Back to the blog!

I can give all sorts of excuses. I was close to goal. The blog posts were repetitive. I couldn't think of something to write.

And then there was my ruptured Achilles, and the surgery, and the cast, and then the physical therapy.

But the fact is that I just weighed in at nearly 280, after being at 255 at the end of summer. Yes, 10 lbs of that was going off Medifast and back into a real diet, as soon as my body had carbs again I popped up, as expected. However, what I didn't do was stay there.

I can blame the lack of exercise due to surgery, and bloating and swelling, but I also know that I wasn't eating properly. So it's time to get back on the wagon. Blogging regularly. tracking my food intake. Getting back to the gym regularly. Rehabbing my foot so I can play tennis again and start running.

Today is a new Day Zero. Nearly a year ago I started this journey and was sitting at 332 pounds. I had gotten down to 280 in April. My goal is still at 240, and I've got 39.8 pounds to go, starting now.

I don't really want to kickstart things with another bout of Medifast, but it is definitely time to go back to small meals, lots of healthy snacks, and reasonable dinners. MyFitnessPal needs to be back on the daily website rotation, and I need to update the app and track religiously.

Yes, that includes the cupcake I got in the break room this morning. *sigh*

Overdue update!

So, let's update what's been going on the past month.

I severed my Achilles tendon, and had to wait three weeks to get into surgery. Well, surgery was a success! I wore a splint for a couple days and then went and got checked on and got a cast.

Two weeks in a cast, completely non weight-bearing, and then I got stitches out. Stitches came out Tuesday of this week and everything looked good. I got put into a heavier cast with my toes pointed down to protect the healing tendon. I'm in this cast for three weeks, BUT I'm  now allowed to do as much weight bearing as I like.

I've hobbled around a little bit with a crutch, and done some 'scooting'. It's not easy, but I'm doing it.

On November 25th I'll be taken out of the cast and put into a walking boot with a heel lift, and can start walking with a crutch or a cane. This will be just in time for our drip to Disney, so I'll be scooting around the parks on a motorized scooter for much of the time, and limiting my walking to just a little bit a day.

I've gained a bit of weight over the past month, which isn't surprising considering stress, Halloween, and limited exercise. But it's time to get back on the wagon and make sure I've not lost any ground when I get out of this thing. I want to be at no more than 260 lbs when I get the cast off. I weighed 266.8 this morning, and I think my cast weighs 3-5 lbs between the cotton, the fiberglass, and the tape.

So, today, I'm back to tracking on MFP and I'll weigh every day now that I can stand on my own feet. I should be able to get back in sync pretty easily, and then it's just 'make good decisions' and hit the holiday season at 260, and not 340 like last year.

Back to blogging

This is going to be a vaguely random blog post.

About a month ago, I'd transitioned off Medifast. I was eating more food, and more types of food, exercising a lot more, and I even started playing tennis again. I was bouncing around between 259-265 pounds, which I felt was pretty good considering I doubled my calorie intake and started eating carbs again.

Well, last week I was playing tennis, and while running for a shot, I felt a snapping in my right heel, and i hit the ground hard. Lying on the court, looking up at the lights, my foot hurt pretty bad, and I was sure I'd just ruptured my Achilles tendon. I got helped up by the class and went to the bench and iced it.

A while later, my wife came to get me, and brought crutches. I was able to go to my podiatrist the next day and he took a look at it. He confirmed it wasn't good, and sent me to get an MRI.

Now, Id been seeing this podiatrist because I have a vicious bone spur on the back of my right heel. I had an even worse one on my left heel, that I had surgically removed about 5 years ago. This surgery sucked, and I wasn't really interested in repeating it. However, my right heel was getting worse and worse, and I had finally decided to get surgery in January and just get it dealt with.

However, before doing that, we decided to try a less invasive response. I took oral steroids for a week, and then strong NSAIDs twice a day. the steroids kicked in while I was at GenCon and it was pretty magical, all the pain went away, and stayed away. When I saw the doctor again later, he suggested I try to stop taking the NSAIDs and see what happened. Well, the pain came back in 2 days, so I went back on them.

However with NSAIDs on board, I was feeling great so I started back up with tennis. I took a couple of intense 1-on-1 lessons and loved it, and signed up for a couple of group classes. It was at one of those that my tendon snapped.

