hmmm I’m thinking Amberite or Bkitty might be bigger into writing their stuff down
anyone else have some advice for galaxy?
I switched from music to audio books for workouts about 2 years ago. It’s serving me well–keeps my interest even better than music because it’s new, helps me do more pleasure “reading” than I’d otherwise have time for, and lets me pay more attention to my body as I put it through its paces, as opposed to simply ramping my speed up and down with the tempo.
I just listened to The City and The City–definitely recommend that as a good one for workouts.
I track everything–what I eat and what my workouts entail. It helps me stay on track with eating healthfully through accountability that I have to look at. Tracking everything also helps me make better resource trade off decisions when I, for example, have a lady-business-fueled Nutella craving that simply cannot be denied. Also, since I have records of both foods and exercise, I can better analyze patterns and relationships.
I think BKitty recommended a good website for all that a few pages back in this thread.
see I love listening to audiobooks but thats when I’m laying around or doing light work around the house
when I’m running I tend to let my mind drift and phase out, I don’t think it would work out well, I once tried listening to podcasts while running but couldn’t concentrate
but everyone’s different I guess
I have an online journal at livejournal.com that I keep private where I track everything I eat. I have the ability to be online at work at my main job, tho, so portability isn’t an problem for me.
Ya know, I just thought about it. You’re in the ATL, right? My sis is a temporary transplant down there (til July or August) and training for a marathon. If you want a running buddy once the weather warms up, let me know.
I track everything and for me, the diet is the ‘easier’ part as I tend to know what cals are in the food I eat so its easier to have a running tally throughout the day. I use foodfocus which is more of a UK food tracking site. You have fitday which I beleive is more US food based.
As for exercise and weight, I find that I just use an excel spreadsheet (I’ll find a way of posting it up). That way it’s easier to see the trends instead of just guessing. I also weigh my food for more accurate record keeping.
I also find that I tend to eat better when I’ve gone gym or swimming as I think why should I waste the exercise I’ve just done by eatting a doughnut.
I personally think I need to eat more to lose weight but I have to tweak. Darth - how much cals do you eat per day?
Gak! Sorry for 3 posts in a row, but I forgot to do my weekly check in. From last Monday to today, I netted a loss of exactly 0. But honestly, I’m fine with that. The amount of chocolate and salty snacks I hormonally consumed this weekend :rolleyes: should have done more damage than that. Sometimes I really LOVE being a woman.
You can calculate your BMR (base metabolic rate) which is the number of calories your body uses to maintain itself daily if you have no activity here and then there are other links there to calculate your daily calorie needs based on activity level, and how to manipulate that to gain/lose weight.
I’m a big fan of mynetdiary.com. They offer both iPhone/Android apps plus a good web interface with all data in the cloud, so you can pretty much put your data in wherever you like. It also offers some basic ability to calc BMR and track exercise burn as well, though I use the Bodybugg for that.
Bonus: MND offers optional sharing of data with friends so your and your buddies can look out for each other. Pretty neat. 
This is what I’ve calculated as well as using a cycling method of calorie management.
BMR 2463
Overall Daily Caloric Burn 2710
Deficit 1 Deficit 2
Day 1 2439 2303
Day 2 2032 1897
Day 3 1897 1761
Day 4 1626 1490
Day 5 1355 1219
Day 6 2710 2710
Day 7 2439 2303
Day 8 2032 1897
Day 9 1897 1761
Day 10 1626 1490
Day 11 1355 1219
The deficit one figures is if I want to do it at a moderate level while deficit 2 is if I want to be aggressive with the weight loss.
It would be ace to use a bodybugg - Don’t think they do a UK version. What’s your thoughts on it chuck and has it allowed you to fine tune your regime. Has it helped?
A few years ago, I lost about 50 lbs, but plateaued there and have since gained it all back now and am at around 300 lbs. I hope to get down to 200 and stay there, but just getting started back up is a bit difficult.
I’m trying to get back in the swing of things, but trying to figure out where to start is a bit intimidating. Here are some of the things I want to do, but I think it’ll be tough to just start on all of them at once.
