Category Archives: health & fitness

A narrative of my journeys with diet, exercise, and various healthcare professionals

randomness, the ongoing saga of my job, weight loss

My world

Aaron and I just had a major thrift purging, and took a carload of stuff to Goodwill. Seriously. A carload. The backseat and trunk were both full of computerage and old clothes. Mac Classic from Sheryl (rescued from an untimely demise in a landfill), scanner, Mac 7100, older Mac whose number I forget, 13″ Apple Monitor (which had to go to Salvation Army instead, since Goodwill doesn’t accept monitors), Genesis consoles and controllers, two bags of clothes, some books, an external Mac modem, etc, etc. We freed up a good amount of room in our bedroom and our computer room. And, hopefully, we racked up a good amount of thrift karma, to counteract our bad luck at finding deals at Goodwill and the flea market lately.

I weighed myself again yesterday, and found that my weight loss has temporarily stagnated at eleven pounds. Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m still grateful for, but I’m hoping to continue to lose weight at a decent clip, so I’m not tempted to drift from the Atkins Way. I do know I’m still burning fat, though, cause the pee-strip tells me so. Just to show how much weight this week and a half of Atkins has helped me lose, let me show you the lovely chart from my Excel weight-tracking worksheet (yes, I know, I’m a dork):

click for larger graph

That’s from mid-November of last year to right now. Note the stretch after the wedding where I didn’t give a shit about how much I weighed, and didn’t even weigh myself at all for a couple months. Also note the dip at the beginning of the chart, and the righteous rebound right after two Christmas dinners in a row. 🙂

In case anyone cares about my crazy work soap-opera… Andrew decided that one of the temps who was prepping should move to being a processor, and that Rama (who, you will recall, complained about being a temp and having waaay too many hours) should return to prepping. This took effect on Tuesday, and we’re all happy about it. All except Dawn, the other prepping temp, who pretty much hates all of us now, since we were instrumental in getting our old temp canned. But, really, Lorna just didn’t get it, for the most part. I won’t go into it, since you won’t really follow, but suffice to say she was inconsistent and just didn’t get it. So, yeah. All of us are in a great mood except for Dawn, who scowls and gives us all a silent treatment like we haven’t had since Junior High.

Still on the agenda: Loni’s carpal tunnel worker’s comp claim. Oh, yeah, and let’s see what Ruth says when she gets back from vacation and all the shit’s gone down. 🙂

P.S. – I’m on vacation today and tomorrow. Aaron and I are going to Ann Arbor tomorrow. Whee! Four-day weekend! Outside of my honeymoon, I haven’t had one of those for a long, long time.

the ongoing saga of my job, weight loss

Atkins and Aaron and work. (oh my)

Even though my site seems to be down, I’m still going to post an update.

Aaron and I are finishing up Day #3 of the Atkins Diet, and doing surprizingly well. People have told me they felt like crap during the initial induction phase of the diet — I feel great. I feel less lethargic than I did, though I’d stop short of saying I actually feel energetic. I at least feel more alert… though that could have something to do with my attempts to get to bed before midnight this week and last.

I’m enjoying having him home when I get home. It’s like every night is a weekend-night. All except for Monday, when I worked 12 1/2 hours.

At work, we swapped off what clients’ accounts we each process, and our temp, Rama, has apparently hit her breaking point with the stuff I used to run. She’s now complaining to our boss that she should only be working 30-35 hours a week as a temp, and she’s working 40+, and she wants to swap off with one of the other temps, so they can process for awhile and let her prep the work like they do. No dice, as per our meeting last week, but our supervisor, Andrew, said he’ll step in whenever she’s ready to go home. She was not satisfied with that answer, since it seems like he’s just trying to placate her, and not deal with the problem at its source — the problem being that the processors work 45-hour weeks (soon to be longer still), and the preppers are scrambling to barely make their 35 to 40.

We’re all at a snapping point. We’re sincerely hoping that we can all quit at once, having found other jobs, and leave Andrew floundering. We’ll see…

roadtrips, weight loss

Gravity Games

Hey, remember this from the front page?

Week #1
9/7 – 9-13
No Dew Week

Week #2
9/14 – 9/20
No Pasta Week

Week #3
9/21 – 9/27
No Candy Week

Well, nix that. I’m joining Aaron on his full-on foray into Atkins, starting Monday. (That’s tomorrow.) I’ve got my Atkins profile up on their website, and checked out some recipes. Aaron’s gone full-force and bought the carb-counter book and the Atkins cookbook, and borrowed another low-carb cookbook from the library. He likes to eat more meat than I usually do, anyway, so I think the hardest thing for him is going to be cataloguing the carb content of everything that goes into his mouth.

Me, I’ve already broken myself of my Mountain Dew addiction, and I’ve pretty much cut out pasta. Those were the hard parts. Now I just have to get up early enough to eat breakfast, and remember to make myself a lunch before I go to bed the previous day (since I won’t just be grabbing a frozen meal from the freezer on my way out).