The MRI confirmed that I'd severed the tendon, pretty much at the point where the bone spur impinged on it. So now the surgery time frame is moved up a lot. On October 14th, or sooner if there is a cancellation, I'm going to be cut on and have the bone spur planed off, then the tendon will be extracted from my calf where it's all bunched up, and extended, and reattached to the bottom part of the tendon. There's a severed messy bit that will have to be excised.

I get 8-12 weeks of immobilization and then I start rehabbing it.

I'm not looking forward to all this, but at least it will be done, and there's a good chance of regaining 100% strength in it. I know on my left foot, it feels better than it had in years, so I'm hopeful about that.

I just want to get it over with.

So now that I can't hit the gym and the courts 4-5 times a week, I've got to come up with an upper body workout routine and watch what I'm eating more. I don't want to lose too much ground to this.

Week 26?! Yes, week 26! Broke through my plateau.

Ok, summer has been horrible for my blogging. It's also not done a great thing for my diet plan, I was in a plateau for quite some time, but this week I have pushed myself to make the right choices and get back on plan.

This summer has been great. I feel better than I've felt in ages, and we're doing a lot of stuff outside. We're also going out to eat a little more, and even treating ourselves. Since the summer started I've been on a cruise (made reasonable food choices, but did not 'diet'). Spent a week with my family (more reasonable food choices but still no dieting). Since we got back we've gone out to dinner a few times (reasonable choices, staying as close to lean and green as possible). We even had a small celebratory night out at a hotel, with dinner (reasonable), dessert (fresh cannoli), breakfast in bed, then crepes for brunch.

Finally tonight, we've got one more kid-free evening before our daughter comes back from camp, and we're going out one more time on a date night.

The key to all of this is that despite all of this 'not on plan' eating and activity, I've managed to maintain, and not gain. And then once I buckled down, this week I had over a 4 pound loss! I expect this is because I've spent most of the summer eating enough carbs to have glycogen stored up again, and this week I've burned through some of it.

As of this morning, I was at 254 pounds. Seven months ago, I was at 332 and had put a goal of 250 pounds as a far future goal, nearly impossible to attain. Now I'm a stone's throw away. I reset my goal to 240, so that I would go off plan and regain glycogen and still stay under 250 and have that be my maintenance weight, but now that I'm nearly there, I think I can do a little better.

So, while I'm not to goal yet, it is time to take a pretty hard look at things. In a couple of weeks (whenever I hit 250, I think) I'm going to start transitioning off Medifast and start eating more real food. I want to do the transition properly and then shift into a standard 'IIFYM' (if it fits your macros) style of eating to focus on building muscle and losing fat slowly. So over the next few weeks I'll be looking into that and see where I think I need to set my intake on carbs, fats, and proteins. I expect I'll still be low-carb for a long time, but not quite so low carb as I am now.

I'd like to be in transition before the end of this month, and off Medifast sometime in August or September.

Medifast has been amazing, even with the last few weeks (they were frustrating at the time, but honestly, I wasn't on plan consistently for any of my plateau, so it's hard to complain with 'maintaining/slight loss' when you aren't actually following the diet!).

The biggest lessons I've learned are: consistent meal planning, cooking every day, bringing lunch to work every day. Those are huge, because of course you're going to gain weight when you grab a biscuit at Mc Donald's for breakfast, eat chinese buffet for lunch, and then order pizza for dinner because you don't want to cook. One of those as a special occasion? Sure. All three in one day, and multiple days a week that look like that? Bad idea.

Ok! Enough talking. Time to break out some graphs. I've been a slacker this summer, but it's time to end this thing with a bang, so it's back to daily blogging and weekly graphs and charts!

Click to embiggen!

Here you can see the tail end of my plateau. It started at the middle of may when I hit 260 and then started hovering, dancing between 258 and 262 for a few weeks. I started this week in a good place, 258.0, my previous low. Even with dinner at Blueberry Hill, cannoli, and crepes, I only went up to 259.9 and decided to knock it out of the park the rest of the week. I hydrated, followed Medifast, limited snacks, and broke through.

The 6-week plateau is obvious here.

Taking a look at the weekly, you can see the stall, hovering at 259-261. Despite that though, I ended week 26 at an even 3.0 pound loss week, and that's good enough. I still think I can manage to hit my goal by mid-August.

