Posts Tagged ‘300 pounds’

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Weekly Weigh-In #44: Live Life Today!

August 28th, 2010

Okay, so this post is going to seem a bit all over the place, but it really all comes down to the same premise, so I’ll do my best to tie it all together.  First of all, today was my 44th weekly weigh in, and I came in at 235.2 pounds!!!  That’s a 2.9 pound loss from last week, and I’ve now lost 72.8 pounds total from my starting weight of 308 pounds on October 30th of last year.  Yay.  Woo-hoo.  Go me.  Now down to business.

Not that I’m minimizing my loss this week, but here’s the deal: I know how to lose weight.  I’ve been doing it consistently for nearly a year now.  This journey is about weight loss.  But it’s also about getting healthy and fit.  And exercise is a big part of that; it’s not all about nutrition.  While I was studying for the bar exam, I also ended up experiencing a layoff.  That’s something I haven’t yet talked about on this blog, but there you have it.  It’s pretty common, unfortunately, in this economy, and between that and trying to get on track for the bar exam, I completely lost my exercise mojo.  I’d get in a stray run every now and then – maybe once a week at most – but nothing consistent.  My awesome trainer and nutritionist started encouraging me after the bar to just get back into it, and it brought back the old Nike slogan, “Just Do It!,” which I love for all kinds of reasons.  In fact, I remembered this Nike commercial this past week as I was trying to get back into gear with exercise:

Don’t you love that?!?  Seriously, what was I waiting for?  I lost this weight for a reason – to be able to do things I couldn’t before, to be healthier, to be more confident, to enjoy my life more, to enjoy my family and friends more, to be the person I always knew I could be if I only had the confidence to move forward.  And by putting exercise on hold because of these other circumstances that had me stressed out, I’d done the new me (that had always been there, just waiting to get out) a disservice.

So yesterday, I began » Read more: Weekly Weigh-In #44: Live Life Today!

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Weekly Weigh-In #43: The Complacency Trap

August 21st, 2010

I had planned today to blog about exercise, its importance, and getting back on the exercise wagon after some life circumstance that throws you off.  Then I stepped on the scale this morning for my weekly weigh-in, and it became apparent there was another blog post in me that was much more apropos and pressing.  It’s what I fell into over the past two days: The Complacency Trap…

This week went pretty well.  I rededicated myself to healthy eating, and I did really well with eating low-cal, healthy, and nutritious meals, with very light snacking.  That was through Wednesday.  I woke up Thursday morning and weighed, and I was » Read more: Weekly Weigh-In #43: The Complacency Trap

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The Comeback: Let’s Get It Started!!!

August 14th, 2010

I’m ba-ack!!!  And I couldn’t think of a better anthem to return to ReconstructingThirty.com than the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started!”  I mean, any hip-hop group that has fans spanning from the pre-school set, to we thirty-somethings, to the baby boomers, is pretty frackin’ awesome in my book.  So here goes…

As I mentioned in June, I needed to take a summer break from blogging.  I sat for the bar exam in late July, and I had to really dedicate a couple of months to studying, without the marvelous obsession distraction that is blogging.  Now begins the long three month wait for the results [sigh].  So, you may ask, how does the guy who used to weigh 308 pounds, and used food as his drug of choice, get through the stress of a bar exam?  Did I gain twenty pounds?  Did I get too stressed to eat and drop thirty?  Did I break out like a 16-year old before a big date?  (Answer to that last one: almost – pimples here and there – but no full-on break out).

So what’s the verdict on my weight loss?  Well, » Read more: The Comeback: Let’s Get It Started!!!

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Weekly Weigh-In: An Amazing Weekend!

May 23rd, 2010

This has been an amazing weekend on the Reconstructing 30 front!  And I’ve been enjoying it too much to take time out to blog until now.  First of all, the weather is spectacular here in the Atlanta area this weekend.  It’s hot (90+ degrees today), but it’s not yet humid, so it’s been an amazing weekend to have lunches on patios (check), and then get some work and blogging done in a glass coffee shop with views of the skyline (check).

My weekend started with my weigh in.  I was at » Read more: Weekly Weigh-In: An Amazing Weekend!

