Two Bad....

....weeks that is.

Today marks day 43 of our 300/365 challenge.  I have lost 2.6 lbs.  My diet for the first month was never spectacular.  I'd have great stretches of good eating, followed by not quite as long stretches of eating poorly.  When I try to eat better, I tend to go back and forth like that a lot.  What really helped the first four weeks is that I was in the gym nearly ever day.  I missed four workouts in the first four weeks.  I missed seven in the last two weeks.

Over the last week or so, I just haven't had any desire to go to the gym. That is starting to change for the better again. Going to bed last night, I was looking forward to working out this morning and made sure my alarm was set appropriately. Without much sleep though, I couldn't drag myself into the gym today....and lost another day in my challenge. Tomorrow won't happen that way though. No matter how much sleep I get or not, I will have the time before work to make it up to the gym....and there is no way I skip it.

The way this challenge is going, I need a little bit of a kick start.

Another Notch

While my weight might not be dropping too fast, I was really encouraged tonight when, even after a good sized pasta dinner, I put on my belt and got back into the notch I was at before the honeymoon.  I weighed about 10 lbs less when we left for Antigua, but I can tell my body is getting back to that point now even if it's not showing on the scale.  Considering I went home and ate a medium Primo's pizza all by myself on Monday after writing my last post, and the fact that I have Como's pizza in my near future, I am highly doubtful that I'll drop any weight by the time I weigh in on Monday.  Just trying to keep myself positive here, and this notch will give me something positive to hold on to.

Speaking of Monday, LM and I tried out our new massage table that night as well.  I've been thinking about getting one for a while now, and I think getting massages in Antigua really helped sell LM on the idea.  Now I just need to make sure I get her to let me rub her down at least once a week.  :-)

Looking forward to a couple days off after tonight.

401

So for some reason, the fact that last week's post was my 400th published post here completely didn't register with me while I wrote the post.  I probably wouldn't have changed anything I wrote about if I had remembered, but I probably would have used a different title, which means I wouldn't have found that perfect picture for the way I was feeling at the time.  All in all it worked out fine, and now I can get on with post 401.

HAVE

Until I realized this was  post 401, I was going to use some form of my workout/weight loss status as the title.  As it is now, the 401 title led me to the above photo, which I think is as perfect as the last picture.  My weight loss/workout program is going well.  I haven't missed a day at the gym since my last post (14/15 days now) and I weighed in at an even 258 lbs this morning.  I'm down just over 4 lbs in 15 days, which is a good drop for me and a couple lbs ahead of my pace weight.  Again, I want to stay out well ahead of my pace weight because I tend to plateau for a week or more at a time at certain weights.  This 2lb cushion is nice, but we want more, we want more....

YOU

I'm also contributing this extra loss to the fact that my weight training wasn't as hard as it normally is Thursday-Sunday.  With the British Open being played over the weekend, and the time difference meaning the players I wanted to watch were playing at my normal gym times on those days, I spent a lot more time on the treadmill than normal, and less time lifting.  I had one hard training day in those four, but I don't think it made up for the other three days.  Hopefully I am wrong and I am just burning fat more efficiently now so this weight loss continues, but we are only 15 days into our challenge...so it's way too early to tell.

SEEN

The biggest part of all this for me is going to be my diet over the next 350 days.  My diet isn't great by any stretch of the imagination.  I love foods that are bad for you in more ways than one, and sugar-filled drinks.  But, even with my love for bad foods, my daily diet isn't too bad, even when you consider my cheat meals I figure in every now and then.  And again, it's way too early to gauge how that will work for me.  I plan to tweak my diet and cut the cheat meals as time goes on, but not completely out.  I don't have the constitution to do that right now.  If I try to go cold turkey, I will fall off the wagon and take a long time to get back on.  Hey, it took me a long time and a lot of work to get this fat....it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of time to get back into good shape.

