A good friend of mine were having a discussion yesterday about dieting.  Another one of our co-workers is wanting to shed a few pounds and was making some good progress until he got injured.  I think that sort of sent him into a downward kind of funk, and he started regaining all the weight that he lost.  But it got us talking about food and debating how food affects different people in different ways.

My friend was making the argument that certain people really struggle with watching what they eat more than others do.  And even now, I’m not sure I can fully comprehend or understand what that means?  I’ve certainly heard and read that some people are “emotional” eaters and how their food intake is directly affected by their mood.  Sure, I can fully relate to the fact that eating makes me feel good.  And sure, I certainly can get very cranky and such when I’m hungry.  But is that to say that there was someone else out there that feels hunger more than I do?  Perhaps physically, or maybe emotionally?  Or is it strictly a difference of will power and dedication of the individual?  And that we’re all equal, but that some just find it easier to cave in or give up than others?

I hear folks all the time say, “You’re so lucky that you can lose weight so easily.”  Or, “I wish I could watch my diet like you do.”  Both statements very much rub me the wrong way.  They seem to discard my daily struggle with food and dealing with hunger and completely throw it out the window.  If I’m motivated, I can watch my diet and lose weight, but it’s anything but easy.  I’m eleven days into my diet.  That’s eleven days of 1,500 calories a day plus doing an hour of working out.  There hasn’t been anything enjoyable about dieting itself.  It sucks and I hate doing it.  The only joy that I can hope to get is stepping on the scale from week to week and hopefully seeing decreasing numbers as the weeks go by.  Or perhaps the feeling of being able to move down a notch on my belt, or fit into some “skinny pants”.  I’ve said many times before that dieting, for me, is the hardest thing that I have to commit to doing as part of my training.  Swimming, biking, and running are all temporary workouts throughout the week.  Counting calories and teetering on the edge of being hungry vs. satiated is with me all the time, from when I wake up to when I sleep, and even occasionally in the middle of the night when my body needs a snack.

But I digress.  I’m wondering if there really is a difference in each individual’s ability to diet?  I know that people have different metabolic rates and certainly there are people that have the capacity to train at higher volumes - I get that.  But at a mental and emotional level, is dieting any easier or harder from one person to the next?  Or is having the will power to diet and forbidding yourself of certain foods no different than having the dedication to go and work out even when you don’t want to?  It makes me wonder.

So it’s a week and some days later since the whole back in motion thing began, and I’m still moving.  It’s very slow progress, but it’s progress none the less!

I still haven’t done any running and I probably won’t until another month or so at least.  But I did three swim and three bike sessions last week.  And I’m on pace to do the same this week.  It’s not much at maybe an hour or so a day, but coming from zero it seems relevant.

All is still good on the eating front.  I weight myself yesterday and was 178.  So, that’s six pounds from the previous Monday, but in all honesty, I was down to around 180 the day after my last monster meal.  It might not be an actual six pounds lost after losing all the food bloat, but I feel comfortable saying that I think I shed an honest two pounds last week.  So, I’m happy with that.

Swimming is getting slightly easier and biking… well, I’m biking in Minnesota in late October.  I’ll let you know how the biking is going as soon as I can feel my legs and my nether-regions again.

So last night, I had what was my “last supper” (not to be confused to blasphemize the actual Last Supper).  It was a big plate of chimichangas with Spanish rice and smothered with cheese sauce goodness, all washed down with a very big (and shockingly expensive) margerhita.  If all goes according to plan, that’ll be my last “good” meal for some time to come.

My alarm rang at 5:30 AM this morning to wake me up for masters swimming.  I stepped on the scale today at a whopping 184 pounds - 32 pounds over what I consider my race weight!  I’m guessing that at least two of those pounds are a result of last nights dinner, but I’m taking them at face value.  It gives me more motivation when I get to add those two pounds to the overall weight loss. :)

The actual masters swim session was a harsh dose of reality.  What is supposed to be my strength certainly didn’t feel like it.  The lactic acid started building in my upper body after just 150 meters (LCM sucks, btw!).  150 meters, people! That’s under 4% of what the swim portion of the IM distance is!  I totaled 1,200 slow, painful meters for the day before calling it quits.  I knew I was out of shape, but today I had a good taste of exactly how out of shape I have become.

