Friday, March 25, 2011

Breaking down walls...

Hopefully I will be able to get back to posting daily VERY soon but for now it shall remain when I have a minute to sit and write a post, busy does not begin to describe my days lately. There are some aspects of my life that do not make the front page of ye olde blog and it is some of those things that have kept me away from it but in spite of that I have been how do you say? Back on the wagon again. I have to admit that for the first time since starting down this path to better health I let things slip a whole fuckin' lot tad bit in the past maybe three or four weeks and am slightly up in weight, I say slightly because its about 6 on a good day 10 on a bad pounds heavier than I have been maintaining for the last 10 months. Its simply amazing how adding piles O stuff to a fellas day takes away from being able to weigh, measure and quite frankly care about the the food that's going down the hatch. I am not in immediate imminent danger because of my health right now so it makes it easy to lay my focus elsewhere and honestly I have been at this for a little more than three years now with this being the first what I would call lapse in caring about my nutrition.

Making my nutrition and exercise my number one priority must remain my number one...um..priority, because having lived on the other side of 500 pounds I know whats in store for me if I let things slide. I don't fear that I will ever slip back into a completely sedentary life again but I want to be as active as possible so that I can continue to excel with my physical self. I find that having something to focus on helps loads! lately its been my bicycling...even though there has been a lack of said activity because of schedule conflicts and weather I find that when I am in "bike mode" I am on point with my nutrition. Bicycling has become my passion, of course after my wife and kids but you get my point, If I am on a bike I am happy, I am unsure if its because I was unable to ride one for so long and now I am free to do so as I wish or if I really just have a love for riding these two wheeled contraptions down a dirt trail looking at the scenery....my guess is the second option.

The new Giant.

My K2 dashboard with the Garmin 305 forerunner on the new bike mount, you can also see my Sigma 906 cyclometer mounted on the stem.

Speaking of bikes I am always on the look out for "bike deals" and last week I found an incredible deal on what appears to be a great bike! its a Giant Cypress lx full suspension hybrid. The woman that I bought it from gave me an indoor bicycle rack and a trunk mount bike rack when I bought the Giant, lets just say that I got more than a good deal on the bike and accessories and couldn't be happier with the deal. Getting ready for the trail I also picked up a Garmin bicycle mount for my 305 forerunner, I installed it and mounted the GPS yesterday so I am all ready for the rail trail! I took it out for a short ride to test the connectivity to the satellites with it in the position that it is on the bike, worked great. This year I will be going for records on my bike, I will have to look but I believe that my longest ride on the rail trail is right around 25 miles and I want to double that this year and have a goal to hit a 50 mile ride at some point, perhaps beyond that even. The weight will come off, I am not too worried about that honestly because the amount of riding I am planning on doing it will have to come off!

Last year I worked on my endurance on two wheels and the year before that was getting use to how being perched up top of a skeletal aluminum frame with skinny wheels between me and the pavement felt, this year we are going for distance. My first bicycle ride was about a mile and I had to pull over because of the prison sex like feeling on my plump posterior...not that I have ever experienced prison sex but I do have an imagination and its how I would imagine it feeling. Now that a 20 mile ride is par for the course I feel ...dare I say... Normal? no longer a 500 pound guy rooted to a couch looking out the window wishing he could join in the fun that is life but a 300 pound man doing what he wants when he wants to but I am far from done with my health journey.

I have more goals that I have not reached yet with my health and weight, there have been times when I doubted that I could get there but when I think back to the 500 pound version of me I doubted that I could lose even 100 pounds. I have done double that figure to date and kept it off for the better part of 3 years now, for whatever reason breaking through that barrier of sub 300 pounds has been a task for me, more mentally than anything else and I can't for the life of me figure out why a mental barrier could stop me. Enough is enough with letting an imaginary line in the sand stop me because if I take the whole number factor of my weight out of the equation its just that... a number. I have lost as much as 229 pounds since starting and have bounced around in that 200 to 229 pounds lost zone for like I said the better part of 3 years now and it would seem that every time I get close to going below 300 pounds it slams into that wall....this time I am bringing a sledgehammer with me, I have to finish what I started.

