A New Me

My initial workout plan included a workout on DVD, Walk Away the Pounds. I’ve decided to phase out the elliptical from my workout for at least a couple weeks and solely do the DVD. It’s easier on my knees, and I get a more intense workout with it than I do on my elliptical.

I have the “Deluxe” edition that contains the 1 & 2 mile walks and the 3 mile walk. Right now, I’m focusing on the 2 mile walk mainly, but I’m going to try to work in the 3 mile walk at least once a week (depending on what time I get home from work and what I have planned for the nite).

What I really like about the workout is that it incorporates an upper body workout as well as using weights (2 lbs). You don’t get that if you’re walking around the block (well, maybe the weights but not the upper body workout unless you don’t mind looking like a crazy person … LOL). And since you walk in front of your tv, you can’t use the excuse that it’s too cold out or too hot out or raining or snowing.

I know that there are some other versions of the Walk Away the Pounds workout out there now. I’m thinking about looking around for them to see what variations there are in the workout. I need a little bit of variation to keep myself interested. And Leslie (Sansone) can get a little annoying at parts of the walks (especially when you do the same one several times a week). No matter what other DVDs I end up getting, I’m going to stick with some sort of walking workout for now. As time goes on and I lose more weight, then I’ll move to a toning workout.

If you’re looking for a workout that you can easily do in the comfort of your living room, I definitely suggest the Walk Away the Pounds DVDs.

I just did my weekly weigh-in. I was down only 0.8 lbs this week, but it’s better than a weight gain, especially since I only worked out on Sunday and Monday of last week. That brings my weight loss for the first 2 weeks to almost 5 lbs. Considering my plan is to lose at least 2 lbs a week, I’m slightly ahead of schedule. So I’m not that upset about only losing 0.8 lbs.

My motivation definitely sucked last week. I just didn’t work out. I knew I should, but I still didn’t. I did stay on my diet (I hate calling it that … it’s more of a change in eating habits) … except for yesterday. Robin, Dannilynn, and I went out to supper at Chilis. I got the chicken fried steak (which was the BEST that I’ve had in quite a long time). I did have potatoes and broccoli along with that, and we didn’t get dessert. And we went out last nite, so add beer to that list (more wasted calories).

So … how would I rate my progress thus far? I think I’d give myself a B-. If I rate fitness and diet separately, then fitness gets a D and diet gets an A-. I really need to bring the fitness grade up. If I continue to eat the way I have been (eating normal sized portions and not snacking) and get on a regular fitness routine, I should easily make my goal of 2 lbs a week … maybe even more. I’m trying not to push myself or kill myself because if I do that, I know that I’ll just end up stopping completely. I need to stop being lazy though. I need to get a regular routine going and stick with it. So that’s my next mini-goal. Wish me luck.

Name: Lose It! iPhone and iPod Touch application
Homepage: http://www.loseit.com/

At the suggestion of epizoic, I downloaded the Lose It! application (iTunes link) on my iPod Touch. If you’re trying to lose weight, and you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I suggest you download it. It’s a FREE app, so you’ve got nothing to lose.

At first I was only going to keep track of my weight and exercise with it. But I realized that keeping track of what I eat is important too. And it’s easy to do with this application. All you have to do is search for the type of food you ate and enter how much you ate. And they’ve got supermarket and restaurant foods as well.

To start, you enter in some data such as height, weight, and birthday. You also enter in your goal weight as well as your weekly goal (how much you want to lose each week). The app then gives you a date where it estimates when you’ll have reached your goal weight if you stay on track as well as your calorie budget (by day). Then you just enter in what you eat and what type of exercise you do. The app lets you see where you are on your calorie budget for the day.

You can also enter in recipes to easily include meals that you make from scratch. I made potato and ham soup for dinner today, and it was easy to enter that recipe into the app (I had to guess at some amounts, but that’s because I just tossed stuff into the pot). And it saves the recipes, so if you make things on a fairly regular basis, you just have to enter it once and then select that as the food you ate. It also has the option to enter custom food and exercises (that aren’t in the app’s database), but I haven’t used that yet. But it looks like they make it easy to do.

I’m hoping this application will help keep me on track. I think seeing what I eat and how much I exercise and how that relates to my daily caloric intake will really help. I just need to make sure that I keep entering things in.

In my first post, I gave a really quick overview of what I plan to do around here. Now that I have the layout all tweaked out the way I like it, I thought I should go into a little more detail as to what my plans are.

First off, I didn’t come up with the idea to set up this site all by myself. I got the idea to set up this site from Elaine (or @cybertoad on Twitter). I had found her diet blog last year (via Twitter). She recently started blogging over there again. So I thought I’d follow suit since I just started on my plan. I hope she doesn’t mind that I did that.

I’m kinda swallowing my pride here. I wasn’t going to include what my starting weight was. I was just going to post updates as to weight loss. But I thought that including my current weight would keep me honest. And seeing it there on EVERY PAGE of this blog would keep me motivated to keep going to reduce that damn number. And yes, my scale measures to a tenth of a pound (it’s a digital scale). So I’m logging my weight at that precision.

My exercise plan is still in its infancy, but at least I’m starting. I bought an elliptical machine in June 2007. When I first got it, I actually used it quite a bit. Then I started getting lazy and then just stopped altogether. I did start up again last spring, but again, I didn’t last very long. This time, I plan to keep going. I’m also going to alternate that with my Walk Away the Pounds DVDs. I’ve got a set with 1 mile, 2 mile, and 3 mile walks. I really like that I can walk in the comfort of my apartment. I don’t have to worry about the cold or the heat or the wind or the rain or the snow. And I’ve got a set of 2 lb dumbbells that are used during the walks. The plan that I put together (about 15 minutes ago) is this:

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