- Get back to exercising 30 minutes, 3-5 days a week. When I was doing this before,
- Only eat out 1 time a week (including cafeteria at work)
- Cut back on snacking
- Only drink soft drinks when traveling or eating out
re: Bodybugg
It’s definitely helped. When I first started working out, we didn’t worry that much about calculating burn because I was operating at such a high deficit that it didn’t make that much difference. We knew I was running around 1,250 negative because I was losing around 2.5 lbs/week, but it probably varied a bit from day to day. With the measurements/weight changing appropriately there wasn’t a big need for careful calculation.
But when I started to get close to my target weight (i.e. when I started to pass under 215 or so on my way to 190) it got harder. At the lowest point I was eating around 1,500 calories/day, which we’d already upped to 1,800. To slow the loss we upped to 2,000, then 2,500, then 3,000, but I kept losing weight. Around that time I completed the 24Hr 6-month “new member program.” Because I’d been keeping my 5-day/week workout program (and did some other little things they listed) I maxed out the points and got a free Bodybugg. We configured it and quickly discovered that I was burning between 3,000 and 4,000 calories/day. Apparently at some point in the process of going from 29% body fat to 17% I turned the corner in terms of metabolism. So we increased my diet. I bottomed out at 180 lbs before it all caught up.
Since I’ve had the Bodybugg I’ve aimed to eat 250 calories over what I burn. Some days I’m over or under a little, but by tracking my intake closely (with MND) and watching the display I can exert a lot more control over my daily intake. We’ve been tweaking a lot since then, like adjusting when I eat (first removing some of the late-night eating, then eventually trying to stay around 250 up throughout the day as much as possible).
Without the Bodybugg it’d be a lot tougher to ride the line so close. I download the Bodybugg and MND data every two weeks and compile it into a report (showing intake/burn, nutritional content, workout specifics) which I take with me to my training sessions.
Short version: I like the Bodybugg a lot. It’s super-helpful if you’re trying to run tight numbers (like when adding muscle), but I imagine it’d help with losing weight as well. Food logging and accurate calorie burn information take the mystery out, which exposes the real difficult part: lifestyle change. Sure, nothing’s 100% accurate, but it’s really close – close enough that you know how things’ll work out each week. It’s motivating. I vary as much as 1,000 calories in a day. For example, on Feb 2 when we were snowed in, I laid around the house all day and burned 2,684 calories. On Jan 22 when I was out and around all day and did a 1.5 hour workout, I burned 4,110. Just walking around some vs. sitting all day can add up to hundreds of calories.
re: Logging food
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t believe I was fat because I was just lazy. I had (have) lots of personal problems that translated (can translate) into food problems. Thankfully Audra talked me into trying the gym right around the time I was ready to give up. (Ask me sometime in person and I’ll tell you how she did it.) So “giving up” for me turned into exercise. I couldn’t deal with all the shit, so I just gave in to what the trainer put on my workout sheets. I got up, tried to work, then went to the gym and mindlessly did what was on the sheet. It sounds all motivated, but in reality it was just my version of giving up.
Of course, doing what the trainer recommends makes results. Eventually I started feeling crappy at the gym 'cause I was still eating badly, so I changed what I ate a little bit to feel better working out. Eventually I started to feel like maybe I should pay more attention to what I eat because I didn’t want to waste my work at the gym. Then finally – with lots of help from Audra and my trainer – I made the jump to logging food.
That was a big discovery point for me. At first I just realized how badly I was eating. FWIW, I think this is the hardest part of the whole process – being faced with the problem head-on. Realizing that I knew NOTHING about nutrition, and I don’t mean nutritionist-level knowledge. I mean simple feed-yourself-without-killing-yourself knowledge.
I honestly believe that if I hadn’t been so depressed anyway that I was pretty much shut down, I’d have freaked out at that point. Incredibly, my resignation worked for me and pushed me through. I stopped eating out a lot because a) I couldn’t afford it anyway and b) I couldn’t tell what they were doing to my food so I couldn’t log it. I know how to cook, so I started adjusting recipes to remove things that I couldn’t possible eat all the time. I started weighing what mattered to me. Sure, I love heavy cream and real mayo, but I don’t love them enough to die for them. And I didn’t want to eat thimbles full of food – which doesn’t work anyway because the carb/protein/fat balance is off. So I ditched 'em and shot for a basic 20/60/20 (fat/carb/protein) diet with the number of calories the trainer recommended.