As Ever
Me

Monday, March 14, 2011

Who me? yes you! couldn't be! Then who??

Well well well, look who walked in through the door... Its been some time since I posted on ye olde blog and I am sitting here after a long day of organizing boxes of diapers N vs 1 vs 2 vs 3!! Rattles and bumpers and and and the day is getting close. I have recently found some success on the list of Craigs with the selling of some of my double wheeled transportation devices which hurt and is awesome all at the same time! the extra dough is nice and I am deciding on which color my new bicycle will be, what you didn't really think the profit from the bikes would go to diapers did ya? but this ain't that kind of blog so enough about the new addition that's on the way and perhaps I will touch on the bicicleta situation later but lets get to how the fat man has been doing lately.

I haven't made it to the gym in quite a while and my mood is definitely being affected by this, I am an addict after all, and I don't mean cheeseburgers! With gas prices reaching up into the $4.00 range I have decided that my workouts will be local for a bit because of the strain in ye olde wallet and I have been enjoying walks around the lake and the occasional romp on my "Hilly course" on the K2. Honestly though I have not been all I can be in the working out department and my intake has been how do I say? anything but on track what with all of the excitement of the new addition, not to mention the waiting hand and foot on Wify so that she can relax a bit after lugging around her new again rotund belly. If I am being completely honest I am struggling a bit the past few weeks with getting my intake within the range that it needs to be and my waistline is certainly paying the price!

I am slightly up from where I was the last time I focused on my weight but I don't think that its going to be too big an issue to get the couple few extra pounds off with the weather warming up and Wify being home from work very soon. I have a problem putting me first when someone else needs it and I am not in imminent danger of having my heart grenade in the driveway, this is a fault of mine that I am working on but not having much success with when I need to tend to someone else. With all of that said I have to keep in mind that not putting me first is what got me into this whole Hyper obese Supersize me state in the first place so getting my calories back down to my "losing" amount is an important item on my shopping list for the coming days. My eating habits are right now not what I would call on track, Yes I am still eating whole foods, No I am not eating processed foods, I still do not eat red meat or pork but my fish consumption is way down because of Wify not being able to eat as much as we usually eat, possibly most importantly I am not sticking within my calorie allotment.

Making up for the past I would say three weeks is going to be where my focus is for the next couple because after that things will need to be changed up a bit and being able to recognize that is probably a great thing. I am up in weight some, nothing that could be called back sliding or anything but up none the less, My bike is tuned up and rearing to go as soon as the weather starts being more consistent and the trail dries up a bit more and I don't want to get out there to find out that the extra few that I have on me is going to effect my ability to ride the trails. My life is where I want it to be for the first time in a long while, I do what I want to when I want to and feel unlimited in that, I will not give that back for anything because it is who I am, who I have been the entire time and I ain't not gonna give it up.

I have a goal to ride a consecutive 50 miles at some point this year and I have the route mapped out on a local trail, actually a couple trails that intersect and I honestly get excited when I think about the day that I will do it. I have a friend that rides too and I actually met her through my blog and the plan is to talk her into doing that 50 miler with me when I do it, She is capable of doing the ride and I know that I am capable as well and I believe it will be a fun goal to reach. I am going to try and make time to post regularly again but life sometimes grabs you by the cajones and all we can do is go along for the ride and finding time for non necessities just doesn't happen. Keeping my shit together while mixing the ingredients in the proper order to get what I want as an end product has been how I get down for a few years now, the last few weeks has been a break from that and I know how to do it, I have done it and have been doing it so back to the grind I go.

That my good people is all I got for tonight, I shall return again to drop some random thoughts from my gray matter as soon as a few extra minutes pile unto one another again.

As Ever
Me