I still have two days until the official end of my experiment, but am afraid that I will not reach my goal.  Unfortunately, the obstacles in my path were too great.  A weeklong business trip, spent mostly in the car, a 3 day bachelor party, and finally five days spent almost entirely in bed with the flu.

I am not sad.  This was an experiment, one that most said was crazy and unhealthy anyway and there are always anomalies and aberrations in experiments and that is why we keep trying and use large sample sizes.  With only one participant, even one hurdle could derail the project, and I encountered three.

I am still hoping to get below 200 pounds by the end of the experiment without resorting to massive water loss like fighters do before their weigh-ins and I think I can manage that.

On Monday, January 31st.  I will post the pictures and my final weight along with my body fat measurements according to the electrical impedance scale and also caliper measurements.  I have been refused a second DEXA scan so soon after my first by my doctor, but then, he does know more about medicine than I do

I hope everyone that is reading this is continuing their own experiments in creating the most healthy and vibrant lives for themselves and not limiting it to just one month, for I certainly won’t!

Gone were my hopes of weight lifting and running every day in a mad dash sprint to the finish line.  It’s hard to do pushups when your entire body aches.  My throat feels like I’ve drank a glass of sand, vomited it back up and then drank another glass of sand.  (I wouldn’t drink the same one I just puked up, that’d be gross).

Over the past few weeks several friends have told me about they have lost weight while violently ill.  Maybe it will work for me too and I will come out of this a few pounds lighter.  My only concern is losing muscle as well.

Oh well, such is the life in an experiment.

My DEXA scan on 12/28 weighed me in at 211.7 pounds at 27.9 % body fat (more accurate).

My first Weigh Max electrical impedance scan on Jan 1st had me at 208.7 pounds and 26.4% body fat.

My weigh in this morning was 205.7 pounds at 26% body fat, but those numbers don’t tell the whole story.

My almost Twice Daily Weigh Ins

There are lots of daily fluctuations of my weight and that gap and rather large jump in the middle of the month was the bachelor party I just attended.

If you take a look at the total “distance” my body has travelled to lose those three pounds it is actually a very impressive 27 pounds!

Here are some of the results from my first DEXA scan.  I was sent what appear to be photocopies, but I will ask for the digital versions so you can see my fat deposits more easily.

1st DEXA Scan Result-1

1st DEXA Scan 2

1st DEXA Scan 3

In the first image you can see my body composition with fat, muscle and bone.  It also shows my BMI which is a rather useless number because it only looks at weight vs height so even if someone has 5% body fat but is extremely muscular, they will still be labeled as obese on the BMI scale.

In the second image you can see how dense I am (1.369 times a white male for my age, height and weight).  All these years I’ve been telling people that I am a land mammal and here is scientific proof.  I am just too dense to float.

In the third image you can see a table of how my body composition breaks down in the different parts of my body.

I’ve taken 3.25 inches off of my waist (and another 3 in my arms, hips and thighs) during this experiment and I definitely experience that change in the fit of my clothes and how I feel.  The ultimate test will be when I have my second DEXA scan and blood work to test the efficacy of what I have been doing.  Here’s to science!

The showers are now timed to last 10 minutes under the cold water and if I turn it off, I penalize myself with another two minutes at the very coldest that I can take.  I start with the water on my upper back, both because it seems to be easier and also because Tim found that having the cold applied to the upper back and shoulders provided the most benefit.  I then spin around so that it hits my chest and face.

It was so cold that I thought that I would drink some to lessen the amount that hit my body.  It tasted cold, too cold.  When I got out of the shower, I tried the ice water.  It was warm…

So now here’s the question.  Just what temperature water am I showering in?

To find out I ordered myself a thermometer and plan to measure the temperature of the shower water and post it here.  I also need to find out the dangers of long immersion in really cold water.  Brrrrrr, but still fun!

The whey protein is great, but when I take too much of it I can feel it congesting me and making me sluggish.  I feel better (not morally) when I use the hemp, but if I forget and have my nose over the top of the can when I open it… BAM!  The stench of something rotten and wicked assails me and I have to turn my head or be overwhelmed.  I should sell this stuff, right?  What’s weird is that after that initial barrage on my sense of smell, it almost has no scent.  It’s like a defense mechanism or something. “No, don’t eat me…”  I still do, despite all its protests, usually with some almond milk, almost butter, a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon and a few ice cubes.  This morning I added two raw eggs (sans shell) for some extra creaminess.

WARNING: If you are going to consume raw eggs like this (or like Ahnold did in the movie Pumping Iron), there is a risk of Salmonella poisoning so make sure you know where the eggs have come from and that they have been refrigerated the entire time you’ve had them.

