142.0 Re-assessment and Starting Strength!

I have a teensy bit of bad news but a whole lot of good news to share today.  First, the bad--I've only lost 1.8 lbs since the end of May.  That's entirely because of a 10 day vacation in Colorado Jack and I took at the end of June, plus a long, binge-y 4th of July weekend.  The good news is, I lost it all in less than a week!  And today I'm lighter than before we left on the trip (142.8).  So that's something.

But I have even more exciting news: this week I started to lift heavy.  Yes heavy, like in the weight room alongside the wannabee Arnolds, taking a 45-lb bar, putting plates on it, and lifting it.  The idea seed of lifting was planted in my mind a couple months ago I think, around the time I had my fitness "revelation."  Ever since then, the pull towards it has gotten stronger every day and I began to get more and more bored and annoyed with the classes I was attending at the gym that focused on high rep with low weight.  I decided to begin Starting Strength, a widely recognized lifting program developed by Mark Rippetoe which is highly recommended for beginners/novices.  In the program, you lift three days a week, doing pretty much just the basic lifts, like squats, deadlifts, benchpress, and overhead press.  Later you add stuff like power cleans and pull ups but I haven't gotten there yet--kinda scared actually.  For each lift, you only do 3 sets of 5 reps, but the point of the program is that every workout, you add 2.5, 5, or 10 lbs to what you lifted the last time.  At first I was incredulous; I mean, how can that be possible??  I've gone to strength training twice a week for over a year and I've barely budged from squatting 30 lbs, right??  Well after doing research and coming to find that many, many people have vouched for the fact that you can, and will progress that much that quickly on this program, I starting getting excited about it and decided to give it a shot.  Here are my starting weights for all of the lifts included in this first phase of the program (which I think I will do for about a month):

Squat: 65 lb
Deadlift: 75 lb
Overhead Press: 30 lb
Bench Press: 45 lb

So yeah, I'm not quite at the bar for OHP but I plan to be tomorrow.  My goal right now is to squat my body weight by the end of July!  (or around there...)

More good news--I had good results on my re-assessment today.  The last one I had was May 20, and I've lost .25-.5 inches everywhere on my body but my bust!  That's a score I'd say!  :)

Shoulders: 39.75/-.5/-9
Chest: 36.5/0/-7
Waist: 32/-.5/-8
Hips: 37.25/-.25/-4.25
Thigh: 19.5/-.5/-3
Arm: 10.5/-.5/-1.5
BF%: 24/-1.7/-11

Taking my good feelings and positive vibes and sending them out to y'all via internets!!  Cheers! :)

143.8 Lost 4.2 Lbs in May!

I lost 4.2 net lbs in May--I haven't been able to make a statement like that in months!!  I'm so ecstatic that my weight loss is back on track.

Diet update: It's the 16th day of my diet (not counting Memorial Day Weekend) and I've lost 5.2 lbs so far.  In my last post, I said that when I weighed myself on Tuesday after Memorial Day, I hoped to be no more than 145, and that's exactly what I was!  Following the same pattern as last week (odd), I stayed that same weight until Thursday, then went down .6 pounds on Friday and again today.  So really I only lost 0.6 lbs since last week, but it's not too bad considering the holiday.

Last night there were tornados in our area.  After hearing sirens, Jack and I brought the cats down to our creepy dirt floor basement and stayed there for about a half hour until we were in the clear.  While it was very gusty with severe thunderstorms outside our house, we did not witness an actual tornado.  I found out later, however, that there was a lot damage to houses and other buildings, as well as terrible accidents on the highway (a couple semis overturned) not 10 minutes from where we live.  We were very lucky!

Not much going on this weekend, although Jack's birthday is this Tuesday so we may go somewhere to celebrate tomorrow.  Cheers!

144.4 Re-Assessment and Diet Update

Check it out, I'm under my "Goal Weight"!  To think I sat on a platuea for four whole months when all it took was a week and a half to slash those few pounds.

Today is the 11th day of my diet and I've lost 4.6 lbs.  This week was a little disheartening at first, because Tuesday through Thursday I stayed at 145.8 lbs.  Then magically this morning the scale revealed to me that I had lost 1.4 lbs!

Doing this diet really hasn't been hard, and bringing my calories up to maintenance on the weekends definitely helps keep it realistic and reasonable, and keeps me sane.  I haven't even been that hungry--it only took a couple days for my body to adjust to the decrease in calories.  Things might get sketchy the next few days because of Memorial Day Weekend, however...we are leaving town tonight and not coming back until Monday evening.  I think I will try to stay at my maintenance calories without using My Fitness Pal since I've sort of gotten a feel for how much food/drinks that is.  I just feel like when I use it around other people, it makes me seem antisocial (mainly because it usually takes me a while to find something on there that's similar enough to what we're actually eating).  If I'm lucky, the scale won't go above 145 Tuesday morning.

