Spacegoat’s Portal

Good morning one and all.  It’s another weigh-in today.  I haven’t had one of those good weeks though so I don’t expect great results.  Over the last two weigh-ins I lost nearly 6lbs.  It’s time to pay the piper.  I could tell I wasn’t burning the fat the way I was the week before.  I’ve been going through basically the same motions but I just haven’t been able to keep my basal heart rate up.  But hey that’s alright.  I’ve been feeling great and I’m getting close to where I want to be, not just with the weight, but with my physical ability.  I can feel my ribs! I’m also starting to see some definition in my shoulders and arms. Yeah, I’m doing OK.

Alright so let’s get on with it.  Today I weighed in at 217.8lbs for a loss of 0.4lbs and a toal of 147.2lbs.  Hey, at least it was a loss.

This upcoming week is going to be a challenge because I am off all week.  That takes away the huge convenience the downtown Minneapolis Skyway offers for a daily mode of exercise.  I don’t mind walking in the cold too much, but we had a lot of snow followed by a day in the 40s where the snow started melting, followed by arctic temps.  So the sidewalks are mostly sheets of ice.  I suppose I could go to the gym for some cardio evey day.  I might even head downtown just to walk.  Even then I’m bound to be less active this week.

And then I’ve decided that for New Years Eve, it’s party time.  I don’t care what it is. I’ll eat it or drink it.  And of course I’ll pay the price next Sunday.  Well then, I’m done.  Enjoy your Sunday and see some of you soon.

Hey everyone.  I hope everyone had a nice Christmas.  I didn’t.  I listened to some Christmas tunes last night but they reminded me of all the good Christmases and how this was not one of them, and it started to make me sad.  I’ve been trying not to think about it since then.

Sorry to be heavy, but my mood has soured in the last couple of days because I found myself to be the victim of bank fraud.  Someone made a clone of my check card and rang up over $500 worth of purchases at a Walmart in Houston.  I found this out from Visa on Tuesday night when they called to verify that I authorized those purchases.  I canceled my card of course and then decided it would be best to have my two credit cards reissued as well.  And then I took whatever measures I could to cover my ass.  I called the credit bureaus to put a fraud alert on my identity, and filed a police report.

I was told that it may take up to ten business days for them to investigate it and credit my account.  They didn’t clean me out fortunately, but it will be kind of hard on my budget not to mention the fact that I can’t use any of my plastic anywhere soon.  So I got some cash out yesterday. Hopefully it enough to get me to pay day next week, because I’m not expecting this to be resolved before then.

This really sucks.  I’m not sure what happened.  I still have the card.  My guess is that the number was stolen was stolen out of the locker at the gym that day.  I probably should have known better.  The lockers are kind of like bus station lockers with the keys in the lock.  You just lock your stuff up and take the key with you.  Of course anyone who could get in the locker room could take the key when the locker is vacant and make a copy.  That’s the best explanation I can come up with but it may have been stolen months ago and just used then for all I know.

So you can see I’m not very happy right now.  I just hope this is the end of it.  I’ve heard about the nightmares people have gone through.  Hopefully they just got my check card information and haven’t bought a house in my name or something.

I did do one thing yesterday that lifted my mood a little.  I got me a new pair of jeans!  They are size 38 and fit great.  I’m kind of surpised that I’m down to that size already.  I figured I’d end up there when I’m done, but I have 20 more pounds to go.

Today has been really boring.  I played vids when I woke up, barely managed to drag myself to the gym for a workout, and got a little housework done.  Now I think I will end the day the way I started it.  I’ll write at you Sunday.

Mele Kalikimaka!

Good morning.  It’s a miserable morning here in the frozen north.  I went to the gym first thing this morning at about 7.  It was -12 with a fresh 6 inches of snow on the ground.  It’s a 6 block walk so I had to bundle up real good.  *sigh* The things I will do for a good weigh-in!  It was worth it.

Today I weighed in at 218.2lbs for a loss of 2.6lbs and a total of 146.8lbs so far.  That’s a good loss two weeks in a row.  It doesn’t quite get me on track after the November I had, but I’m getting closer.

I’ve changed things up a little bit with my diet.  Last weekend I read about the BFFM plan.  That’s Burn The Fat Feed the Muscle.  It’s a nutrition/exercise plan that focuses on using food to raise your metabolism and promote muscle gain.  I won’t get into the theory, but I need to track my macro nutrients.  You know, calories from carbs proteins and fats.  Weight Watchers is a little to simple to track that sort of thing so I started using another meal tracking system. There are a few free ones out there and I tried a lot of them, but I’m most satisfied with The Daily Plate.  Their wiki style food database is huge, wich makes it a lot easier since you need to get all the nuttrition information, not just calories.

Once I started tracking my meals in greater detail I realised just how many calories I have been cutting out of my diet.  I’ve been consistently under 1,500 calories a day.  That not even including the calories burned from exercise.  subtrackting those calories, I’ve had days under 1,000 calories.  For a guy my height and weight, they say I should be around 3,000 calories a day, so that’s quite the deficit.  But that’s not good.  I should cut no more than 1,000 calories a day out of my diet.  And the more calories cut that come from exercise the better.  That may very well be the cause of my plateau.  I started failing to see weight loss around when I started exercising at the gym.  I have increased my calories burned without increasing my intake and created too big of a deficit.  My metabolism kind of crashed and my heart rate dropped and I probably processed food less efficiently too.

So as much as it seems wrong to me, I upped my calorie intake.  It seems to be working so far.  I mean the scale doesn’t lie, and my heart rate has increased.  I still need to work on it though.  2.6lbs is too much for a week.  A pound of that is probably lost muscle.  The problem is how many calories do I take off from exercising?  I can get a pretty precise count based on the food I eat, but the calories I burn in a workout is a guess.  So I don’t want to cut it too close or I’ll lose out on any sort of benefit.

Alright I’m off to play video games.  That ought to burn a few calories.  It’s OK though, it’s too cold to go outside and I already did my workout.  Besides I can always do the housework later right?