Strange Balance to the Day

Today started as well as can be expected after a very late night. Of course, no beer makes it much easier. Ate pretty well early in the day including fruit, veggies and a chicken breast (plain, no bun) from Chick-Fil-A. Dinner on the other hand was not quite the same. We tried a new Chinese restaurant and it turned out to be a buffet that included sushi, Chinese and the like. Turns out, my estimate for dinner was just under 1200 calories.

So, crazy amount of food – way too much hidden sodium (wow). Carb specifics is something that I need to get more familiar with. Even without a ton of knowledge, nearly 220 is insane. Well, the lesson is very clear: don’t eat at a buffet for a while. A corollary, don’t let the price of the meal influence what you eat. Not rocket science, but when you map it out like this, the lesson seems very straight forward.

On the plus side, I did a fair amount of activity (not exercise per say) including 90m of yard work (lugging and spreading dirt/mulch) along with the readings from my fitbit which say I took 10090 steps today. That is pretty good – will need to watch pretty closely to ensure the reading is accurate. Tomorrow is back to the grindstone and I am very curious to see the step count at the end of the day. Also, my schedule will be returning back to normal with the resumption of work so meals will be at more normal times and sleep will return to human from the vampire hours I’ve been keeping.

I am going to try the sleep mode setting of the fitbit as well tonight.

A few days in…

Things are going well. Calorie intake is less than calorie burn. Continuing to track what I eat and drink. Exercising today consisted of yard work and swimming. Had a 4th of July get-together and stuck to my water and a few munchies.

I’ve been talking and thinking about some of the programs that are out there that provide food and plans to lose weight. These can have some really positive results, but where I am right now, I feel confident with my plan. There is a certain amount of learning that needs to come out of this, especially on the nutrition side. I’m not sure that the programs provide enough – or at least early enough. Time will tell if this will work for me. If not, those certainly become a very real option.

I decided to add the fitbit to my program. This is billed as a “wireless personal trainer”. It is a simple little device that you clip onto yourself and it uses an accelerometer to determine how many steps you take (to determine your activity level). It also has a sleep mode to see how well and how long you sleep. There is a companion website where the data gets uploaded and allows you to track food consumption and other exercise. This will be an interesting element to the exercise aspect of the plan. Its primary focus is on the 10,000 steps a day philosophy. More data coming soon.

In the beginning

Its been about 20 years since I’ve really done more than think about my health. There was a brief period a decade ago, when I had to get in a bit of shape in order to go on an extended hiking trip. The effort that went into preparing for that trip was just enough to get me through. It was an amazing adventure that occurred exactly 10 years ago, but I have not done anything since. Well, I recently took a small holiday to Colorado (main purpose was a cousins wedding) and had two revelations. The first is that I need to get back into the country. We spent a day in Rocky Mountain National Park. We drove to the top (Lookout Road) and made several stops to take photos and do mini-hikes. It was quite fantastic! I certainly pushed the normal boundaries of the day trails, but realized that in order to do real hiking I would need to put serious effort into my health. The second realization (or part two of the 1-2 punch) was some photos of the wedding. We had many photos takes, but one that stands out in my mind was of all the cousins. As I looked at the photo, I appeared to be about twice as wide as any of the rest. Not a complete surprise, but one of those clarity moments.

With that as the backdrop, I decided to get serious about my health. I decided to make the context of my efforts around a specific goal. Rather than a goal of “getting healthy”, I thought about what I could do if I accomplished my health targets. And that is how I mapped out my approach. My goal is to “Get in Hiking Shape”. The image to the left is from a tool called Goalscape. It is a visual way to develop and track progress on goals. My thoughts on how to be successful revolve around three main areas. The first is to lose weight. This means exercising – burning calories that have been saved up over the years. I will start with walking, swimming and stretching properly. This will help get me back into shape to consider additional types of exercise. The second area is all about eating properly. There is education that needs to occur as well as changing my eating habits. What, when and how much. I will be tracking my activity in order to see what I am really eating as well as a way to ensure I stay focused. For any that employ GTD, you know a huge part of success is psychological. Getting your head right with what you are attempting to do – the tracking and journaling will be a part of that for me. The third area will be focusing on endurance. This is really geared towards the main “Get in Hiking Shape” goal. I have not put a lot of thought into what I will do there as I need to get the first two in real control before I go too deeply.

So that is my overview. The “why” of this website. I will be adding additional detail on my overall health, shape and progress. As I mentioned above, this is really a place to park my thoughts, challenges, wins and progress. You may be wondering about the title of the blog – 17 Stones. Well, three days into this, after developing the goal, doing some research and really understanding what is ahead, I was looking for some World Cup Football and stumbled on the BBC show “You Are What You Eat”. Not sure I would have stopped before to watch this, but I did and they started talking about the weight of one of the people. The interesting thing was they measured it in stones. While I’ve heard of that as a measure, I can’t recall really hearing it used in everyday conversation – and I do watch a lot of BBC. Anyway, as I was doing laps today, it occurred to me to use that as the title of this blog and a reminder of where I started. I have done a few blogs before, all using BlogSpot. So after I dried off, I tried to create my site, 17 Stones, only to discover there was already a blog with that name. Dang! I toyed around with a few other names that were less compelling and decided to look out beyond BlogSpot. I have heard good things about WordPress and decided to give it a whirl – name not taken, blogging now happening! Now that that is settled, I took a look at the other 17 Stones blog to see what it was all about. No surprise, it is about another’s journey to lose weight. I will read what he has to say and likely create a link here to track his progress. No need to do this alone.

Thanks for reading, expect frequent updates and wish me well. I will do the same for you!

Note – the episode I watched was Season 1 Episode 4, “Jane and Holly Henwood”.