Tofu has phytoestrogen in it, so I’ve been avoiding it as much as possible in an effort to increase my testosterone to help with the muscle building and fat loss during this wonderful experiment of mine so part of the experiment has been the great protein scavenger hunt.

My brother hipped me to a meatless protein source called Quorn.  It’s made from mushrooms, has no soy in it and the Naked Chikn Cutlets have 11 grams of protein each.  I’ve done both a stirfry and tacos with them and am going to try their other products.  My meat eating housemate tried a piece from the stirfry and said it tasted really good, I wonder if I could fool them with it.  Or I wonder if they could fool me with actual chicken and tell me it’s Quorn!

Going in I knew that the diet would not be the strict, slow-carb one that I had been following, but I planned ahead to do as little damage to my month as possible.

I brought my supplements and exercise bands (which I didn’t end up using), but did manage to take cold showers and even jumped into a 3 foot tall pile of snow and rolled around for a couple of minutes in just my boxers.  It really didn’t feel cold until I had melted the first layer of snow around my body and I was covered in water.

On Saturday morning, we went up to Mt Baldy and I had been snowboarding ONCE before on some rather easy slopes at Snoqualmie Pass in Seattle and so I told my friends that I was “excellent” with my one day of experience.  We rent our gear and are standing around between a chair lift and a gondola while the rest of them discuss which runs to do.  The chairs sit four and the gondola eight so we all get to go together in the gondola, but it goes up much higher on the mountain than the chairs.

As we’re sitting in the gondola, enjoying the expansive views, my buddy says to me “Hey Mic, how you feeling, you nervous?”  I look around and see a very, very long way down the mountain and we aren’t yet half way up.  “Yes, I am.”  But since you can’t learn to swim without jumping in the water, I plunged down the slopes.  Perhaps, plunged is improper.  I inched down the mountain with extreme trepidation would be more accurate.

Those boards turn so quickly that I had to use every muscle in my body to stay upright, but even though I was using all of my muscles, I didn’t remain upright the entire time.

What’s the result of this wild weekend?  I’ve regained a lot of the weight that I have lost, but I feel stronger, so I am hoping that the final fat percentage reads much lower.  Also, my waist is still more than two inches smaller than when I started so I’m not without hope.

I’m back on the diet and had a solid workout tonight using the improvised “kettlebell” from the Four Hour Body.  12 days left.  It’s a sprint to the finish line now!

A large part of my days right now are spent in the car as I have to drive up to 90 minutes  one-way to get where I’m going in San Francisco or Oakland/Emeryville.  This has put a big strain on my ability to exercise and my desire at the end of a long day to take a frozen shower (I still have though).

To combat this, I have found myself doing wall-presses (standing pushups against a wall) outside of meetings, isometric exercises while sitting at a table and forceful contraction of the transverse abdominis while I’m driving.  I’ve definitely seen less downward shifting this week than last, but it could also be that I am just adding more muscle as well.

Another thing that I’ve learned is that I am just about always heavier when I go to bed than when I awoke that day.  So if you get up and weigh yourself and then go to the gym and exercise like crazy and then weigh yourself again before you go to bed, you’ll most likely be heavier.  If you are starting a body transformation, always weigh yourself at the same time of the day.

My total body weight in the morning and evening

Also as you can see from my progress, I am not losing weight everyday and the gap on Sunday was when I got home at 11 and forgot to weigh myself.  Another problem with traveling is the routine gets disrupted, the scale gets moved and things get forgotten.

I’m still a bit behind schedule, but I still have 17 more days to burn that fat!

It’s been a crazy long day with meetings and driving around the Bay Area.  I will post something better tomorrow.

Here’s to my disappearing act…

Now for the numbers:

I weighed in at 208.7 and 26.4% body fat on the morning of the 1st.  Today, I was 205.4 and 25.8%.  Nowhere near my goal of a pound a day, but looking at the chart of my weigh-ins you can see that for the first couple of days I gained weight (and went up to 26.8% body fat too).  It really took a few days for my body to change gears and get into the slow carb rhythm.

Morning and Evening Weigh Ins Week 1

Besides the poundage and fat I also measured the circumference of my two biceps, waist, hips and both thighs.

L Arm no change

R Arm -11/16″

Waist -2.0″  Woohoo!  That’s why my pants fit again.

Hips -1.25″

L Thigh +.25″

R Thigh +.25″

So not exactly the poundage and percentage goals that I wanted to shoot out of the gate with, but I’m cooking with gas now.  We’ll see if I can’t pick up the pace this week and get me sub 200 lbs and 8-10 lbs of fat to put me back in the race.

Here is a video of what I have brought with me, the thoughts of OCD have already occurred but feel free to voice them as well.

Tonight when I am settled I will post the pics and results of this past week, quite positive!