And here's my weekly graph. Still pretty impressive, even with that flat bit. Not much longer now!

Scale frustrations, slacking on the blog, and NSV.

So I haven't been blogging. I also haven't been losing weight.

For the past few weeks I've been hovering. Why am I hovering? A few reasons, most likely.

I've been eating out slightly more often, and that's increasing carb intake. I'm snacking on a few things I shouldn't... a chicken finger, some real peanut butter, more sauces than I should be eating with my chicken and mushrooms, etc. going heavy on sodium and not keeping my carbs under 100g is not helping.

I'm just not drinking my water. I know I need to and I'm working on that today.

I'd stopped exercising as much.

So, I need to actually pay better attention to water and sodium and carbs for a few days, and then I'm going on vacation where the goal will be to 'eat like a healthy person' and not 'eat a medifast diet' or 'nom nom nom buffet food and dessert bars'.

I want to get home from vacation within 2 lbs of where I started (ideally 2 lbs lower, but 2 lbs heavier is ok).

I'm currently at 260. My low is 258.2, but that was an outlier when it happened. I've been bouncing between 259-261 for a couple weeks now and it is definitely time to buckle down and do something to kickstart my metabolism. I'm hoping that more/different types of exercise and different foods will help.

However, let's go over a few NSV that have happened:

I can mow the entire lawn, with edging, and cleanup and not get winded.
I was up on the roof cleaning gutters and it was perfectly fine.
I'm wearing size XL shorts and shirts and they fit.
I put on a pair of size 38 pants and they fit!

I was straining my size 44 pants when I started this. I'm not totally comfortable in a size 38 yet but it is close. All my 44s are gone to Goodwill, and the 42s are on their way. 40 is comfortably loose (requires a belt) and 38 is a little tight.

I still have 20 lbs to lose, but I feel great and am getting slimmer and stronger. So I can't complain too much when I'm having a scale plateau at this point.

Brief weekly update (Week 18!)

It's been a hectic week and I haven't had as much time to blog as I'd like. I'll try to get a full weekly update post up soon, but here's a quick one!

Progress: I lost over 4 lbs the week before Geekway, but this week I ended up 1lb over last week. I know exactly why: working out last night, not drinking enough water at the convention, and not staying on plan. I had rice, potatoes, bread, etc while at Geekway, and all those carbs reloaded my glycogen stores, so it's back to the Medifast Plan at a fairly strict level for the next few days to get back on track.

Here's my weekly progress chart:

My weekly average has dropped to 3.8 lbs/week, which is still pretty awesome. I expect to have  a big loss this week as well, if I'm right about holding onto glycogen.

Since I don't have any scale victories this week, I'll add a couple non-scale: I had to add ANOTHER (this is #3) hole to my belt. It's really ridiculous at this point for me to still keep it, it's so long.

Also, last night at workout class, I got about 75% of a pull-up done. This is the first time I've actually gotten most of the way there, and I think I'll be able to knock one out in a couple of weeks.

16 Weeks. Zero loss this week, bleh.

Between exercise, being sick, or whatever, this week was a static week for me. I ended up exactly where I was last Thursday, with my weight bouncing from a low of 264.5 (1.3 lbs down from previous low on April 27th), to a high of 267.4 (1 lb more than last week's final weigh-in, and 2.9 lbs over my low).

Not sure who the culprit is, but I'm hopeful that this means I'll have an easier time losing next week. With 4 days of Geekway throwing a wrench into Lean and green, I'll need all the help I can get.

Hectic Day

Just realized that I hadn't blogged yet today... I've been super busy though, between a couple of work projects, Geekway coming in a week, grocery shopping, workout class, and more.

I was up a ton today, all water weight I know, but it's still annoying. I hope it will all melt off tonight, as I've been drinking a ton of water. However, I'm also feeling a little sick, and I'm not sure how that will mess with me.

I managed to make it through my workout class ok, but since then I've felt bleh. Here's to tomorrow giving me a nice surprise on the scale for when I post my weekly update!

Week 7 - Posted my first gain for the week

So, I weighed this morning, and after yesterday's ballooning up of retained water, I did't expect much.

Yesterday when I weighed in, it was at 297.1, but I hadn't gone to the bathroom yet. After bathroom and stripping down, it was 296.1. Still bad, but not as bad. That had me backpedaling about a week. So I drank lots of water, and closely watched my sodium, and stuck to my standard Medifast meals and a very basic L&G of fajita turkey breast and mushrooms. However, I noticed something: I really wasn't going to the bathroom enough despite the water I was drinking.