MY

Speaking of cheat meals....I found a place near the house that has what look to be pretty awesome stuffed burgers.  I was hooked when I saw a picture of one online last week, but have yet to try it.  It did, however, influence my dinner choice on Friday night.  LM and I did a double date night with SO and Shy that night, starting off with dinner at Champ's.  It had been a while since I had been to Champ's, and even longer since I have eaten there, and they had a new menu.  On this menu....a stuffed burger.  Bacon, cheese, and onion all inside the patty.  Yum.  Much better than the time I tried to make these on my own a few years back.  I don't think it's all that hard to do when you have the right ingredients, but when you are frantically searching for something to put inside a burger, as you are making the patty....you aren't prepared enough.

BASE

After Champ's we walked over to the movie theater and watch The Conjuring.  Not sure what the name of the movie has to do with the movie itself, because what I saw was pretty much the opposite of conjuring....but I guess calling it The Exorcist or anything like that would have been a bad move anyway.  The movie was ok, which is saying a lot considering I usually think all scary movies are just dumb, and it made the ladies jump and/or lose their breath more than a few times.

BALL?

In other news for the week, LM got a BRAND NEW BIKE.  That topic, along with troubles with my own bike (The X) were supposed to be in a post a couple days ago, but I never got the chance to put pen to paper until today.  Hopefully sometime soon we'll get the chance to combine the bikes and stuffed burgers into a post about a cheat meal that I have to peddle my ass off to go eat.  As a matter of fact, it will have to be soon if I have any hopes of hitting my weight loss goal by next summer.  Cheat meals will be few and far between in a couple months, and winter weather will get in the way of biking anywhere around that time.

A Whole Bunch of Nothing

Either my blogging rust is showing, or this site just sucks now.  Actually, I am thinking it's a little bit of both....but there are some serious flaws with this site when the body of drafted posts just disappear.  

 So here I am, trying to complete one post out of three in a span of 11 days. The pace isn't all that brisk, but I was really pleased with the previous two I had tried to put up since the 4th. Alas, all I have now for the 4th of July post where I talked about the BBQ with my family and friends as well as the wedding, is a picture of the faded chalk flag the girls drew in the driveway. I love the picture, and wish I would have taken one before it rained on the chalk, but there was a lot more in that post I wanted to put out there. The main subjects of yesterday's post are a lot easier to remember, since it was only about 24 hours ago and I was just talking about things that happened on Saturday. The post covered coming into work early for training, lunch at Bucharest with my beautiful wife in my free time between training and the start of my shift, Scherzer not becoming the first MLB pitcher in history to go into the All-Star break 14-0, Lincecum getting a no hitter, finishing the first season of Breaking Bad, and verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. It's not often I really like my own posts, but that one I did....and now it's reduced to the above list of events. Seeing as there is no use in crying over spilled milk, unless you are doing so to get someone else to clean it up for you, I am moving on to my next post....and carefully making sure I don't have this one disappear. So, sometime before the wedding, LM and I decided that we would challenge ourselves to continue working out when we returned from the honeymoon. The last trip we took alone was to Vegas last year where we got engaged and we worked out a lot before the trip, but fell off the wagon afterward. To avoid that, we challenged ourselves to get in 300 workout days in the 365 following the honeymoon. Although, that had to be pushed back a little because of the injury LM sustained at the end of her bachelorette party and we are just starting week two of our challenge today. We are now on day 8, and I have gone 7/8 while LM has gone 8/8. Had it not been for the aforementioned training on Saturday, I would also be at 8/8. While it wasn't a workout day for me, it also wasn't a rest day considering how very long my day was. Eating well goes hand in hand with the workout program, but is always tougher for me to do. Last week I did pretty well for most of the week, but really went overboard on Thursday which kept me from losing much weight at all. Last Monday I had a starting weight of 262.4 lbs. This morning, I weighed in at 261.2. To reach my goal weight of 202 lbs by the end of this challenge, I need to lose 60 lbs. If I can keep this pace up, I will more than reach my goal in a year. The problem is, I can't count on a slow and steady pace. I have a history of getting stuck for a while at certain weights, 260 lbs being one of them, and need to have big loss weeks here and there to make up for the plateaus that I will undoubtedly encounter. All in all, week one went pretty well. I just need to keep my nose to the grindstone, and my hands off the crappy food I tend to crave. EDIT: Looking at this completed post, I see the formatting doesn't work correctly now either. My apologies for this long ass, single paragraph.

The 4th....