Second Month Update

So it feel like it's been so long and I really should have posted this sooner. Most of my time was preoccupied with finishing school but now that school is over and I have my degree I should have free time to post more frequently.

Since it's been such a long time since my last post a lot has changed. I've gone through a few different cycles on my diet and exercise so I guess I'll break them all down.

The Diet

My basic diet when I started was a simple one. I would basically adjust my eating habits from eating two large meals a day (lunch and dinner) to 3 smaller meals and two snacks. I'm not all for having 5 small meals and my attitude really hasn't changed much even now, I'm ok with the two snacks and three meals. So the basic part of my plan was to make sure I ate something early that was healthy.

Honey Nut Cheerios in milk and a glass of orange juice.

A basic breakfast if I do say so myself. It was really satisfying to have something simple that I liked that I could look forward to first thing at work. I made sure it was always a proper amount, 1 cup of cereal, 1 cup of 2% milk, and 1 cup of orange juice. My first snack of the day was yogurt. The yogurts were just the regular yoplait ones.

Lunch was my awesome idea. I wanted something fresh with veggies but I'm not too keen on salads. I settled for an easy to make sandwich: ham, turkey, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, mayo, and mustard. Occasionally I would add an extra slice of bread, extra veggies, and swap out the ham for bacon for my ultimate club sandwich.

I found out pretty early I was a really awesome sandwich maker which made that lunch really easy. Awesome sandwich = happy Randall. Add in pickle on the side and lunch was complete.

Then another snack of an apple. I like the small-to-medium gala apples so it was an easy to get snack. And finally on to dinner. I made sure to try to eat every day before 6pm and make it small. Chicken sandwiches or bacon and eggs were always my go-to things if I couldn't find other small items to make.

And that was basically my diet in a nutshell. Obviously the biggest part was cutting out all drinks, especially soda, completely. I made sure to drink more than 8 glasses of water a day which helped keep everything stable.

The Additions

A couple of additions I made to my plan are multi-vitamins (Mega men) and protein solutions (Whey Protein):

Both of these were really nice additions. The mutli-vitamins were especially helpful. Immediately after I started taking them, within a few days, I noticed the increased energy. It felt like I was simply feeling better every day. The whey protein I started taking every time I worked out or played DDR. It made the next morning that much better; I wasn't in complete pain after a hard workout session. And then to top it off I would throw in a session here-or-there with the shake weight. Knock it all you want the thing is easy to use and works.

The Next Level

My how things changed so quickly. Obviously I continued to do research into dieting and weight loss, not content with simply staying where I was. The biggest thing that changed everything was finding a good calorie counter. I decided to go with Calorie Counter from MyFitnessPal. The app is simply amazing. I immediately started keeping track of everything and set the app to a 2 pound-per-week loss.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/diary/GameBoiye

The cool thing about this app is that not only can I keep track of everything I eat but others can even view it. One of the coolest features is how the app even syncs up to the website. They have a nice forum with really good information and helpful people that even further motivates me. Also you may have already noticed but there's even a tracker I placed on this blog that gets updated whenever I weigh myself. It will be updated every Sunday night since that's when I weigh myself.

A thousand calorie deficit gave me a limit of just over 2000 calories a day. This actually turned out to be a little more difficult than I originally intended. The odd thing was where the difficulty was coming from; not eating enough. Doing extensive research it's clear that cutting calories from your maintenance level will make you lose weight, but cutting too much will actually put your body into starvation mode. Once the body enters starvation mode it lowers the metabolism and tries to hold on to all the fat reserves. I realized quite quickly that I had been still eating just under my thousand calorie deficit.

Eager to change I started devoting everything to this calorie counter. I made sure to enter every single thing I ate and made sure I always come within range of my goal. Because I was ok with losing 1-2 pounds a week I set my goal at 2000 calories and that would be the minimum. But it could still eat up to 2400 if I really wanted to and still be losing weight. With me not drinking any fluids other than water the milk and orange juice in the morning things progressed very well.

Odd Changes

So all of these changes, and finally eating enough food while still staying at a deficit definitely made me change a bit. Extra energy and power were definite pluses, but the oddest change came from sweating. Oddly enough I never really sweated before unless I was doing something physical or exercising. Now all of a sudden I started sweating for no reason at all. At work I would just be sitting in a chair and start sweating.