So this morning, when I woke up, I was actually a little surprised that I'd dropped all of my gain from yesterday and a bit more. I was back down to 293.4, which is .4 lbs over my low from last week. However, I still am not peeing like I should be. I've decided that for whatever reason, my body is clutching onto water and not letting go. Maybe it is being a little sick, maybe it was too much sodium, maybe it was workout, maybe it was stress from driving on ice for 60 miles... probably a combination of all four.

After last week's 6.5 lb drop, a rebound week doesn't actually seem out of place. Even with a gain this week, my average is still 5.5 lbs. And, I fully expect to see things 'revert' to normal soon. I know that my caloric intake is within 100 calories or so per day of being accurate, and it is impossible for me to gain fat with my deficit. As soon as I start peeing again, I expect to see another big drop, and then go back to a more steady pace.

click to embiggen!

In other news, the workout last night was insane. We had 11 people show up for our Goal Busters class, and Kevin set up two main stations... a circuit of 7 exercises in one half of the gym, and mats in the other half. So, we did our workout:

Warm-up:

• 2 minutes of passing the medicine balls in a circle
• 30 seconds of Jumping Jacks
• 30 seconds of staggered squats, right leg
• 30 seconds of staggered squats, left leg
• 30 seconds of ankle mobility
• 30 seconds of push-ups
• 30 seconds of mountain climbers against the wall

Partner work up (repeat 2x):

• 60 body weight squats
• Hold a wall squat during partner's squats

Circuit:

• 1 minute: Standing Rows, Alternating arms (30 lbs each) on the cable machine
• 1 minute: plank
• 1 minute: 2 mountain climbers into a pushup against a mat stack, on glides
• 1 minute: plank
• 1 minute: Kettlebell Swings (35 lbs)
• 1 minute: plank
• 1 minute: Heavy Rope double-overs
• 1 minute: plank
• 1 minute: Bosu Balance with dumbbell clean and press (15 lbs each)
• 1 minute: plank
• 1 minute: run against an anchored heavy band
• 1 minute: plank
• 1 minute: monster walks with a blue band
• 1 minute: plank

Cool down and stretch

After class I went home and watched Survivor (Yay! Survivor is back on!) and had a Medifast smoothie. Normally I use chocolate pudding for these, but this time I screwed it up and it was actually not bad. 

Medifast Dark Chocolate Smoothie
1 Package Brownie Soft Bake
1/2 cup cold water
1 1/2 cups crushed ice
1 Tbsp PB2 powdered peanut butter
1 Tbsp Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
1/2 tsp Vanilla extract
Put all ingredients in your blender (I use a Ninja). Blend the ever-loving heck out of it. Check consistency and add ice  if too thin, water if too thick. Pour into a glass and eat with a spoon or drink through a straw.

It was thinner and less 'creamy' than the pudding-based smoothies I make. I think I can revisit this though, and add light cream cheese to it to thicken it up and give it that dairy hit that it was missing. 

Ok, my first 'bad' week is over and done with on this plan. Time to keep working and erase this! I've got 5 weeks til PAX and 7 weeks til Geekway, and I want to be in better shape for both of them!

Frustrating day!

I weighed in this morning and was significantly up from yesterday, and about where I was a week ago. This was a pretty frustrating thing to wake up to.

So I thought back to what I'd done over the past few days... I worked out with weights, and ate extra protein. We'd traveled recently, had an out of town visit.

Also, I've got a little bit of a sore throat. And I ate more carbs than normal and wasn't exactly on plan.

All things put together... maybe sick, weight training, inexact diet... I'm probably holding onto water, even though I don't feel swollen.

So, today I'm going strict Medifast with a couple of enhancements. 25 calories of Laughing Cow in my macaroni. No snacks, no extra protein at work. I'll eat my Lean and Green before workout class and make sure everything is precisely measured and make sure not to use high-sodium additions.

And, even then, I'll just keep tracking. One backslide of a few pounds isn't the end, I was on 'foreign' scales for several days, as well, so there's really no good way to track anything with precision. So... I'll just keep tracking, go from here, see what happens. I'm still way ahead of schedule!