Category: health

Today I started off with a Dunedin North Rotary meeting for breakfast. They are a great group of people and do a lot of charitable work. Today there was a presentation on RotoCleft that I found moving. Poor orphan children in Peru would receive free surgeries to fix cleft palates. I digress. The breakfast at Rotary is typically a buffet line and I can’t help but enjoy scrambled eggs and cheese when someone else is cooking. Only this time it was scrambled eggs, cheese, peppers, small sausage chunks and bits of ham. I caved immediately and went for two scoops. I also had a cup of orange juice and 24 oz’s of coffee with a couple half and half’s.
When I got home, I started checking out the impact of what I’ve consumed. It amounted to 670 calories in a single sitting! Now, this is truly an eye opener. I normally add in strips of bacon with possibly a muffin which would have knocked my plan out of the park for the day.
To add insult to injury the menu planner at MyPyramid shows that of those calories I consumed 328 were junk calories! And the maximum junk calorie allowed is 360. So, not only was my diet off because of calories, more than half of what I consumed was useless. AAAHHH!
I register officially into the Menu Planner of MyPyramid because I obviously need to track and learn a few things.
Ok, I do my aerobics on the TecTrix for 30 minutes and burn around 600 calories. But somehow I feel every iota of that junk causing my stomach to churn just a tad.
Okay, how can I get back on track. I know, I’ll go for a salad, that’s gotta be good right?! Ah, there we go two cups of chopped lettuce and half a chopped tomato. Some lite dressing at 50 calories.
OH NOOO! 10 of those dressing calories are junk. Well, at least the salad will hold off the hunger and help me play catch up. But I gotta find a better something to add flavor to the salad.
Search the pantry. Honey, it’s all sugar. Parmesan cheese, half junk by volume. No, the left over biscuits won’t do it. Man this wouldn’t be so hard if I could enjoy the sugars, solid fats and alcohol. Or had at least balanced them a little more through the entire day.
Eureka, salsa! No junk and less calories too. Okay, another salad for dinner.
But I got another 243 calories to go and it would be wise not to short myself too much. Start cruising the search function in the menu planner. I have to find things with little or no junk in them.
Apples, nectarines, brown rice, oatmeal, tuna, almonds, all have no junk factor and they are in my kitchen. As I browse further I’m finding a number of things I have are low on the junk factor.
With that in mind a handful of almonds, a little brown rice with a touch of salsa and I’m done for the night.
Okay, plan better. No and low junk factor foods.

This is the rest of the post

With a renewed sense of purpose I started this day. My goal was 300 calories or less per meal with the potential for a snack some time around 100 calories. It was also to ensure I worked out every day possible. Before dumping a load of stuff into a bowl I stopped, read the label and measured. I did the same with the milk. Funny thing is, the single serving of milk was more than my cereal needed. I could have used less and used fewer calories in my budget. Oh well, live and learn. That’s as much a part of this as anything else.

Then it was on to exercise. Up to now I’ve been working out alternating an aerobics day with a strength day. Aerobics days are 20 to 30 minutes on a TecTrix ClimbMax (its called a stepper). Strength days were a full circuit on an old BowFlex XTL.

To keep life simple and jump start my body into submission, I decided to do both strength and aerobics work outs on every day I possibly could. Timing can be an issue with work and life demands. (Work at home doesn’t mean I do nothing or have total schedule freedom). That and the fact I have a few injuries that could flare up. One of those I believe to be Plantar Fasciitis. (I’ll blog on that separately.)

Jump to the end of the day and, although I was tempted to eat more, it wasn’t maddening. I made it consuming only 515 calories which is way below my target of 1000 and stepping for an output of 400. I haven’t figured a way to calculate calorie burn of the Bowflex routine. I don’t expect to be able to keep this up for many days. But for an opening day, it gives me confidence that my goal of hitting 191 is achievable.

Today I began.

My first move was to drop my portions and document what I was eating. I picked an arbitrary goal of 1000 calories. This seemed the common sense thing. Let’s face it, many Americans consume three or four times what they really need.

I started with reading labels. I nearly went into shock
when I discovered that what I considered to be two healthy bean wraps, almost all the calories were in the shell. Each shell was 170 calories a piece. That was over a third of my target for the entire day without considering breakfast or dinner or snacks!

This day was a bust.

Then I found http://www.MyPyramid.gov which is helpful with unlabeled foods like fruits and vegetables. If you register with them and log in, you can actually enter your diet using a search field allowing you to store up to seven days based on 2400 Calories in a day. It also projects “Extras” or junk in your diet like sugars, solid fats and alcohol. The search function has some packaged stuff, but can sometimes be way off, like the large tortilla shells it had listed as 90 calories when packaging showed 170. I would have loved to have used only the Menu Tracker function, BUT this lack of accuracy and flexibility was enough to submarine the entire purpose of tracking my progress.

It’s a good reference, but certainly not the only tool for me to use for now.

So I set up a small spreadsheet. Initially I’m starting out with a Date, Intake or Output, and a Calorie column. Simplistic for now. Who knows what it will look like later.

At the end of September 2008 a mandate was passed through my branch of the military reserves that weight standards would be further tightened to match those of the Center for Disease Control’s use of the Body Mass Index.
Everyone has one year before the standards would be enforced at our annual weigh-in. What does this mean to the organization at large? A 1% decline in maximum allowable weight standards across the board. 1% seems insignificant until you realize that for a 200 pound person that is a 20 pound drop.

What’s the impact to me? My standard allowable weight was 213 pounds and I always stayed under that maximum by at least ten pounds. Now, my maximum is set at 191 pounds, which means I’m currently ten pounds over and to keep my ten pound buffer, I need to drop 20 pounds.

This thread will be an attempt to document over this next year, what I do to reach this goal.

I have to say that although I received the initial word about this with chagrin I wasn’t truly happy with my weight as it is.

So what is my long term goal: 1) Meet the standard for the new body weight requirement consistently. 2) Attempt to reach an added buffer weight of a few extra pounds below the standard.

Stay tuned.