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Help Me Eradicate Driving While Dining – DWD

May 13th, 2010

Today I saw two people doing something that really chaps my hide.  Eating.  In their cars.  While driving!  I won’t say that I’ve never been guilty of this, but it irritates me now for a few different reasons.  First, I’ve always been really turned off by sloppy eaters.  You know, the ones who slurp their soup, crunch their chips too loudly, smack when eating something sticky, have stuff running down their chins, etc.  It drives me nuts, too put it mildly.  I’m hardly a prude, but I do think when you eat, unless you are one of the .0000003% of us who really was raised by wolves, you should kind of try to be as normal/least gross as possible.

Thus the problem with the car eaters.  They feel safe in their cars (just like all the nose-pickers on wheels out there), so they stop by a drive-through window, order some high fat, sloppy food, and then go at it like a hungry cheetah taking down it’s prey, thinking none of us can see the pure, animalistic passion with which they consume their cheesesteak, taco, french fries, or whatever else.  The clear windows that everyone else can see through providing a buffer between them and the outside world.  Like the guy I got behind today on my way home from work.  I couldn’t tell what he was eating, but it was messy, and he had a beard.  Ick.  Just…  Ick.   He’d tilt his big head back and drape whatever this was into his mouth, invariably catching the remnants in his beard.  And since traffic was stopped, » Read more: Help Me Eradicate Driving While Dining – DWD

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Nutrition Monday: I’m a Chobani Convert

May 10th, 2010

No, I haven’t joined an obscure Eastern religion – I’m still a Methodist.  For those of you uninitiated in the Greek yogurt craze that’s sweeping foodies and health nuts across the nation, Chobani is a brand of Greek yogurt, usually with fruit on the bottom.  My nutritionist recommended Chobani to me way back at our very first appointment on my actual 30th birthday last October.  I’ve never been much of a yogurt person, thinking even Breyer’s or Yoplait tasted like flavored bad breath until I was well into my twenties, so this Greek yogurt thing scared me a little bit.  Greek yogurt is more pungent than regular yogurt, and I blogged months back on how I just couldn’t do Greek yogurt, or a Scandinavian (maybe it was Icelandic, I can’t rememeber) yogurt called Skyr that I tried.  You can read the details here, but long story short, I thought they tasted like @$$.

The last time I tried Chobani was literally the day after I first met with my nutritionist in October.  That was enough for me at the time.  Truly.  My nutritionist is amazing, so I thought we just happened to have different taste preferences when it came to this stuff.  Nutritionally, Greek yogurt has a much higher protein content than regular yogurt, so it fills you up more effectively (at least this is my layman’s understanding of the concept), but I had decided I didn’t like Greek yogurt, and that was that.  (I can be quite decisive with food when I want to be).  Then a series of seemingly innocuous conversations and readings of tweets got me to reconsider.  A couple of weeks ago I was » Read more: Nutrition Monday: I’m a Chobani Convert

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Blogging and Balance

May 6th, 2010

It’s been a full week.  My dad had knee replacement surgery yesterday, and I spent 13+ hours at the hospital with him (he’s doing great – going home tomorrow), I had my own little medical test Tuesday night (a sleep study – more to come in a future post…), and a lot going on with my career right now, too.  Which has left little time this week for a) exercise (ugh), and b) blogging.  It’s okay – I’ve been focused on the things I needed to be focused on this week, but I’ve definitely missed checking in regularly here on the blog, and checking your blogs, too.  I did make the rounds on Google Reader this afternoon, so I’m getting caught up on my blog reading, so I thought tonight I’d do a little blog writing, too.  My weekend without blogging turned into almost a week, though!

This all reminded me of a time, maybe a month into writing this blog, when I got totally out of balance with blogging, though.  I was spending almost all of my down time working on the blog.  First it was the layout, then it was migrating from Wordpress.com to a self-hosted site, then it was getting myself setup with AdSense and as an Amazon affiliate, then it was checking my stats, and checking my stats, and checking my stats.  I was a little obsessed.  I was enjoying it, and I wasn’t sacrificing time with family and friends, but I was sacrificing time to exercise, and I felt like I was running out of material to write about, because my free time was spent, well, blogging.