So, we’ll see how that goes. I’m looking forward to it myself.

Yesterday, Aaron and I headed out to Cleveland for the Gravity Games. For those of you who aren’t big “Extreme Sports” freaks, the Gravity Games includes skateboard vert (ramp) and street (men’s and women’s), freestyle motocross, wakeboarding, inline skating street and vert, and bike dirt, street, and vert. We watch it on NBC every year, and it’s been in Cleveland for the past couple of years, but we haven’t gotten out to watch it live. This year, though, since we got the heads-up at the Taste of Cleveland, we went out and got tickets for this bad boy.

We left around noon, and got there around two-ish. Found parking for five bucks, walked the couple blocks to the Games, brandished our tickets, received loose-fitting wristbands, opened my camera case (for no one to actually search it), and we were in. We walked around the Festival Village, which was basically the marketing and merch fairway, and got some stickers and a sampler CD of some kind. Could have gotten more stuff, had we actually been able to approach some of the booths, but the stuff we got was pretty much shoved at us by booth attendants out in the middle of the fairway.

We wandered over and found a bike dirt venue, where kids were allowed to go down a ramp and do their best trick on a five-foot dirt hill. I finished up the roll of film that was in my camera by snapping photos of the kids, and of the one guy who was running the show, who would go down the ramp occasionally, to keep it interesting. He turned a backflip almost as soon as we got there to watch, so I didn’t get that on film. 🙁

One of the great things about the Gravity Games being in Cleveland (besides the fact that it’s close enough to drive) is that your ticket gets you into the Rock Hall for half-price. So, we spent about an hour and a half, I think, wandering around the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. And we didn’t even get upstairs! We decided that our little taste of the Rock Hall was just enough to make us want to go make a day of it sometime in the future.

Bob Burnquist, Rune Glifberg, and Andy Mac watch one of the lower-ranking skaters (Sandro Diaz?) pull off a tailgrab. (c) Pat Wright, Gravity GamesAround 4:00, we headed out and tried to find a spot in the bleachers by the vert ramp. It took some patience, and several seat relocations, but we ended up on the top row of bleachers, right by the WKYC Channel 3 sign. (So, if you happen to watch the Gravity Games on some Sunday afternoon in the next two months, and watch the Men’s Skateboard Vert Finals, look for us.) We ended up watching the Women’s Skateboard Vert Practice and Demo, so we could have our good seats for the Men’s Finals later that evening. I spent one roll of film on the Vert ramp, so we’ll see how that comes out.

It was great being able to see some of the skaters live: Bob Burnquist, Andy MacDonald, Bucky Lasek, Pierre-Luc Gagnon, Rune Glifberg… Too bad there was no Tony Hawk, but I guess you’ll have that when you retire. *shrug*
We headed out around 9:15pm — after the Finals were over, but before the scores were announced. Made it to the car, found I-90 West, and stopped for dinner at a TGIFridays in Westlake on our way home. Got home around 12:30am or so, which is early for coming in from an out-of-town excursion. Usually it’s 3am. 🙂

So, good weekend. Yeah. And Aaron’s got the next four weeks off of work, so he’ll be home when I get home from work every day. w00t! That makes things a little better, too.

weight loss

My Weight-Loss Plan… For Real This Time

All right, guys. I’m going to proclaim my goals out loud (so to speak) and unashamedly, so that I cannot renounce my plans.

I am fat. More than fat, I am obese. I can’t seem to locate the entry where I discussed how I’m not-quite-morbidly obese and linked to the scary Flash BMI calculator (Beth? Do you remember?), but we’ve gone over the fact several times in the months before the wedding. I am still the same weight I was in November… which could be good or bad. I choose to be grateful that I haven’t gained any more weight. I maintain that there is some validity to the concept of a weight setpoint, since I seem to have stabilized around a given weight.

Oh, hell. I’m not going to dance around it anymore. I weigh 250lbs. *collective gasp*

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am 70 pounds overweight by the most conservative estimate. Being my ideal weight (my personal ideal weight, not what "they" say) would put me back in middle school — though I’m now about three inches taller than I was then. (Yeah, I hit my growth spurt in sixth grade. Oh, the horror…)

So, you say, whatcha gonna do about it? Well, I’m glad you asked.

First, I’m going to create a little spot for current weight info in my sidebar on the main page. That way, everyone can cheer me on (*nudge, nudge*). I’ll include my current weight (embarrassing though it may be), BMI (body mass index), and body fat percentage, and indicators as to whether each is rising or falling.

Next, I’m going to set goals. Actually, let’s do that right now. *scribbles math problems on scrap paper* OK, let’s assume I can lose one pound a week. That’s fair and relatively simple, right? Right. So, that would put me at my ideal weight on New Year’s Eve 2005. Not this coming New Year’s, but the following. (Good God, that’s a long time.)