But it was movement.  And you have to start from somewhere, right?!  So, this morning it has officially begun.  The road back is going to be very, very long and very much uphill, especially for the first few months.  Gone are the days of pizza and beer and it’s back to apples, oatmeal, and cottage cheese.  But I’ve always enjoyed the journey and seeing the gains that can be made with a little discipline and hard work.  So it’s back to the grind stone and hoping that I end up someplace close to where I’ve been before.  It doesn’t really matter that much if it’s faster or slower than previous years, but just that I arrive happy, healthy, and in one piece.  Let the 2009 season begin!

So IM looms far on the horizon next year.  Normally, I wouldn’t be too concerned about it but I’m very much starting from ground zero this time.  I haven’t swam nor run since IMWI ‘06, I haven’t biked in any kind of training fashion since the Spring of 2007.  I’m thirty pounds over race weight and horribly out of shape.  I was playing with the neighbor kids just yesterday and they had me huffing and puffing just running around the back yard.  It’s a sad shape of affairs, lemme tell ya!

But for the first time in a long time, I’m excited to start training again.  I’m still going to be taking these next few weeks very easy/off as my parents will be in town for the next few weeks.  There is just no way that any kind of dieting is happening while my mom is here cooking various yummy things for me.  But when they’re gone, I plan on hitting the diet fairly hard and working out consistently.

My loose plans are:

• Lose weight.  I’m still debating how I want to approach this.  I could either tackle this one really hard and shed most of the weight off in a couple months.  Or do this slowly over the winter.  Each has its pros and cons, but I’m probably leaning more towards the prior.  I think I can drop twenty pounds by New Years?
• Swim and spin.  I hope to get most of my cardio done in the pool and on the bike which aren’t so bone jarring and hopefully will ease my body back into action more so than running.  Nothing too strenuous right off the bat.  I think I could probably handle an hour of very easy swimming or biking a day off the bat.  It’s far easier for me to coast through these two activites than it is to do so running.
• Address potential running issues before starting to run.  I have “glass legs” and tend to develop achilles problems easily, especially when starting out.  I’ve also had a pretty consistent history of IT band problems.  I plan on strengthening and stretching my calves to hopefully address any achilles issues.  I’m also planning a regimine of IT band stretching and massage along with trying to strengthen my gluteus medius, which I think has been helpful for me in the past.

Once I have a few weeks of the above under my belt, I think I’ll be able to add running into the mix.  Hopefully, I’ll be up to doing somewhere between 8-10 hours a week by mid-Winter.  Then slowly ramp up that volume as Spring comes.  If all goes well, I hope to be in 1/2 IM shape by early Spring.

So that’s the plan.  I have a few more weeks of the good life (although honestly, the novelty of being able to eat whatever I want lost its charm long time ago - now I do it mostly out of laziness) and then it’s back to it.  Seriously, this time… No really!  Seriously. :)

I’ve long touted my formula for losing weight with friends of mine.  In a nutshell it is that I, being a man of average height and wanting to lose 2+ lbs. a week, gets to eat 1,000 calories a day plus 500 calories for each additional hour of working out that I do.

People say I’m nuts, too extreme, not practical, etc.  But a good friend of mine just referred me to the McMillan Running Nutritional Calculator which seems to mirror my thoughts on dieting.  His estimates seem to be spot on to what I think is necessary for losing weight.  Of course, eating calories in those amounts sucks, makes me extremely grumpy, and hungry much of the time.  But if it were easy to be thin, everyone would be.  Such is life… and why I’m 30 pounds over (race) weight. :)

I’ve been mighty lazy these days (surprise, surprise).  I’m leaning towards making a run for IMWI 2009, but I’ll have to think about how feasible that is now with baby and having been out of anything active for two years now?  I’ve been thinking about doing shorter events.  I just don’t know if I’ll feel challenged enough to diet and train adequately for shorter races.  The hills at Wisco put the fear of God in me to show up trained and as thin as possible.  Not to mention that I’m still waiting for my perfect weather day.  Grrr!  I shouldn’t have cancelled in ‘07!

