Archive for March, 2009

Woke up this morning, weighed in, and found I now weighed 18 pounds less than when I started. That’s the first time my weight loss has seemed like “quite a bit”. Three pounds a week so far which is really awesome. My overall goal is to get down to about 165, which is a sixty pound loss. I’m almost 1/3 of the way there.

One of the benefits of getting physically active through Power 90 is that I seem to have more energy for everything, more stamina, more desire to do something other than sit at my desk.

A couple weeks ago or so, I finally got back into my shop and started finishing my current project which had mostly sat around as pieces of wood waiting for me to make something out of them. I attacked them with vigor (something I couldn’t have said before), and the result is the workbench you can see at the bottom of this post. It cost me less than $100 in materials and is pretty dang heavy. Now, it’s time to clean up the mess you see behind it.

What really excites me about it is that I can spend hours out there shifting wood around now, and I don’t feel tired or worn out or sore at the end of the day.

Yeah, kind of late for doing that. Anyway, first 30 days, total weight loss of 11.6 pounds. Pretty much right on target, really. We’ve moved up to the second set of videos, and the workout is quite a bit more intense. Was almost like starting over, except that I didn’t hurt for days after doing it. The number of ab reps doubled, and the first day, I managed about 160 of them. The second time through the ab routine, I managed 195. Felt like I about killed myself, but I got through them. It’s amazing, really, how much change can happen in a month. When I first started, I could barely do five pushups (may have been less than that) without having to take a really long rest. I can now do twenty or more in a row. The ability of our body to change itself to meet new challenges is amazing.

Don’t think you’re going to get before and after pictures tomorrow – you ain’t. Even though it’s Day 30, and you’re supposed to take pictures, and I’m going to take pictures, I’m not going to scare you all by showing you what I looked like with my shirt off thirty days ago. I’m not even going to scare you by showing you what I look like now. I’m going to wait until the “real” after.

I’m fairly happy with the progress I’m seeing. Of course, I want more, but I’m edging close to three pounds a week which is pretty dang good. We’ll see what the scale says tomorrow, and I probably will at least post the numbers.

One of the side effects of this whole thing is that I seem to have significantly more energy on a daily basis already. I was able to do a bunch of woodworking yesterday – like six hours or more of it, and I’m not sore or tired today. And I did it the day before, too – even skipped watching some TV and worked on my workbench instead. It’s amazing, really, how much easier it is to get stuff done now that I’m not worn out as easily. It’s amazing how even just a couple of weeks of exercise and eating right can change so many things about how you feel. It’s a better pick-me-up than caffeine.