I recommend logging because it’s pretty much a necessity to get the addiction under control and to learn what you need to know to take care of your body. We’re bombarded from all angles with the myth that we can eat without conscience and be fit. It’s bullshit. To be fit, we have to be in control of what we eat and how we exercise. And to do that means facing it.
I don’t, however, recommend doing it alone. If you don’t freak out when you see the real numbers – assuming your “freaking out” doesn’t end up taking the form of cheating, mis-logging, or otherwise obscuring the real results – you’re either an alien or in as bad a shape as I was. Either way, I had Audra and a first class trainer to help me through it. You probably need help too. Don’t feel bad about it. Get it. Here or elsewhere.
Anyway, sorry if I’m oversharing. It was a really crappy year for me, but I feel like a different person. Now I’m working on facing down the problems that got me there in the first place, and in the meantime I’m still working out five days a week.
Honestly I’ve never really gotten around to calculating calories to the dot, I see how many calories everything has and kind of ballpark it but my own personal guess would be I eat between 1800 to 2000 per day?
I think I end up burning more though because I’ve been doing so much exercise, and to top it off I lift a lot of heavy stuff at work all day so that’s just icing on the cake so to speak
now if I got one of those body bug things I imagine I would start, but until I hit a plateau and can’t break it by stepping up the exercise even more I might start
The one I use the most is Lose It! on my itouch and desktop. The interface is really easy and I’ve been very good about keeping up with it.
Like Chuck’s, Lose it is cloud based and easy to update. you can also do a friend network there.
I keep wanting to use mynetdiary, but I got so used to loseit, it’s hard to change- lol!
Audra also turned me on to the Livestrong.com website for tracking food calories and finding out what I can’t figure.
Bootcamp again, tonight- eek! lol!
Heya Gang,
I turn my back for one minute and I have two pages of posts to catch up on
Chuck - Awesome post dude, and definitely not oversharing. I think your story probably rings true for a lot of us, myself included.
Starsaber - great list dude and we’re all here for you! Any of them are a good place to start. For me, packing lunches and not eating out was huge, and then not grabbing Starbucks baked food for breakfast everyday (~500 calories in a scone it turns out) and instead having a protein shake and an apple (aprox ~180 cal, with no fat and minimal carbs).
re: Tracking food. I’m a big LoseIt (iPhone) fan. I’ve also used Excel to make meal plans and fine tune things. Bkitty mentioned Livestrong.com as well, and I’m a huge fan of that site, as their food database is massive, and I could manually enter items into LoseIt that weren’t in its database.
For tracking workouts, I’ve tried Muscle & Fitness’ app, but it’s hard to beat iFitness or notebooks. I’ve alternated between the two, and tend to transcribe the notebook into into Excel.
I thrive on routine now and know the calories of most things I eat, and most of the exercises I do. I will switch up certain lifts, calisthenics (yaay for bkitty’s burpee challenge!) or cardio (Darth’s treadmill inspriation!), but each week follows pretty much the same routine.
Mon: Cardio + core (abs/lower back/obliques) + biceps/triceps
Tues: Cardio + lats/delts/traps & bit more obliques
Wed: Cardio + core + chest + insane pushup day
Thrus: Cardio (treadmill) + legs & bit more obliques
Fri: Cardio (spin-class style) + burpee day + circuit
Yesterday was a bit of an anniversary for me. Feb 8 2010 I made a commitment to get in shape for a bunch of reasons. I wrote my weight (270lbs) on the white board in my office and invited the guys next to me in to see it. I also wrote down 230 as my goal. I hit that and set 200 as my goal. Then 185. I hit 175 then added some more muscle and stabilized at 185 in the summer of 2010 and have kept it there since. BF % was 8.8% yesterday
The workouts are now the easy part. The hard part is always trying to eat right, esp sitting down to game on weekends. This thread has played a big part in helping keep me motivated, adding variety, and ultimately changing a diet into a healthy lifestyle. Thanks everyone.
Wow, lots of feedback, this is great! Thanks for sharing everyone, and definitely not too much sharing from anyone.
So it looks like I’ll be checking out the apps for the iPhone to track everything (I just got my iPhone in the mail today for Verizon woot!) or trying the excel way. I feel like something portable will work better for me as I would otherwise forget a lot of stuff regularly. I’m hoping that tracking everything will keep me working out regularly!