I realized I had gotten totally out of balance with blogging.  Reconstructingthirty.com had become my focus, to the detriment of » Read more: Blogging and Balance

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Weekly Weigh-In: Are you Down, Down, Down, Down, Down?

May 1st, 2010

First, a video to put a smile on your face and brighten up your weekend. The Pink Glove Dance from the good folks at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon (more below on why I’m sharing this):

This morning was my first weekly weigh-in after my first 5K, and I was a little worried earlier in the week that I may actually post a gain!  I gave myself Saturday (the day of the race) off with my eating plan.  That Saturday started with the free pizza they had after the race, and devolved from there into a Mexican dinner that included queso, chalupas, and cake (it was a party for a charity organization I volunteer with, and I wanted to enjoy it).  I indulged without guilt, but the day after the 5K, my scales were up 4 pounds!!!  I’ve done well with eating since, but since my exercise this week has also been half of what I strive for  (my goal is 4 days cardio / 2 days strength training per week, and this week I only got in 2 days cardio / 1 day strength training), I was afraid I wouldn’t post a net loss this week.  But I did!  Here are the stats: » Read more: Weekly Weigh-In: Are you Down, Down, Down, Down, Down?

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My First 5K: Been There, Done That, Got the T-Shirt!

April 24th, 2010

Me at the finish - and no that's not sweat or my typical hairstyle - it poured rain through most of the race!

I DID IT!!! This morning I ran my first real 5K race, and I posted my best time for 5K yet!

The race: the 5K Water for The World Run in Johns Creek, Georgia – just north of Atlanta. The contender: me, Chad, a thirty year old who weighed in this morning at 248.5 (broke 250 this week!) and is down almost exactly 60 pounds from an all time highest weight of 308 on my 30th birthday in October of 2009. The weather: sixty degrees, THUNDERSTORMS and driving wind and rain (this is NOT what I meant when I signed up for the Water for the World Run).

My day started with the alarm going off at 6:00 am, and as soon as it woke me up, I heard the thunder, followed by the pouring rain. Unfazed, but a little concerned about whether the race would be canceled, I got dressed and drove over to the office building where the start/finish line and staging area was at 7:00 am. By the time I arrived, the rain had let up a little, but it was still lightning, so they held the start of the race for 10 minutes. We ended up starting at 7:40 instead of 7:30. And I have to say, that extra 10 minutes of roaming around the staging area and vendor tents was intimidating. All the little fit people (and I mean little literally, not as a diminutive) were prancing around, stretching, wearing sleeveless shirts, laughing, and seeming way to chipper for 7:00 in the morning on a Saturday.

At the start - that's me in the royal blue t-shirt in the middle of the frame - thinking I'd lost my ever-lovin' mind at this point.

But then I realized that noticing them first was my own insecurity kicking in, because there were plenty of other people there who were a bit out of shape, didn’t have form fitting clothes, and were standing around like normal people waiting on something to start. As I started chatting with some of them as we lined up at the starting line, I found out it was quite a few of our first 5K, even for some of the runners whom I would have assumed had done this before!

At 7:30 am they
» Read more: My First 5K: Been There, Done That, Got the T-Shirt!

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My First 5K: Three Days and Counting!

April 21st, 2010

Water for the World Run 2010 from Don Felice on Vimeo.

Yowzahs!!!  My first 5K is just three days away!  It’s still amazing that I’m starting to become, dare I say it, a runner!  That just boggles my mind.  I am by my very nature, sedentary, and I have to force myself to exercise – you know, in the same way you have to force yourself to do your taxes.  I still look at runners and think, what the hell is wrong with you?  But I guess I gotta change that mindset, because I’m joining their “running-for-the-heck-of-it-without-even-having-just-been-mugged” club!  This is really insane.

This week has been busy, and tonight was my first run since Saturday (!) – but I did really well, so I’m still confident that Saturday will come and go with me finishing the race and not checking myself into the hospital across the street from the finish line (good strategy by the race planners, by the way).  This reconstruction thing is really starting to show results, I’ve lost over » Read more: My First 5K: Three Days and Counting!

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