myself off the couch and actually doing some exercise. If only I could remember that I would feel this good when I’m making excuses to avoid exercise. Hopefully the race in December and this training plan will help me to stay on top of things this time around.

Lessons Learned:

I feel better after exercising. Maybe this should be obvious, but apparently it’s not because I always forget.

There are no tricks or shortcuts. I have to choose to exercise and stop making excuses.

Tracking progress helps. I’m using Daily Burn to track my calories and exercise. It can be a bit cumbersome at times, and adding exercise is not always intuitive, but overall it’s a nice application and I’ve found it to be helpful (it’s free by the way). I really like the stat tracking. It helps me to see my progress built up and charted over time. It makes it seem worthwhile to go for a walk even if I only have ten minutes. Little efforts do add up!

I’m not happy that it is almost the end of August and I’ve only lost two pounds this year. On the other hand, there are still four months left in the year, so it’s far from too late to give up. I can still easily finish the year down twenty pounds or so. I think the 5K will help a lot. Even though my marathon plans turned into a complete and utter failure last year, I did reach my lowest weight of the past several years when I was in the early stages of training for it. I have a marathon in mind for the end of 2010, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself yet. We will see how the 5K goes this year.

Monthly Weight Loss Report, August 2009

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Weekly Web Favorites and 3,000 Calories

Eden — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:32:17 +0000

I started using a new fitness and nutrition tracking website this week (Daily Burn) and was quite shocked when I found I had consumed 3,200 calories one day. To be honest, I know I’ve been eating horribly lately. Trying to treat my stress with fat and sugar apparently. But I had no idea my diet had gone that far out of control. I guess that’s why it’s good to keep a food journal. It would be even better to not eat 3,000 calories in the first place, but now I know what I need to work on.

Favorite Quote:

“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. Better to assume you are a moron and occasionally surprise yourself.” Funny Quotes by Quotes for Idiots

Favorite Links:

The Source of Frugal Misery [from The Simple Dollar] When you spend money, spend it on things you value. Spend as little as possible on the things you don’t value.
How to Network With Busy People – Part 11 [from Steve Pavlina dot com] Don’t begin your first contact with an apology (like ‘sorry to bother you’). Just because someone is busy doesn’t mean you’re not an equal.
On the Proper Use of ‘Me’ and ‘I’ [from Foldedspace] It may be something simple, but this is a nice overview and good for reference in case you forget.
Planning Fallacy [from Less Wrong] Great read if you’re a project manager or if you make plans for the future…yeah, that should be everyone. It’s an important concept to understand.
Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy by Moving to Remote Village [from The Onion] This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen for a while (it’s a video by the way). Of course it’s just a parody, but it’s not really that great a stretch to imagine this in our future.

*As always, you can find all of my ‘weekly web favorites’ and many more links on my StumbleUpon page and my Delicious Bookmarks.

Weekly Web Favorites and 3,000 Calories

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Debt is Slavery Book Review

Eden — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:42:46 +0000

Debt is Slavery: and 9 Other Things I Wish My Dad Had Taught Me About Money, by Michael Mihalik. This book is short, to the point, and packed with lots of great advice. I’ve read it three times and I would put this in my top five personal finance books, possibly at number one. I think for someone just getting started with figuring out their debt and finances this is probably the first book to read. It’s short enough to get through very quickly and find some immediate advice and inspiration to get your finances under control.

The book offers this definition of slavery: “The state of being bound in servitude as an instrument of labor” [pg. 23]. Do you ever wake up in the morning and not want to go to work that day? Do you go anyway? Do you go because you really love your job that much or do you go because you owe money to someone (probably many people) and even though you may have a choice of how you’ll earn your money, ultimately you have no choice but to go to work and get that money. Lately, I’ve been dreading Monday mornings as early as Saturday night. I feel trapped and bound to this service by my debts.

“Too many people hate their jobs but are afraid to leave, because they wouldn’t be able to pay their mortgage, credit card bills, car loans, or boat loans. Debt can turn a free, happy person into a bitter human being. Debt can turn you into a slave.” [pg 25].

It’s possible for debt to be good, but debt is still slavery. A mortgage can usually be thought of as good debt, but you still must make sure you can afford the mortgage you are signing up for.

“The word ‘mortgage’ is derived from the Latin word ‘mort,’ which means ‘death’, and the Germanic word ‘gage’, which means ‘pledge’. So ‘mortgage’ means ‘death pledge’. What does that tell you?” [pg 30]

When we spend money, we are really trading our time for the things we buy. We make this even worse when we go into debt to buy things. We are now committing our time in the future to work to earn money to pay for the things we bought in the past. This becomes even more painful if you don’t like your job.

‘Stuff’ ads busywork and stress to our lives. So much stuff we buy we don’t even need. Eliminating unwanted stuff from our lives is an important part of getting control of our finances and getting out of debt.

Experiences are more valuable than stuff. Don’t find happiness only in buying things. You won’t look back on your life when you’re older and fondly remember the stuff you accumulated.

It will be easier to stop buying stuff if we avoid advertising and understand that we are constantly being marketed to and a lot of money is being spent to convince us to buy things.

Make a goal of saving 50% of your income. If you do this, you would have the ability to take a month off from work for every month you work (assuming you’re earning an income from a job and not passive sources). Don’t spend more money when you get a raise. If you keep your expenses the same as before, you can increase your savings exponentially, even as your income may not be increasing at such a high rate.

Money doesn’t buy happiness, it buys freedom. This is my greatest motivator for making more money and getting out of debt right now. I want to be free again.

This book is packed with solid advice, expertly fit into a short, easy to read format. If you’re just getting started with fixing a financial mess in your life, I would buy this book immediately. If you need a little extra motivation and a better understanding of the mistakes of the ‘normal’ American way when it comes to money and work, read this book. I had planned to give away my copy after reading it, but I decided this is one I want to keep on my bookshelf so I have it available to read again when I see bad habits creeping back into my life.

Debt is Slavery Book Review

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Weekly Web Favorites: Losing Weight is Hard Edition

Eden — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 15:07:54 +0000

I’m really struggling with my diet and exercise lately. I’ve realized that I first turn to food when I’m feeling stressed or depressed. The only healthy replacement I can think of is exercise so I’m going to work on making exercise a priority, even when I don’t feel like it.

Favorite Quote:

“One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. Unless you’re a raccoon. Then it’s basically all one category.” – Funny Quotes by Quotes for Idiots

Favorite Links:

I have two favorites from Early Retirement Extreme: Survival Preparedness – a great starting point for emergency preparation and Extreme Early Retirement vs. Friends and Relatives offers a look at the issues you’ll face with friends and family when trying to save money to the extreme.
What We Wish We Knew When We Were Younger [from Get Rich Slowly] – a great look at things we wish we had known before, since I knew virtually nothing about money these all apply to me and many more too I’m sure.
The Short Term and the Long Term Choice [from The Simple Dollar] – Ask yourself where you’ll be in the future when making a decision, this is great advice and something I’m trying to put into practice in my life now. I have far too much of a short term focus.

Carnivals

I was fortunate enough to be included in the Carnival of Personal Finance: Famous money quotes edition, hosted by Christian Personal Finance and the Festival of Frugality #189, Extreme Heat Edition, hosted by Modern Tightwad. Many thanks to the carnival hosts for the hard work they put this week!

*As always, you can find all of my ‘weekly web favorites’ and many more links on my StumbleUpon page.

Weekly Web Favorites: Losing Weight is Hard Edition

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