Zip. Nada. Nilch. No weight lost, but no weight gained - I’m still sitting at 168.2. I will say that I probably slacked a bit this past week in terms of being good with my diet. With my sour attitude toward things as of late, I’m also finding it hard to adhere to the terms that I set out for myself initially. I’m not eating terribly, but it could be better. I grab a handful of Pringles here or there and in my worst of moods this past week, I succumbed to the power of a Chipotle(-like) burrito. Even so, I still do think I made progress this past week, even if Tanita won’t confirm it. I’m down another notch on my belt and I think I’m solidly in between my winter and summer jeans. I haven’t yet tried on the summer jeans, but the winter ones no longer stay up with my belly alone providing back pressure. Belts are a requirement these days, so I guess that’s good!

Thanks for the feedback on my last post. I know it was a bit crummy, but ehh… it needed to get said. I’ve pretty much decided that I won’t be doing the 1/2 IM that I signed up for in a couple months. More than likely, I’ll try either converting my entry into the Olympic category, or finding some other folks doing the race to do a relay. Just doing that helped my attitude towards things a bit. I don’t feel as much pressure to make weight by June. I don’t feel as much pressure to get my running volume (while nursing sore Achilles) up to 1/2 IM levels. I don’t have to worry about posting an all time worst 1/2 IM time. Training can now resume at a slower pace and we can see later where this season takes us.

The temperatures have finally gotten up a bit and hopefully the rain stays away long enough this weekend to get a nice longer ride in on Sunday. Ironmomjenny is putting together a ride this weekend. I think it’s a secret goal of hers to try and get a Guiness World Record for longest paceline ever. For any of you locals, I think the plan is 2-4 hours @ 18-20 MPH on Sunday afternoon. I’ll probably be at the smaller end of both of those, myself. :)

Have a great weekend everyone!

For those looking for their daily dose of inspiration and motivation, this isn’t the post for you. If you want to continue, be my guest but don’t say I didn’t warn you…

(more…)

So… I weighed myself this morning - 168.2. Not terrible for a little over a week. I have the feeling that I was a little more dehydrated than normal when I weighed in, but it should be close. I had a decent week last week of eating. I did splurge a little last Saturday utilizing my optional “special occasion” card (if you must know, was my birthday this past weekend. :) ). And I may have eaten slightly more than I was allotted on Easter, although if I did it wasn’t by much.

Three pounds in a week and a half or so is right on target, I’d say. I will say that I don’t strict calorie count so much as I sort of ballpark estimate everything. I think my guesstimates now doing this for a few years are pretty accurate though. And when I watch what I eat, I tend to eat the same things over and over and over again. Lunches are comprised of either a 6″ Subway Club (no cheese or mayo), or maybe a Quiznos small Sierra Smoked Turkey. Fruit I usually classify as 100 calories a piece. And I’m pretty in tune with my portion control. It’s amazing how little 1/2 a cup, or even a whole cup is for that matter! I still get very hungry at times, but this week seems to be better in terms of dealing with cravings and what not. I find that if I can ween myself off foods that I really like, I usually lose the desire to eat them in the second or third week.

I had forgotten how working out feels when you’re trying to lose weight, though. There have been a couple runs these past couple weeks where I just ran out of gas and had to cut my runs to walk/runs. Not so much because I was out of shape (although there is some of that), but more so because I was just completely out of energy. It comes with the territory I suppose. And probably better to have workouts suffer now in the early season than when the brunt of the training is supposed to come.

That’s it on the weight front. Everything else is going well. Training is slow going, but I think I managed 8-9 hours last week? I’m slow as molasses at running, I have no muscular endurance on the bike, and I feel like I’m swimming through jello in the pool. At least I don’t have one glaring weakness - I’m bad in all three! :)

The weather here continues to suck. We have a winter advisory here today until 7 PM and are expecting 3-5 inches of snow. :( Which just strengthens my case that I have to get out of this state sooner than later. I hate the weather here. It drives me absolutely nuts.

