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%.

I took pictures again. While my measurements dropped drastically from the last 4 days, including 4.4 lbs weight loss the picture doesn’t show that much of a difference. I think I have finally managed to get a half decent 45 degree shot of me as well. The legs could look better but it’s definitely a change in the right direction. Actually in my profile pictures I have noticed that my posture has changed again and my spine is better aligned and straighter. I’ve always had a “hole” in my lower back and that seems to get smaller and smaller. When your gut is not pulling on it so much I guess it gets a chance to straighten out. I can feel my chest getting stronger and my “boobs” are sagging a little more. On guys that’s a good thing, once I lose all the fat out of them they should look fine. It’s only a matter of time. Until then here is my current update.

12/13/2009 Transformation Picture

Well I had skipped my cardio yesterday and I almost missed it today. I generally do my cardio in the evening after my kids go to sleep. On photo days it gets pushed back a bit later after I complete the photos for the blog entry. But tonight it got postponed even more.

My father-in-law is in town for the next three weeks, he arrived yesterday, but his luggage didn’t make it. So the airline said they would deliver it tonight between 5:00PM and 9:00PM. Sounds good, right? Well we get a call from the delivery company around 6:00PM that he’s on his way but he’s delivering several other luggage and he wouldn’t make it to us until around 10:30PM. At this point I’m getting a bit miffed but I think, sure that will still work, I just wait and do my cardio right after he gets here. I had to man the door as I told him not to ring as the kids were asleep. At 10:45PM I called the guy and he was nowhere near our place. So I knew he would interrupt my cardio, I just wasn’t going to wait any longer.

So I did my cardio starting at 11:00PM, the guy arrived around 11:15PM and my wife and father-in-law took care of the luggage. I was pretty pissed that I had to be up that long and wait for nothing. Had I known he was coming that late I would have done my cardio before then. Regardless, I did put in my one hour and that’s what matters.

Today I ate light on protein. It was not on purpose but I know the cause. I ate meatloaf for dinner instead of some kind of clean meat which is nowhere near as protein rich as a steak or piece of chicken is yet it’s just as calorie rich if not richer for the same weight. So there was the culprit. I also skipped my morning snack due to eating breakfast at 10. All in all I still managed to stay the course in terms of calories but it’s much harder when I have to do it with home cooking that might not be as clean as grilled chicken breast. My father-in-law is in town it’s going to be very interesting how I can stay the course with an extra person in the house eating something different than me.

Today started out as any other weekend. Late breakfast, skipping morning snack then lunch. I went easy on the breakfast and lunch and I was thinking I might have enough extra calories to throw in an evening snack and indulge in some chocolate. Well that didn’t happen. My wife made chicken in her signature paprika sauce and something else that I haven’t eaten in the past 7 weeks: spaetzle. Spaetzle is a German type of egg noodle/mini dumpling. It is very simple to make and all it takes is flour and eggs and water mixed together to a smoot consistency then it’s chopped into tiny bits over boiling water with a grate. I love this stuff but knowing that it’s essentially refined pasta I have been staying away from it. Plus I had to do the calorie calculation on it to figure out just how much of it I could really eat.

Well today I did the math. I added up the total calories of the ingredients (flour, eggs, oil) and then measured the complete bowl of finished spaetzle’s weight to take the absorbed water’s weight into account when measuring. The total mixture was right at 2,000 grams. And It had 2,000 calories in it. I figured it’s 100 calories per 100 grams, not too bad, I can easily eat 200 grams of it and still do pretty good. Well it turned out I was wrong. While I did measure the empty bowl for tare before measuring but I forgot to subtract it from the 2,000 grams. The bowl weighed 650 grams so the finished spaetzle was only 1,350 grams and still 2,000 calories. So for 200 calories I was only supposed to have 135 grams of it instead of the 200 that I already ate. Doh! It’s a good thing I ate light all day and even this miscalculation let me stay within my calorie budget. And thanks to the eggs my protein numbers stayed solid. So yeah, I couldn’t eat chocolate today again but at least I didn’t blow my diet with the spaetzle and my wife was pretty happy that I ate what she cooked, wel I actually made the spaetzle but she made the fantastic chicken in paprika sauce.

Today was a back day again. I didn’t feel very strong and I had a tough time with the chest supported rows. Life’s not easy on a calorie deficit…

Today’s eating went OK even with the couple of snags that I have hit. I forgot to pack my protein shake powder in the morning so I had to mooch off of a co-worker. Lucky for me there are two guys at work who also use protein supplements in their diet so they could help me out. But honestly, I’ll just take a stash of protein to work next week that way I always have it just in case I need it. I also ran out of Luna bars at work and forgot to take any new ones so I had to get a replacement from the grocery store at lunch. It was OK as I had to go to the bank anyway and I hat do get spinach for my spinach salad too so it was a three birds with one stone situation. I also bought a couple of bags of frozen vegetables while I was there and replenished my supplies at work. I should be set on veggies for the next week for lunch. All I need to bring is the meat and rice.

For dinner  was going to eat a burger patty with rice and vegetables but my wife said she made nothing for the rest of the family so she wanted to go out. Since I blew through most of my calories for the day by then and I only had about 410 calories left for dinner I was in a serious bind. But then I ended up being OK when we decided to go to the Chinese buffet that also serves Mongolian grill. I had the same thing I had last time: shrimp, mushrooms, bean sprouts and squash in teryaki sauce. My 18 month old daughter ate almost as much shrimp as I did, she really loves to eat whatever daddy is eating. It’s really great. My son battled with broccoli and green beans but it went better than usual, he actually ate most of it. All in all it was a good dinner. I closed with some fruits while my son had Jell-o and my daughter had tapioca pudding. My wife just got braces put on this week so for her it was a pretty painful experience as her entire mouth is in pain. She can’t really chew right now so she tried her luck with noodles and broccoli but had a tough time with it.

Today’s chest day was a bit weaker than the last one. I just didn’t really have the energy to go as strong as last time. But then again I know that building muscles and working strong is not going to happen on 1,700 calories a day. I’m just glad that I still have the muscles to do as much as I can.

Incline Press

• 1×10 @ 100lbs
• 2×10 @ 90lbs

Decline Press

• 1×10 @ 80lbs
• 2×10 @ 70 lbs