Some more good news--I'm back to getting re-assessments at the gym!  It turns out my old trainer Ashley was wrong (or lieing?) about how you are allowed a limited number of free assessments.  I was talking to another trainer there last week and she said you can keep doing them forever if you want!  So I set up an appointment with her this past Tuesday and we will start back up monthly.  Here are the results; I've lost quite a few inches since my last one in November, especially in my waist (increase in arms is due to biceps):

Shoulders: 40/-2/-8.5
Chest: 36.5/-1.75/-7
Waist: 32.5/-3.75/-7.5
Hips: 37.55/-1.75/-4
Thigh: 20/-1.25/-2.5
Arm: 11/+.25/-1
BF%: 25.7/-3.1/-9.3

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!  For me it's just about to start :)

146.0 Complete Diet/Workout Overhaul

World, I have something very exciting to share with you...ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!!  I have finally started to overcome my plateau.  It's all because of two things: clearing up some serious confusion I had about weight loss, and deciding to just man the frick up and cut my calories.

For the past three or four months, I hadn't lost any weight.  I'd been training pretty hard at the gym, and keeping track of my calories on My Fitness Pal, but the thing is, I didn't really care if I went over my calorie goal for the day...like ever (and I'm talking upwards of 500 calories per day...it had calculated a 500 calorie deficit for me, so now it seems pretty obvious to me why I was staying the same weight--I was just eating at maintenance!).  The reason I was eating so much was because any time I got the slightest pang of hunger, I would immediately eat something because I was afraid I would lose muscle, that my body would "burn my muscle for energy."  OH MY GOD, where did I get that idea and why is it being spread to the masses??  What sad and unfortunate misinformation.  Basically I had this fear that if I didn't "feed my muscles," then all the time I spent in the gym doing strength training would be all for nothing, a complete waste of my time.

Thank sweet Jesus I somehow stumbled across Lyle McDonald's website www.bodyrecomposition.com and educated myself!  After reading a bunch of his articles and doing further research as well, I realized that as long as I get enough protein (about 100 g per day) and do strength training a couple times per week, I can cut my calories, even very severely, and lose fat without losing muscle.  That means that when I'm sitting at my desk at work and my tummy's growling at 9 am even though I just ate breakfast a couple hours ago, I can pull through til lunch knowing I'm burning fat instead of muscle!  Seriously, I can deal with hunger as long as I know that fat is being burned.  This is a huge breakthrough for me.

So.  I made some changes on My Fitness Pal so that my daily calorie deficit would be 700 calories and decided to actually stick with this calorie restriction, no going over.  I also decided to really cut back on my cardio, changing my daily run to 30 minutes of fast walking or walking uphill on the treadmill along  with my strength training twice a week (research also guided me to the conclusion that high intensity cardio helps a lot with overall fitness, but not necessarily fat loss).  According to the math, considering that a pound = 3,500 calories, I would lose a pound per week if I followed this strictly on weekdayss then let myself slide a bit (just to maintenance) on the weekends.  Well...I started this on Tuesday at 149 lbs and today I am 146, meaning I lost 3 lbs in just 4 days!  Not really sure what's up with that since it doesn't follow the math, except that it might be water weight loss (Lyle McDonald said that when people first go on a diet they lose a lot of water weight...I didn't think that would apply to me but maybe it does since I've been on a plateau for so long).

Anyway, the plan is to keep this going until I'm happy with the amount of fat that I've lost, then I will bring my calories back up to maintenance and go back to high intensity training.  At that point, an indefinite plateau would be just fine with me!  :)

By the way, on Wednesday I went swimsuit shopping, to much success I believe.  Here's the one I decided on:

I think it's pretty flattering, but it will look even better on me once I've lost that belly fat...not to mention once I get a tan!  :p  I will update again in a week about how this diet is going.  Now I'm going to go enjoy the beautiful weather!  Jack and I are going to take a nice long hike.  :)

148.0 It's Been a Year!

Then (March 2010) and Now

Happy 1st Birthday to you, Blog.  It's been a year and I've lost over 40 lbs!  Of course I'm not at the goal weight that the name of this blog suggests, but I've succeeded at getting to what I believe is a "normal" weight for my body--the weight I seem to settle into when I'm healthy.  For the last few months I haven't really lost any weight (even though I gave up all added sugar for the month of April...well I may have cheated a bit with that), and my belly fat is stubbornly sticking around.  It's May and I do not have that "bikini body" of which I spoke in a recent post, but as you can see in the above photo, how I look now in a swimsuit is comparable to how I looked before I gained all the weight.  Back when I was overweight I would sometimes look wistfully at that photo and wish I was that skinny again.  I don't know how much I weighed in the "before" photo, but I think it was between 145 and 150.  I think I look a little different now (especially in the tummy) but not necessarily better or worse.  I do have some abs now, which I think you can sort of see, even under that layer of fat.  I know I'm being a bit down on myself, but I'm getting so sick of that "donut" that's stuck around all my life and just won't take the hint that it's not wanted!  Donut, it's not me, IT'S YOU.