While this was somewhat of an alarming change, doing a bit of research and using common sense lead me to one conclusion: my metabolism finally increased and I was burning off my fat. By actually eating the proper amount of food and still having a good deficit I was forcing my body to convert fat stores in my body into energy. It felt good to see physical changes like that, even if not expected.

Pushing Even Further

After about three weeks of continuing on like this I decided I needed to make some more changes. I didn't have time to exercise anymore with school finishing so I decided to focus on the diet more. I looked for things in my diet that seemed off or excessive and tried to fix them.

For instance, the sandwich and pickle I was eating every day was nice but I noticed that it was rather high in sodium and lacking in some beneficial items. I switched out the mayo with light mayo which tastes the same to me. I swapped out the white bread for much better wheat bread. That helped drop both the sodium and calories in addition to giving me a healthier sandwich. Even the meats I was buying was swapped for low sodium versions. The entire sandwich was that much healthier.

I swapped out the pickles for sodium reduced ones and then changed it for cottage cheese. I wanted to eat more protein on a daily basis to make sure I lost as little muscle as possible and any new muscle could build easily. The one thing I got from being overweight were extremely strong leg muscles. I might as well work to keep them while losing the weight, could come in handy some time. Even the cottage cheese I switched from 4% to 2% eventually.

My breakfast cereal was changed from Honey Nut Cheerios to regular Cheerios and finally to Special K Protein Plus. I'm still sticking with the 2% milk and orange juice for now since I like those and they aren't all that bad for my diet, if anything they are actually pretty good.

For all of my snacks I decided to cut out as much unnecessary sugar as possible. Sugar in fruit is ok, but after doing some research on high fructose corn syrup sugars I decided against the yoplait yogert. I did drop it down to the low fat versions but eventually I just replaced it with another apple or banana.

Going to the Extreme

Never content, highly motivated, and 100% sure I will conquer this goal I pushed on. My company was nice enough to give me a present for graduation: a gift card for Amazon. Well here's what I got with it; I made sure to put it to good use:

• Measuring Tape
• Body Fat Tester
• Body Fat Percentage and Body Mass Index tool
• Food Scale
• Heart Rate Monitor

While none of these really help me to directly lose weight they are nice for helping me keep track of my progress.

One of the other things I finally did was take my "before" pictures. I kind of wish now that I had taken them originally when I started. I had convinced myself I didn't need them and wouldn't want them, but now I think I do. So I took them now, better late than never. I can still lose 100 pounds from now if I really wanted so hopefully they'll come in handy some time to show off.

The other change I did was finally sign up for a gym. I was fortunate that my coworker John and his girlfriend Michele gave me a two year membership to 24 hour fitness. I went there tonight and signed up. I even got setup with a fitness trainer for three days of next week. I've got a friend who has been going for awhile so I can go with him though I was kind of sad at how it was. For some reason I figured it would be less packed. I could barely hear anyone talking in there so I guess it's not going to be as social as I initially thought. But I guess that's not the reason I'm going so it doesn't make too much of an impact.

Thoughts on Future Changes

There are a few things that I started doing research on that I may change in the future.

The first development I've been looking into is the lunch meats that I eat on my sandwich. I put about 2-3 servings of it a day and I figured that may not be very healthy. After doing some research it appears there are issues with it, even if I buy it freshly sliced. Most lunch meat has sodium nitrite in it to keep it fresh and apparently that can cause it to have bad carcinogenics. With the amount I have been eating I figure it's better to be on the safe side and cook my own meat. It should be cheaper to buy large quantities of turkey or chicken to cook and cut myself. I can lay off a lot of the seasoning and salt which should help lower my sodium intake as well as have fresher meat.

The next item I have been looking into is the possibility that microwaves are bad for cooking food. I haven't looked too much into this and it almost seems inherently false but I'll look deeper into it just in case. Luckily I don't microwave much so it shouldn't be a problem for me.

Lastly I was looking at buying one of these:

http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-TEM500--Muffin-2-Slice/dp/B000B18P96/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1331187580&sr=1-1-catcorr

I could use this to replace the cereal I was eating in the morning with Eggs. There were a few different research papers that released articles on eating a fattier, protein focused breakfasts and how it could lead to better weight loss: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1262453/High-fat-bacon-eggs-breakfast-healthiest-start-day.html

I haven't decided yet if I really want it. It's not very expensive but at the same time the company itself seems to make these cheaply. There's lots of complaints about their devices breaking or having coatings peal off. Though for that price I guess you can't expect much.

