weight loss 1 Comment

Averages

Isn’t that the nicest little chart you ever did see? It’s my average weekly weight, as calculated by my DietOrganizer program. I only just discovered that particular chart today, and boy, does it make me feel good about myself. 🙂

I’ve also been using the “Google 15” widget for my personalized Google homepage, which does a very similar thing by charting both your daily weight and your running average.

(I really only use the personalized Google homepage so I can see the headers of my Gmail at work, since accessing webmail is not only near-impossible with the web-browsing countermeasures they’ve installed, but is also an offense punishable by termination.)

At any rate, it does my heart good to see those numbers going in the right direction. It makes for less drama when I get on the scale every morning (o noes! i gained a pound overnight!).

In other news, my gut seems to be deflating. My upper abs not so much, but my lower ab fat is definitely shrinking like an old balloon. Maybe this Saturday’s bimonthly weight-loss photos will make me a happy camper.

P.S. – It’s interesting to me how difficult it is to share someone else’s weight-loss joy when you’re kind of in a rut yourself. For me, anyway. When James at work is all excited about losing weight, but I’m holding steady, it’s hard for me to give an enthusiastic attaboy. Likewise, when I showed him this chart today, he seemed happy for me, but seemed to remain bummed that he’d gained over the Black Swamp Arts Festival weekend, what with the fair food and friends in town and all. I can also tell it’s kind of awkward for Aaron to be excited for me when he’s not losing as fast as he’d like.

It’s kind of the negative side of having diet buddies, I guess. When neither side is very competitive about weight-loss, all bets are off.

P.P.S. – I took my bodyfat percentage and did some calculations yesterday, and figured that my current lean body weight is probably around 135 lbs. Interesting factoid. Assuming my muscle mass remains a constant, that means I need to lose about 6% bodyfat to reach my initial I’ll-be-content-here-for-a-while first goal of 190 lbs.

Getting down to my ultimate-ever goal of 160 would require me to be… *does calculations* …15.6% bodyfat. Hmm. Unlikely, but not impossible. Honestly, I can’t even imagine what I’d look like in that body.

randomness 2 Comments

I Give Up

I designed some stickers for Aaron’s podcast. They were adapted from the t-shirt design, which I also designed (with some editorial help from Garza).

The stickers were to be 4.25″ x 2.75″ big. The printer’s online instructions said to submit files at 300dpi. Since I’d resized the design from a larger t-shirt design, I opted to ignore their suggestion and submit the design at 1200dpi instead. This saved me from having to rework the entire design and optimize it for a smaller print size.

The stickers came in this week. All the fine detail is lost. The fantastic black background blends into the mascot’s hair and skirt, because my hairline divider stroke failed to print properly. The katakana surrounding the mascot is illegible. All because I can’t follow directions.

I spent two hours tonight reworking the design from scratch, which was harder than I’d expected. I created a layer of halftone dots (a la newspaper photographs) for shading, then went through the painstaking detail work of cleaning up said halftone dots around the edges of the drawing with the eraser tool. Only when I went to throw in the fantastic black background did I realize that I should have been painting in white instead of erasing. The mascot’s cute mug became akin to some sort of monster movie villain, being that half of it was suddenly filled in with black.

I wanted to have this done tonight. I wanted to tell Aaron I’m sorry, and that the next batch of stickers are on me, and here’s the new design. Instead, I’m going to bed without making my lunch. Again.

Excuse me while I go have a nice cry, then beat myself about the head until I fall asleep.

randomness

Life Is What Happens…

Original plans for the evening: 1.) Eat dinner. 2.) Go to Toledo Area Genealogical Society meeting. 3.) Edit and post podcast.

Revised chronology for the evening: 1.) Eat dinner. 2.) Go to two-and-a-half hour Toledo Area Genealogical Society meeting. 3.) Talk to Mom on the phone for half an hour.

Don’t think the podcast is getting edited and posted tonight. Good thing I put tomorrow’s date on it when I recorded it this weekend.

weight loss 1 Comment

Diet & Fitness Update, Week Ending 9/9/06

Good news! I finally broke through my two-week plateau at 206.5 and 206lbs respectively, and have managed to stay below 205 for the last five days or so. My official week-end weight is 203.5, although I weighed in this morning back at 204. I’m fairly confident that I’ll stay below 205 now. w00t!

My major dip in weight happened the day after my resistance-training PUSH workout, and stayed there despite pizza and cheesecake on Friday, and two Pollyeyes stuffed breadsticks on Saturday. You would think that a weight dip after exercise would incite me to exercise more often… but no. I ended up not following up with my kickboxing cardio.

Even so, I still plan to order some clothes for myself this week. Maybe I’ll even treat myself to a trip to Levis Commons and take a turn around Lane Bryant.

This week, I plan to *really* do two days of exercise. One day of strength training, one day of cardio. I know, it’s way less than the nice PUSH people want me to do, but I’m easing myself back into it. Making habits. Losing the weight slowly, so I’ll keep it off.

As much as I’d like to hit my goal weight by Thanksgiving, the statistics are against me. Overall, I’m averaging a loss of just under one pound a week, although my consistency has improved over time. If I were to stick with this program, with these results, I’d hit my goal of 190 just before Christmas. I’m not giving up, though. We’ll see how it turns out.