About Fogdog's Weight Loss

Don't Focus on the Goal...

If you've followed this blog you know that I've struggled for many years with improving my health. I've finally reached a point where I've managed to maintain a small amount of success. Now it's time to take the next step, but I believe it requires a new way of thinking.

Instead of trying to get healthy, why not shift focus toward learning how to build healthy habits instead. Follow me as I try to teach myself how to Engineer healthy habits that will allow me to take my health to the next level. Let's see where this experiment goes!

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Journal Update - 1/7/10

It’s been a while since I wrote anything meaningful on this blog. Other than reporting my weight I haven’t really put any time into writing articles or even journal entries. To be honest, the last few weeks have not been good to me. The last 3 weeks have been extremely stressful. Some of the stress is just life but I also bring a lot on myself.

Three weeks ago I was just starting to get back into exercising. The big problem, even though I was getting some workouts in here and there, I hadn’t created a firm plan. To date I still do not have a firm exercise plan. The week before Christmas brought the usual holiday stress. Gifts, traffic, weather… You name it and it was stressing me out. One thing I know about myself is that I am much more successful when I can maintain my normal daily routine. I only had to work Monday and Tuesday that week, so my routine was thrown way off. You would think the extra time would have been perfect for setting up a workout plan, but it never seemed to happen. I did manage to work out on Wednesday, but it was only a 20 minute jaunt on the elliptical trainer.

On the day after Christmas we took off for vacation. Believe it or not, but this was not a vacation I was looking forward to. I’ve got so many things I would have rather done at home than go on vacation, but it was essentially free as my wife’s parents offered to let us stay at their timeshare. I brought my laptop thinking I might have some time to write a little, but the opportunity never materialized. The vacation was fun and my kids had a great time but as I said I couldn’t help think there were so many things I needed to do at home. During the vacation I ate pretty well and drank a lot of water. The unit we stayed in had a kitchen so we ate in every night but one and even then I didn’t overdo it. I also got quite a bit of exercise in during the trip as we took our kids to several museums and science centers so I got to do a lot of walking. The complex we were at also had a state-of-the-art fitness center so I got a couple workouts in as well. Unfortunately I definitely over-did it one day. I’m used to lifting free weights at home, but this place had all the machines that target specific muscle groups. It was so easy to move from machine to machine without having to set things up that I ended up doing a whole lot more in an hour than I usually do. I paid the price the following days with a lot of sore muscles!

We got back from vacation on New Year’s Eve. No rest for the wicked as we had friends coming over for the evening. They arrived just as we finished unpacking. It was a fun party and I definitely ate more junk than I should have, but you have to let your hair down once in a while.

New Year’s Day brought more stress with my main resolution. 5 years ago I quit smoking. For some really stupid reason, I actually started smoking again about 6 months ago. Granted I’m not smoking a pack a day like I used to but it’s been slowly creeping back into my life. So my main resolution this year is to get back off the smokes again. I knew the first couple days would be tough to eat right and not smoke so I told myself that I wouldn’t worry about my eating for the first 3 days. I also told myself that I would try to keep myself busy during the last 3 days of my vacation so I wouldn’t have time to think about smoking or eating. I have a million things to do around the house anyway.

Unfortunately my plans were all for not as I developed a bad case of the flu! I’m sure being stressed and constantly on the go helped wear me down and of course now I’m even more stressed as I’ve been laying in bed sick for the last 4 days! I suppose there has been an upside to being sick; I haven’t eaten much in the last few days and quitting smoking is a breeze when you are sleeping all day long.

That brings me back to the here and now. I’m still recovering from the flu but I’m well enough to go back to work. I still have a ton of stuff to do around the house, and it will wait until I get to it. I’m eating OK though I’ve been really hungry the past couple days (probably due to not eating while sick). Right now I’m just trying to survive until the weekend. Hopefully at that time I can manage to get myself caught back up and I really want to get my exercise plan going. Although it’s been a rough few weeks, I’m not giving up. I knew there would be tough times and I plan to fight through them and pick myself up. Wish me luck!

2 comments:

  1. Glad to see you're feeling better. Since January 1st was a Friday, I've decided that Fridays will be my weight-in day. I lost 3# on week 1. All I did to lose this weight was to stop eating JUNK! By junk I mean no chips, and no sweets. My knees already feel the difference!

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  2. Good for you Weezel, keep at it. I like to weigh in at the end of the week too because it gives me an opportunity to live a little on the weekend (as long as I did well during the week). Hopefully I can post a decent loss this week.

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