The Numbers

To bring this all to a close here's what everyone has been waiting for, the official numbers. I'm going to be adding a little more information to this post now that I have a few different ways to track every part of my body (don't worry, I kept it PG). I'll probably only post updates to these every few months if even that. My weight was taken this past Sunday night and everything else was taken from 5 minutes ago.

Current Stats:
Weight: 288.0 lbs
Fat %: 33.4%
BMI: 39.0
Waist/abdomen: 52.5 in
Hips: 48 in
Both Thighs: 26.25 in
Both Calfs: 18.5 in
Both Biceps: 16 in
Wrist: 8 in
Wrist: 12.75 in
Neck: 17.25 in
Shoulder: 53 in
Chest: 49 in

So that leaves me with my loss. I am currently at 288 and I started at 310. So far, less than three months in and I already lost 22 lbs. While it is somewhat impressive remember that the first 10 or so were most likely all water weight. It's going to get even more difficult the lower I go.

But I've told myself I can and will do this and I have confidence that I can hit this head on. I'll post again in a few weeks with another update, wish me luck everyone!

Status Report: First Two Weeks

So it's been two weeks since this whole thing officially started so I figured I'd give an update. Things have been going great, I didn't really realize how easy it was going to be for me. In regards to the diet at least, everything has been going good and I have not "cheated" yet. The fact that I simply cut out the drinks and sides is pretty easy enough for me to do at this point.

The Workout

So since last time I talked about my actual diet, this time I think I should go over what I am doing in addition to the diet to help me lose the weight. For now, my basic goal is lite workouts that are not too intensive. I don't currently have any gym membership so I'm not doing any serious workout; for now I just wanted to keep it simple and not do any strength training.

To give you an idea of what my "extra activity" consists of, here's a few pictures:

At three bucks a piece that's not a bad bargain for a complete workout set. I've lost a lot of weight before with Dance Dance Revolution and it's something I've always had fun doing. I'd take this any day over blindly walking on a treadmill or riding an exercise bike.

For now this is my biggest addition to my daily routine. I have not started with any serious strength training yet as I don't want to start off too strong. I'll possibly add that in once I have more time to dedicate to this. Most of these games track the calories I burn based on my weight and steps taken, so I've been trying to average at least 300 calories of DDR a day if not more. Today I did 500 calories worth in about 45 minutes while eating a banana; it felt great.

The Problems

So like anything that I don't have experience with there are bound to be problems that I ran into. The first problem I didn't account for it time and stress. Having to deal with work, an overly aggressive school schedule, and a drastically different diet really ended up taking it's toll on me. If I could have changed anything, I would have waited to do everything till after my school had ended. But at this point I don't want to stop, I'll just deal with life as it comes at me. I'm trying to take everything else easier in order to make a little stress in my life.

The next issue was diet pills. I had thought about using diet pills a bit and did a bunch of research on it. There was this one my parents had taken that they had lost over 40 pounds on.that they recommended. Sounds good right, especially since it's someone that closely related to me? Well turns out my body just doesn't like them as well as my parents. While I probably should see a doctor before including anything like that, I took the risk and started taking them just to see what would happen. While the effects weren't drastic, I did notice odd things like random pains here and there (which may just be the extra exercise and diet) and feeling overly drained of energy. It was an odd feeling as it wasn't really just energy, I wasn't really feeling exhaustion, it was more like my body was eating my energy too fast and was running out.

That brings me to my third problem which was probably related to how my diet was going. Initially I had though cutting out all my excess fluids like juices and soda and the sides of my meals was a great idea. I mean it made sense to me. While it was in good intentions, turns out by not properly doing the math it became problematic for my body. I was basing my diet on the fact I burned around 2300 calories a day so at a 500 deficit 1800 calories sounded like a nice target. Thing is, because of my weight, height, and newly added workout schedule (in addition to the little activities I have added to my routine) my calorie burn was probably closer to 2800-3000 a day. I also did not realize how many calories I had been taking in with soda and other drinks, and by cutting them all of them I was essentially under a 1500 calorie deficit a day.

The Breakdown

What felt like a small cutback in eating and small addition of exercise was actually creating a catastrophic calorie deficit my body was not ready for. Add in the extra burn from the diet pills, stress from work and school, and the extra fact my body went into shock and you have one of the biggest breakdowns I've had in years. While I tried to keep it hidden from most people and only a few people truly know about it, it was a frightening situation that I could have avoided had I planned better and really took care of myself like I should.