So… with race season that’s going to be here before I know it, I’ve decided that it’s about time that I start doing the whole weight loss thang. And as I’ve been in contact with Wil and some others about this, I wonder if starting some kind of virtual “fat camp” wouldn’t be fun. You know… we all sort of keep each other accountable and maybe have a weekly weigh in or something? And a place to bitch about how bad dropping weight sucks. Misery loves company after all, right? :)

Anyway, I’m planning on keeping track of my progress here. I started out this week tipping the scales at 171 and change - about 20 pounds heavier than I really should be. My (drastic) plan is going to be the same as last year. My own personal guidelines are as follows:

• By being a living member of the planet Earth, I am entitled to eating 1,000 calories a day.
• For every hour I workout, I get to eat an extra 500 calories (yeah, I know that’s not exact, but it’s easy math).
• When I reach 1,500 calories in exercise, I’m done - regardless of what I did that day. Meaning my hard cap for caloric intake for a day is 2,500 calories. So a 60 mile ride warrants me the same amount of calories as doing a century.
• The calories that I eat should come primarily from good sources - fruits, vegetables, and lean cuts of meat. I can’t get all my calories from chocolate, for example.
• Training calories (i.e. gels, sports drinks, etc.) count towards the overall daily tally so take them wisely and only as necessary.
• Optional: Special occasions (i.e. birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) are granted some relief from this diet, so long as the occasion is truly special and I’m not gorging myself because it’s Friday or something silly like that.
• Optional: Every five pound milestone, I’ll give myself the option to take one “free” meal as a reward for hitting that next level.

I did this last year and I seem to be able to drop 2+ pounds a week while training. Sometimes the training days are rough and I need to just gut through them on pure will alone. That’s the price I pay for living the good life for eight months - suck it up. :) Caloricly sure, it’s probably on the low side and I’m sure some nutritionist out there will tell me that it’s way too little and that I need to eat more. Starving my body, eating away at muscle mass, slowing down my metabolism and all that stuff. But it’s pretty much the way I’ve done things every time I’ve needed to cut weight and it always works. And the more I read what the diets of elite athletes look like, the more I think that they’re closer to the above than not. Besides, if I were really starving my body that badly, I don’t think it’d allow me to train or anything on top of just existing. So I think it’s enough? Perhaps a topic for discussion, though?

In any case, I’m in. If anyone else wants to join in the fun, the more the merrier. You don’t have to abide by my rules above. I only posted mine so others could see how I would be working towards my goal. Any takers? :)

It’s about that time. That time where I wake up from hibernation and say, “Oh crap! The race season is going to be here before you know it!” It’s been weighing on me (quite literally as far as my knee joints are concerned) these past couple of weeks that I should probably start doing something other than being glued to my couch. These days, I’m pretty much disgusted with how far I’ve actually let myself go.

So for the first time in a long time, I ran. Well, I did something that resembled putting on running shoes and going outside. I wouldn’t so much say that I ran as I’d say I sort of shuffled along wondering if and when I’d go into cardiac arrest. And wondering if it was safe to run considering all the sludge that probably built up over the winter and if a big chunk of cholesterol was going to break off one of my arteries and end up lodged in my brain. But I went out and did something, and as much as the run itself sucked it reminded me that I actually like being outside and exercising. Sure, it was gorgeous out this weekend which totally helped. But it was actually a fresh change from being cooped up inside the house watching me have to go down yet another notch on my belt.

So this is it. Yeah, I think it’s it? OK, it’s it. Stamped on my blog and for you all to call me out on it if you don’t hear from me regularly. The season starts NOW!

Twenty pounds heavier than I should be and my HR was somewhere close to infinity just by standing up. But this is the bitter sweet part of the season. Every workout I do sucks, but almost every workout that I do brings me noticeable changes in weight, HR, and RPE of my workouts. It doesn’t feel like I’ll ever get back to where I was, but I’ll have to trust that I’ve done it in years past and that I’ll get there again. It’s good to be “back”.

See you all out there!