ksylvan's Journal

Andrea remarked about my previous entry: "Impressive! You must walk everywhere!"

That's true. I walk wherever I can. To the post office. To the grocery store. If my wife was up to it, I would even urge her to walk with me to some of the nearby sandwich shops (Erik's Deli, Subway, Togos, etc).

I was inspired by reading this page and I've been walking pretty much everywhere.

I also love walking my dogs and even though I could take them both on the same walk, I usually take my beagle on a large loop (about 1.5 miles) then I take my Yorkie on the same walk. It gives me an excuse to get a solid hour of walking at night. Sometimes I listen to an audio book while walking, which helps pass the time.

Best regards,

---Kayvan


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According to my SportBrain page, I have averaged about 13508 steps per day for the last seven days. :-) :-)

People in my age and gender group tend to average about 8000 steps a day.


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The last couple of days, I have not gotten as much exercise as I like and I've not been sleeping enough hours. This mostly has to do with this side contract I'm working on right now.

Today, in a few minutes, I'm going on a nice hour long walk, which will officially mark my being on track. My legs are itching to do it!

I hope everyone's week has been going well. Only a couple of more days till the weekend!


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Today I am working at home on MLK day.

Over the weekend, I saw the number 149.8 on my scale. I am happy about this, because despite any temporary fluctuations, the overall curve of my weight loss has been extremely consistent, as you can see here:




I hope you are all having a great week!

Late update: After walking the dogs and flushing some processed matter down the toilet, I weighed myself at 149.0. Woo hoo!!!


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So far my pedometer has been incredibly useful and motivating. The data (from my personal SportBrain web site) is below. I started playing with it at 8PM on 1/9/2007.

Date | Steps | Miles | Calories
--------------------------------------
01/09/2007 | 6344 | 2.4 | 202
01/10/2007 | 18741 | 7.6 | 640
01/11/2007 | 12154 | 4.5 | 374
01/12/2007 |  1472 | 0.5 | 42


It's Friday. I'm already at work. Tonight, my wife and I go to a friend's birthday party. I plan to keep my calories low today and exercise a lot so that I have plenty of wiggle room at the party.

Best regards,

---Kayvan


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Late yesterday, I got home to find my reward for getting to 150, waiting for me, a Sportbrain iStep X1 Pedometer that I ordered a few days ago from Bodytronics.com.

I made myself wait till I had made and served dinner to my wife and cleaned up the dishes. Then, while I fed the dogs, I tore open the package and started playing with it.

I love this pedometer!!! It's a gadget freak's dream; and it's amazing to see the graphs of my activity on the sportbrain web site. After I had set things up, I took my dogs for their walk and ended up walking about 2.5 miles. Then, I plugged the device in to my laptop and uploaded the data. Fun fun fun!!!

Yesterday, between 8:30pm and midnight, doing my doggy-walk (one hour) and then just putzing around the house doing things like putting away laundry, I walked about 6350 steps! Since midnight, just walking around the house, I have already walked about 1500 steps.

The funny thing is, with this pedometer on me, I'll do things like walk up and down the hallway while I am brushing my teeth. :-) :-) Every little bit counts, right? ;-)


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I'm feeling blah today. Particularly uninspired. Still, I get to plod on.

I realized this morning that I am basically on the last ten pounds to my goal weight (from 151 to 139) and that it's probably going to get a bit harder from this point on.

No matter. As I said before, just keep doing it... Now... and tomorrow... and next week... next month... next year, etc. :-)

I have only done my sledgehammer workout very early this morning today. That's only about fifteen minutes of exercise. That might be contributing to my mood.

Okay, time to fix that. I'm walking to the nearby post office right now to mail some letters. I'll write more later.

Update: I did that walk, but feel pretty similar to before. I think I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything I have to do today... Work stuff, school work, some volunteer work is piling up, walk the dogs, etc. etc.

Blah blah blah whine whine whine.


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I woke up at 5AM this morning because the cats were bugging me to feed them. So, I fed the cats (which means putting food in 3 separate bowls so that I can watch how much eat cat eats) and let the dogs out.

Then, since I was already up, I did my 15 minutes of the sledgehammer.

At that point, I was going to get in my car to go to my Chiropractic appointment. Then, a thought popped into my head. "Why not bike?" Their office is about five miles from my house (ten miles round trip), so I dragged my bike out of the shed, checked it  over, pumped up the tires and oiled the chain and started biking. That was fun and I got an hour of aerobic exercise in the morning.

Then, I ate breakfast and got ready for work.

So, I'm at work right now wearing my skinny jeans. My weight is somewhere around 151 and my muscles are starting to show as the layer of fat is slowly shrinking.

I hope everyone had a great weekend and has a great Monday!


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So, I've been eating right and exercising a lot.

I've even had some late night aerobic sessions thanks to Nintendo. :-) :-)

This morning I weighed in at a new low: 151.8

My son and I walked to the grocery store (about an hour round trip) to pick up some lean turkey for lunch, then I made taco seasoned ground turkey for a taco shell salad.

I go back to work tomorrow after a two week vacation. I'm looking forward to it.

Not much else is going on. I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.





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I've been thinking about why my weight loss effort has been working this time around, as opposed to the half a dozen other times I've tried to lose weight.

I've boiled it down to this: The numbers don't lie.

In the past, I've basically said things like "I'll just eat less and exercise more." and I did.

I ate less for a few weeks, but I think I under-estimated what I was putting in my mouth. Since I was allergic to keeping a food diary or trying to figure out the nutritional facts of the foods I was consuming, it was easy to "forget" that I ate a few cookies, had a mini-bag of potato chips, two bagels and half of a donut as snacks throughout the day.

Bottom line: It was easy to deceive myself and be in denial about why I kept gaining weight even though I was trying to watch what I ate and exercise more.

Now, using calorie-count.com, I weigh myself every day and I log all foods religiously. This forces me to deal with numbers and to confront reality. The feedback on the scale and in the calorie counts are immediate and it's easy to change course.

In the process, I have found it easier to start to peel away the emotional layers from the numbers; By weighing myself every day, the weight on the scale has started to  become simply a measure of progress towards a goal, not something to which I tie my self-worth.

I feel in control of my weight and my food choices for the first time in my life, and I say a big Thank You to the developers of Calorie-Count.Com and to all my friends here!!!


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