Because of Randall essentially "breaking" I have made a few changes to my diet. While I'm still keeping most of my diet the same, I am actually increasing the food I take in. It feels kind of strange to be on a diet and eating more than I normally would but in the end it's still better than before; I'm replacing the extra sugary juices, chocolate milk, and soda with actual food, so just the subtraction of all the sugar is good enough for me.

The other change I'm making is my whole issue with doctors. I've always been hesitant with doctors and I really don't like going but trying to do this all by myself really isn't the best way to do it. I should have already went before I even started but I guess better late than never. I've gotten a few recommendations and I'll be going later this week or next week

The Progress

So what's the progress so far? Lets see, I started out at 310 lbs and now after two weeks I'm somewhere between 295 and 303. It's really odd, I had weighed myself over the course of several days when I started and my weight only seemed to fluctuate by 1-2 pounds at most. It's most likely do to the fact I'm drinking over 100 ounces of water a day (which is much more fluid than I normally drink) but it basically makes telling how much I actually lost a chore. For now I'm not too worried as I can already tell the difference in my cloths. Having to go to that next notch in my belt is kind of nice but now I have the problem with my pants always falling down (or at least trying to) Hopefully this doesn't create any awkward situations but it has become a serious problem for me. Perhaps I'll buy some new cloths in a week or two, but the problem with that is they will only last a few months. Kind of seems like a waste to me.

Well that's it for now. I'll probably post again in another week or two with another status update, hopefully the next two weeks goes better than the last two and I don't have another freak-out session.

Wish me luck!

PS. If anyone has any suggestions on multivitamins to take daily I would greatly appreciate it.

Where it all starts

So here it is, I'm finally committing myself to do it. I almost can't believe it's taken me this long to get started but I'm finally going to do it. Project 100 is an idea I've been floating around for about 2-3 years but just wasn't sure when I wanted to implement it. I've been doing research and studying every now-and-then and worked out something I think will work for me.

So what is project 100?

Essentially project 100 is an entire lifestyle change, a goal for me to lose 100 pounds in two years. It's centered around the fact that I want to change my actual lifestyle, not just go on a diet to lose weight and eventually gain it back. I've tried to incorporate things that I still like and can live with while still losing weight. Much of my loss will most likely be due to the extra physical activities I'm adding to my daily routine, as well as scheduled workouts.

So where do we start?

So I officially weighed myself yesterday. My starting weight, 310 pounds! That is actually somewhat of a relief. I have been cutting back, even if just a little, over the past 6 month in preparation for this project. Last time I weighed myself officially was back in June of last year, and back then I was at 335 pounds! So already, without going on any diet or changing my life style I have lost 25 pounds simply from my initial cutback. I knew I had lost some weight as my cloths don't fit properly anymore, but I had no idea it was that much.

Much of that though is due to the fact I'm over 300 pounds. Any physical activity I do is likely to burn 1.5-2 times as much calories as a normal person. While I do think I suffer from having a lower metabolism, at that weight I'm bound to lose the pounds simply by not over eating and forcing myself to gain weight. But the problem is, if I actually want to get down to my desired weight, which at this point is around 200 pounds, I cannot just keep going like I am. I will eventually reach a weight that stabilizes based on the amount of calories I take in and how much I burn per days.

So where are we right now?

As you can tell, I've already mentioned calories as a concern, and for the most part, it's what I'm going to be using to track my progress. That isn't to say that I'm not going to consider the other components of a normal diet, like fat grams, carbs, etc., but at this point it's too much to focus on right now. At my current weight there's not much reason for me to focus on everything, simply cutting back should work for the first 50-60 pounds or so.

My main goal for the first two months is simply cutting back. Let's throw out some numbers at you:

• Average calorie burn for me: ~3000 per day

Using many different calculators online, this is roughly what I get based on age, weight, gender, and activity level. I'm actually surprised it's so high, but I do imagine it's slightly lower than that as I'm sure I have slower metabolism than most people.

So where am I at right now in terms of burning calories?

Let go through a typical day for me. Most of my days I actually only eat two meals a day (bad, I know!). At least one of those is fast food/eating out. Let's take my favorite restaurant and most common order and do some number crunching:

• Super Star with Cheese: 940 calories

Hum, that's actually not that bad. Taking into account I only eat two times a day, if I ate food like that, it would put me under my calorie count a lot. That's where I realized where I'm really hurting myself: the sides!