My story is as follows:
My inital serious entry into fitness was when I was 28/29 years old, I had always had a goal of not entering my 30s really overweight.
My ‘rock bottom’ moment was that I always said that I did not want to go over 20 stone (280lbs) as I have the thing that if I let it slide, then it would be majorly harder to come back down. That and 20 stone is when I start to feel the effects of being larger.
My other primary reason for losing the weight was that I suffered/suffer from having gynocomastia or in laymans terms (man boobs - with actual tissue not just fat).
It got to the point where I was uncomfortable with it in terms of physical appearance and just my social attitude. So I initiated the appointments to get me assessed, which I did do and part of it was to lose weight. I managed to get from 20 stone (280lbs) to about 15 stone 8lbs (218lbs) in about a year and a half. The surgeon was impressed as he had to actually change his surgery method due to the muscle gain/fat loss.
The training that I did back then was mainly heavy weight work (in hindsight, I never had one definitive program, I just did dead lifts, pull-ups, bench press, military presses, squats, etc). I tended to train 4 days a week, cardio consisted of capoeira and training all of its associated training (free standing handstands (which really builds up your core and shoulders), cartwheels, bridges, queda de rins (imagine putting your weight on your hands and elbows which is pivoted by your kidneys/side – its easier if you Google).
I did this for about a year or so, and then my wife got pregnant. This is when life got in the way. So over a year and a half, I went from the lowest I’ve ever been back to my OMG weight. Now that I have an appointment with the doctor again (to fix the loose skin on the pecs), I have to make sure that I’m dialling in my diet and training.
It’s actually taken me less time to get down in weight this time, but I think the major difference between then and now is that my diet is ALOT better and not so restrictive. I have a much better relationship with the food and it’s easier to track things now that I use a spreadsheet and have clear goals.
I would say that my weakness is the training, its a case of I’m ok when I get there but its the going in the first place. Also I tend to over analyse the program wondering if it is any good.
The gym I go to is more machine/cardio based so my free weight options are limited, so I think I have to do things the harder way (overhead squats instead of normal, single leg deadlifts instead of regular and so on).
It would be nice to get to the 12/13 stone mark, and I know that I’m going to have to step up with the weight program if I want major body recomp to happen.
I have to say Chuck that you are an inspiration to others, so keep it up. In fact all of you are :).
I’ve made a bet with myself that for halloween, I’m going to dress up as a superhero (or even riddick) with my new physique :).
I also think I should get back into doing Capoeira conditioning exercises as it does build your body quickly.
It feels good to fit into clothes that I could not fit into before, it feels good not to have to go to the back of the rack in stores, it feels good to go into stores and they actually have your size (although I notice that when I wanted 44" pants, they did not have it, now I want a different size, they all seem to run out!).
I also feel powerful in things that I do.
Bkitty - Burpees are the devils work…Just saying!
This is what I looked like before
http://http://i439.photobucket.com/albums/qq113/decosta1228/IMG_4580.jpg
My tracking data for my weight loss (sorry if its a bit small)
lol!
I absolutely agree that Burpees suck donkey balls, but I can’t deny the results, or the fact that I’m keeping up with the class better!
Last night was Cardio Wednesday, and it was non-stop for the hour. And yes, there were burpees. ecch!
Here’s another that blows- Bosu Ball Squats. Not easy.
I prefer this as I have a bad ankle:
this is the one from last night, that I did an alt for:
I am working on crossing over to full push-up position from knees. It’s taken a long time to get to this point, but I believe the 21 day thing is what upped my conditioning to be able to cross over. I remember doing planks on my knees and that was a triumphant bridge to cross, too!
still working on fully extended side planks!
What an inspiration this thread is!
Thank you all!
This is quickly becoming one of my favourite threads on any forum I visit.
I was about to come up with excuses to bail on my third workout this week (it has definitely been an off week…) but of course, some honest and insightful posts from you folks has given me that extra push to hit the gym in a few minutes.
So, thank you.
Gradual but sure tightening in calves and lower back reveals that treadmill involves a lot more than just walking.
Anyone into workout videos? I’ve been doing the Mrs.'s Turbo Fire 15-minute interval workout. Turbo Fire set is for real.