Greg's Running Blog

This week’s stats are amazing. I haven’t done anything different than last week but the numbers don’t lie. Or do they?

Weight, inches and fat started dropping off of me in the second half of the week. I’m not quite sure what happened, I ate my usual diet, I had pretty high sodium levels and overall I’m a bit surprised. In 8 days I have lost half an inch from my bicep, chest and thigh, a quarter of an inch from my calf and a whopping inch from my hips.

I’ve been fighting a cold the entire time and I still have a pretty bad sore throat. I hope it will pass in the next couple of days.

I have skipped cardio Saturday, I was too busy working on my blog that I forgot to work on my cardio. As always I made a commitment to make it up the next day but that did not happen either.

I also started wearing my size 38 jeans for the first time in years and I’m on the last notch of my smaller belt. I will have to buy a new belt pretty soon.

All in all I think it was a solid week with solid results. Net weight loss for the week: 4.6 lbs (2.1 kg). Fat percentage loss: 1.9%.

This week was spot on and rock solid. Nutrition was awesome with the exception of Monday that was low in protein and Saturday that was high in saturated fats. Other than that diet was great.

I have managed to stick to my workout schedule with cardio every day and strength training 5 times a week. I have started lifting heavier and lowering the reps. I think I will settle on 3×10 for now, 3×8 was just too much stress. My shoulder was a bit tender after both chest days so I will definitely have to keep an eye on it to make sure I don’t screw it up and put myself out of commission.

I have dropped from 221.3 lbs to 218.0 lbs this past week, a total of 3.3 lbs lost. I’m certainly sticking to the goal. I have lost a quarter inch from my thigh, and calf and half an inch from my chest, hips and neck. It has been a great week. My total weight loss from the beginning is 19 lbs so far.

Next week I don’t plan to change anything up, I think I will stick with the plan as it seems to be working.

Today I finally broke 100! No, I did not lose 100 lbs, luckily I don’t need to lose that much. But I broke the 100 kg (220.5 lbs) mark today. I have been hovering around 100 kg for the past week, I got as low as 100.1 on 11/30/2009 then again yesterday. And today I finally got under it. This morning I weighed in at 99.7 kg (219.8 lbs). I was pretty excited to see my weight in the double digits and out of the triples. Tonight it went up again over 100 but that is OK, it’s just water and food I had today. I really hope I will be able to keep it under 100 from now on. But if I see another 100+ number tomorrow morning I won’t get too discouraged. It’s only a number. And it’s only temporary. I know I will only do better.

This week was not perfect but pretty decent. I kind of fell off the wagon in terms of cardio over the holiday weekend, I skipped cardio on two days. I just couldn’t squeeze it in with all the other things that have been going on around the house with the kids, hanging Christmas lights on the house and just generally hanging out. I have also missed two strength workouts due to being off from work.

In terms of nutrition I think I stayed the course. It wasn’t easy with restaurant visits and friends trying to stuff you with all kinds of pies and yummy, sugary fattening stuff. I certainly have managed my diet well. Based on my fat loss so far I need to cut a bit more calories which will mean reworking some of my diet choices to reduce another 100 calories from it to keep the pounds falling off.

I dropped 2.9 lbs (1.3 kg) this week and I am just north of the magical 100 kg mark. I should be breaking that one sometime next week. My fat % went from 35.1% to 34.5% this week. It shows that I’m keeping on the lean mass and only losing the fat, which is a good thing. Next week I’ll try to be more diligent about the cardio workouts and I should be able to do all my strength exercise as well.

I have been working hard again this week, kept my focus and managed to stay on track. I did strength training all 5 weekdays and I have done cardio every day of the week. I have burned 6249 calories in cardio and it took 10 hours to burn it. I have lost 2 lbs (0.9 kg) this week which seems low considering the amount of calories I ate and the amount of work I put in. I’m not discouraged by this loss I’m just going to keep an eye on it. It can also mean that I’m either not counting my calories I eat right or my calories I’m burning right. Or it can also mean that my resting metabolic rate is much lower than I thought it was.

My BF% has dropped from 35.8% to 35.2% this week. It means that my lean mass has increased by 1.4 oz (40 g) this week which obviously can be water, not necessarily muscle.

I’m still pretty happy with my result, the scale is moving in the right direction, no doubt.

This is a new feature I’m adding today. I have been tracking some of my stats at home and I have decided to post a weekly status update for a more visual, for the left-brain people, representation of my progress. There are more stats to come, I just haven’t had time to populate the database yet.

It took me a while to figure it out and patch the plugin to manage multiple units for weight and length but I think it’s working for now. There are a couple more tweaks I’ll have to implement but I’ll cross those bridges as I get to them.