• Large fries: 470 calories
• Large coke: 400 calories

So now we see that it is starting to make sense and where my weight gain is coming from. Not only that, most of what I drink during the day is not water, it's juices or even worse, more coke. On average I was drinking about 2-3 cans of coke a day, with other types of drinks. Each can is about 150 calories. This is in addition to any snacks I might have, which, believe it or not, are very few. I'm just not a snack type of person which I guess has been saving me from going over the edge.

So for some final numbers, here's what I estimate I was currently taking in for calories: 3500-4000 a day.

So how to we get there?

So the big question is how do I actually get to my goal. Based on the math above, it's easy to make the changes I need. For now, it's all about cutting back. Like I said, at my current weight I expend much more energy and burn more calories just doing basic tasks so I don't really have to go on a all celery diet or anything extreme yet.

Basically let's take everything I decided to cut:

• Cokes, juices, other drinks
• Sides for any time I eat out
• Snacks, excess foods

So basically, by cutting that all out, now my meals look to be around 1000 calories. I can go to my favorite restaurant and still order what I want and not gain any weight. But of course, this is about cutting back and changing my lifestyle, so there will be other changes. Instead of getting that Super Star with cheese that I love so much, maybe I'll get that Hand-Breaded Chicken sandwich which I also love. It's only 650 calories and it's something I really like. I don't mind the switch. If I'm feeling extra healthy, maybe a turkey burger at 490 calories. Going to Freebirds today for a burrito? I'll get the hybird instead of the freebird for a smaller burrito. Maybe not get cheese and have white chicken instead of carnitas.

The goal of this isn't going to be excluding myself from eating everything I like. If I did that, I don't think this diet would last longer than a week. The real plan of this project is to simply cut back. As you can see in my Carls Jr. example, I went from eating 1800 calories in a meal to only 650. And while many of these cut backs are based on calories, it also means I'll be cutting back the other bad stuff too, such as sugar, grams of fat, bad carbs, etc. Once I get down to a lower weight I'll have to start focusing more on those, but for now, I think this will work for me to at least get down the beginning portion of my weight. Remember, I'm trying to do this for the long run so I had to think of a plan that would work for me, not something that someone forced down upon me or something that was forced on a website.

So what else changes?

So what are some of the other things that change? Well the obvious one is what I drink throughout the day. My current plan is to drink at least 8 ounces of milk and orange juice (for various vitamins and other good stuff) and the rest water. Of course I can still have the occasional other drink as long as I am responsible about it. Maybe if I'm at a party or hanging out with friends I'll have a coke or something, but no longer will I have the 3-4 a day.

The other thing that changes is my meals. Two a day is just not healthy and probably hurting me more than anything else. While I'm not sure how much I can stick with it, my current plan is to have 5 meals a day, all small. A small breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a small two snacks thrown in there to keep me from eating large meals.

My breakfast is going to be Cheerios in the 8 ounces of milk I promised myself. Then for a snack it will be yogurt. Not sure this will stay, but for now the regular kind (not the non-fat), but I needed something to fit in here and yogurt seems like the best option. I may switch to low or nonfat later with more probiotics, but for now just regular yogurt is fine. Then the third meal is lunch, hopefully small, I want to average around 400-600 calories for this meal. Then fourth meal is a fruit of some kind, currently planning on apples or oranges, might fit in a banana. The last meal is going to be dinner, and I'm aiming for an average of 600-700 calories, maximum 1000.

So basically, based on what I have planned, my average day should consist of anywhere from 2000-2500 calories, and hopefully much less sugars and fat than before.

Lastly, I'm hoping to stop eating anything after 6pm. I haven't done much research as to why that helps, though I do know the basics of it, but it's something simple to cut so I don't mind.

So is that it?

Mostly. There are a few more things I plan to do and obviously I've left out much of my added physical activities but this post has already became longer than I had wanted so I'll leave those for another time. This blog is mainly to serve as a reminder to myself to keep on track. I hope to provide updates maybe once or twice a week so for those interested, bookmark this and hopefully you can see good progress.

My biggest fear from all this actually is just me caving eventually. Most of what I'm doing isn't that hard really, but to be honest, the biggest thing that's going to hurt me is the cut back on soda. I love soda and used to drink it with every meal, will be sad to let it go. But in order to change, some things have to be given up.

Till next time...