Progress

All posts tagged Progress

Wake Up Call (2011-08-08): I was pretty happy that when I got back from my sabbatical that I hadn’t gained a lot of weight despite all my eating, but then again I was walking everywhere. Well, since I’ve been back I haven’t been very good with my eating and I’m back to sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day. Plus I haven’t been very good with getting back into hitting the gym on a regular basis. I was planning on starting back on Paleo the beginning of this month, but didn’t quite get going last week and finally decided to do it this week. So after rolling out of bed this morning,  I stepped on a scale…

Weight: 201.8 lbs

I figured it would be bad, but wasn’t quite expecting to have tipped 200 again… but I did. Then again, looking back, that’s what I get for having pizza and ice cream while watching TV way to often over the past month. You’d think I would have figured it out by now, not to do this type of stuff… but I do.

Back At It…Again: Time to get back to getting in shape… again. Item #1 on the list is to fix my eating. I hit the store last night to pick up a few things to toss in a crockpot so I’ll have food ready when I get home. As I’ve said in the past, one of my big problems when I have no food ready to go I end up making very very bad food choices.

Every time I’ve done Paleo I’ve had good results. The problem is that I don’t stick with it for anytime extended time frame. Being summer, I’ll have lots of obstacles in the way to throw me off track, but I need make sure I minimize the damage and get back on track. I’ve done the “I’ll start back tomorrow”, and then the next “tomorrow” and the next, and etc way to many times. No more months or weeks off!!

Item #2 is to get back to the gym. I’ve been “doing” CrossFit for about 3 years now. I love it. I’ve made progress. But no-where near what I’ve seen other folks make in a fraction of that time. I say “doing” because I haven’t be been very consistent and I haven’t been very motivated/focused recently.

Lack of motivation is big issue for me recently, I just can not for the life of me seem to get or stay motivated any more. When I was doing SGX (photo), I managed to stay pretty well motivated and stuck to it for an entire year. No such luck with Crossfit & Paleo. At most I’ve managed to keep it up almost 2 months. I gotta figure out how to get past this…

Part of this is that I need to set some goals. I took a goal setting seminar at the gym a while back, but haven’t used any of it.  As of recent, I’ve just kinda been going through the motions of going to the gym without any end goal other than to goto the gym. While “going to the gym” sounds good, its not clear goal and without someway to measure any real progress, it easily dies off. To help give me some goals to work towards, I’m restarting my Suck List from my old blog. I need to take the time come up with both short and long term goal.

Now lets see if I can actually stick to any of this. Now lets get start and do this!

 

After a workout at the gym yesterday, it was off for the post-paleo dunk! And the hydrostatic results are…

2011-01-01 2011-02-15 Change
Weight 190.0 lbs 180.2 lbs -9.8 lbs
Bodyfat 21.6% 18.49% -3.11%
Fat 41.04 lbs 33.32 lbs -7.72 lbs
Lean 148.96 lbs 146.88 lbs -2.08 lbs

(View more photo progress here…)

I’m pretty happy with the results. The guy from FitnessWave said 3% change in BF was good. On the down side, I did lose some lean mass as well. I have to say that this time around I didn’t feel that I had quite as much energy as the last challenge. Not sure what all plays into that, but talking to the guy it might have been underfeeding. He said a lose of 2-3 lbs lean mass is a good indicator of that. So I guess I need to eat more ;-P In the past I did more snacking which I didn’t do this time around.

I am definitly planning on sticking with mainly paleo eating going forward (after a few indulgences ;-D ), as it definitely does seem to work well. But there are few things I will be adding back in now that the challenge is over… like a post-WOD protein shake.

Looking forward to hearing how other folks did at the post-paleo party at the gym this coming Friday!

As part of the Paleo Challenge, I got a hydrostatic body composition test tone from FitnessWave. Its nice to know that my home scale is WAY off, as the number was kinda frighting… granted I’m still not terribly thrilled with the more accurate results:

Home Scale 30.9%
Hydrostatic 21.7%

According to their recommended percentages, this puts me at the very upper end of the “average” for men. One of these days it would be awesome to get down to single digits, but for now I’ll be happy to drop down into the teens.

The ironick part of it is that I’m basically the same percentage as I was two years ago (21.4 on 02/20/2008), but my weight has gone up. Which means I’ve been adding lean mass, as well as adding to the spare tire unfortunately.