However, I've been wondering whether it's me or the donut that's failing at getting flat abs.  Am I doing something wrong?  Is there something I should be cutting out of my diet (clearly cutting out sugar didn't  really help...although I did still eat a lot of fruit)?  Or is it just my body that won't let go of this last artifact of overweight me?  Perhaps my own body is thwarting my efforts?  I don't know.  I know that in general it seems to me like I eat way too much, but I'm hungry all the time.  Yesterday, for example, I  was snacking on something every hour or so because my tummy kept growling and wouldn't shut up!  I probably consumed almost 3,000 calories yesterday.  Sometimes I ask myself if I should cut back on my workouts, especially strength training, and cut my calories with it, but I immediately erase that thought from my head because it sounds awful!  Besides slimming down, I'm really trying to get fit.  To add to the confusion, I've heard conflicting theories on strength training and weight loss; my "personal trainer" at the gym told me that it would speed up my metabolism, causing me to lose fat more quickly, but recently I read online that it's impossible to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, and that you should try to lose the fat through cardio first before starting a strength training regimen.

I don't know, let's change the subject.  A couple weeks ago I cut all my hair off!  Here's another "before and after" pic--

I'm loving my new style.  I was getting so sick of that long stringy hair!  I donated it to Locks of Love of course.  The bangs do get a bit annoying (I hate the feeling of hair in my face), but recently I got some Bumble and Bumble Sumowax pomade and it helps a lot with keeping my hair in place.

One more pic in spirit of the Kentucky Derby today--

That's me and a friend at Derby-themed party in Fall 2009.  Isn't my hat amazing??  My mom made it :)

PS--No I did not forget that I said I would go bikini shopping in May.  I plan to go sometime this week and will post a pic of the one I decide on.  Have a good Cinco de Mayo!  I will be indulging in some homemade tacos and fresh margaritas tomorrow ;)

150.4 Lost Some, Gained Some, Lost Some More

I lost 7.8 lbs in January, ending up at 149.2, but then on February 1st Jack and I left on a trip to LA and Phoenix for a week, and of course I gained a little weight.  I had fun though!  :)  When I weighed myself the day after we got back, I was only 150.8, but then the next few days I slowly gained a little more weight until I was up to 152.2.  But then the other day I got back down to 150.4!  Aren't I a great story teller??

Anyway, it was a great trip.  The pic on the right is of us in the Hollywood hills, and you can see downtown LA in the distance (blanketed in smog!!!).  From LA we drove to Phoenix (a great drive in our mustang convertible rental car!) and the pic on the left is of us at the Desert Botanical Garden there.

Hopefully I at least have a little net weight loss in February! Until next time!

149.2 It's 2013! New Mission...

I'm back!  I feel guilty for taking so long to update, but it's been hard enough lately just to get everything else done in one day that I need to.  But, since this blog is called 145 by 2013, I thought I should at least let everyone know if I met my goal!  Clearly I did not, but I'm very close.  Actually in the beginning of January I weighed 157, which is about the same I'd weighed since November (I didn't really lose any weight in November or December for some reason), but then, magically, a few days later I suddenly lost 5 lbs overnight!  And I've continued to lose more weight in the last couple weeks.  So far I've lost almost 8 lbs in January!  I'm currently a size 8 and working my way towards size 6.

The most confusing part about this is, I've actually been taking it easy this month.  I haven't been working out as much (usually 3-4 times per week) and I've been less careful about what I eat.  In fact, the night before I lost 5 lbs, I ate a bunch of donuts!  I'm trying not to look too much into this (it's tempting to think things like, "maybe I'll lose more weight if I just don't work out") and just keep doing what feels right.  Because doing what I feel like seems to be working best for me this month!

The pictures above are of me and Jack on New Years Eve and me before my interview at an optometry school the Friday before last (I was accepted, by the way!).  I have another interview in Phoenix a week from this Tuesday--I'm very excited for that because I've never been there and it looks like the weather is going to be great.

So.  I know my goal was to weigh 145 lbs, but when I look in the mirror, I feel like I look like I'm a bit more than 4 lbs from my true goal, which is to look good in a bikini!  As I think I've mentioned before in this blog, my actual weight is not as important to me as what I see in the mirror.  Therefore, my new mission for 2013 is to have a flat tummy by May!  That gives me 3 months, and by then I will have had this blog for 1 full year.

Alright then...here's to going swimsuit shopping and walking away feeling good!!