But I need short-term goals, too, so let’s figure I’ll aim for ten pounds in ten weeks? That means I’m shooting for 240 by… oh, let’s say October 1st. Certainly I can do that… right?

— There. I just wrote it on my calendar. Hang on, do I need a five-pound mark? Oh, OK… *writing on calendar again* There. The end of September.

…Oh, yeah. Don’t I need a diet and exercise plan now? D’oh!

Actually, I have several books on the subject (yes, yes, Aaron and I have the Atkins Diet book…), but my favorite is The 200 Calorie Solution. No, it’s not a super-starvation diet. 🙂 It tells all about thermogenesis, which is the body’s burning of calories after a meal, and explains how to get the most out of your exercise by walking or doing other exercise within an hour after a meal. The idea is that if you can boost your metabolism just a little, that will be enough to raise your basal metabolic rate so you continue to burn calories at a higher rate. The process expounds upon itself, and eventually your body actually becomes an efficient fat-burner. Theoretically. I like this program because it strokes my food-ego; I don’t think I eat more than your average person, nor do I eat worse food. I do eat too many starches, though, and I’ll admit to being a pastaholic. I’ll give you that. Overall, though, I think I’m just too sedentary. (Case in point: I’m sitting here blogging while I should be out practicing what I’m preaching.)

Another favorite book of mine is The Setpoint Diet. It’s more dietary than exercise-based, but it’s portion control rather than calorie-counting. It also includes an exercise factor, though, as should any good weight-loss program. The hook to this diet is the groupings of foods into the stardard food groups, plus an "A list," a "B list," and "freebies." The concept is that complete elimination of any food group (ahem, Atkins Diet) is unhealthy for the body itself and a dieter is less likely to remain on a diet which completely removes a given food or group of foods. Eventually you’ll go off the diet, or just cheat, and the weight will come back. (Yes, I know there is a throng of Atkins supporters out there… I side with the anti-Atkins bunch, even though I haven’t tried the diet myself. Call me a skeptic, call me hypocritical, call me stupid, but I still say it’s just not sound.) Anyway, on this diet, you’re allowed to have, say, a couple beers or a piece of cake or some real mayo. Just not a whole lot of it, and not all the time.

The reason it’s called the Setpoint Diet is because the author is one of the believers of setpoint theory, which says that your body tries to stabilize itself at a given weight, just like it does with temperature (with shivering and sweating). If you kick-start your metabolism with exercise, and reach the lower setpoint without your body thinking it’s starving, your body will attempt to stabilize at the new, lower setpoint. Setpoint theory has also been supported with underweight people who try to gain weight, fyi. (I’ll look up some references later, for the skeptical.)

So, yeah. My first obstacles are a.) walking for 30 continuous minutes a day, and b.) eating breakfast. Speaking of, I should go for a walk now.

Anybody need a diet buddy? Come on, I know you’re out there…

wedding, weight loss

T-minus Two Months…

Yep… I’ll be Mrs. Schnuth in about 60 days. Kinda scary in a cool kind of way.

I guess I should keep all the girls who read this updated on the wedding planning thing. Oh, yeah, and maybe Dan and Eric will be moderately interested, too. 🙂

Well, Sheryl has been kind enough to act as a surrogate bridesmaid while I’ve been getting my dress altered, traipsing 20 minutes north to Rossford on Tuesday, then on Saturday, then again a couple weeks from now. She’s also helped me find some appropriate undergarments, since the neat thingy I bought online totally peeks out of the back and armpits of my dress. Gah. Anyway, I’m sure she’s seen more of my pale flesh than she ever bargained for.

I was totally lucky to get as nice of a dress as I did for only $99 on eBay. (The auction’s expired now, but once the wedding’s done and Aaron’s seen the dress, I’ll post up the auction page that I saved.) I’m not used to wearing form-fitting apparel, so the dress actually makes me feel thinner, I think.

Speaking of… Now that I’ve been on a weight-loss kick (sort of) for four or five months, making a graph of my weight as I go, I can really tell when I gain my monthly few pounds. My graph makes a pretty picture like waves now. 🙂 I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that I’ll look like I do now at the wedding. I won’t look like I did during drumcorps, and I won’t look like I did even five years ago. (Would you believe I put on 50 pounds between 1997 and the year 2000? Seriously. That’s amazing to me. What’s even more amazing is how much longer than that it’ll take to get that weight back off…)

This week’s goal is to take two walks daily, preferably after meals. Should be a good week for it, except for Sunday, when snow flurries may rear their ugly heads.

Man, my writing is all over the place today. I can’t seem to concentrate on one topic long enough to get a good thing going. Bah. Maybe I should go watch the news… although I know what’ll be on.