Greg's Weight Loss Blog

It’s a bit belated on the status update but I assure you it’s accurate and to the point. So let’s get through the raw numbers real quick just so we’re up to speed on my transformation.

As you can see my calories look pretty decent for the week considering I was out of town for the weekend. The Friday binge can be explained with my purposeful carbohydrate loading that I was doing for the Saturday morning 10K that I ran. More on that later. The very same race is the reason why there was no running or exercise logged for Friday either, it was a rest day before the race. Average caloric intake for the week comes in at 1,890 calories with 123 grams of protein which is right where I want to be at this point in my transformation.

My weight has still been on a steady decline even though the weekend really did a number on my weight due to excess sodium and the carbohydrate loading of Friday that caused me to retain more water than usual. My rolling average indicates a 1.7 lbs (0.8 kg) loss for the week which I will gladly take. The days of 2 lbs weekly loss are gone but I’m perfectly happy with where I’m at right now.

Running was great all week, I even did a 6.2 mile run while out of town on Sunday. I have ran 28.9 miles and burned 3,541 calories which is very similar to the mileage and calories burned on my 5K race week two weeks ago. It averages out to 506 calories a day. I only did one strength training on Wednesday and my chest is really sore from it. I think I tore it up pretty bad so I’m taking it easy for the next couple of days until I think I’m back to normal.

Based on the numbers of 1,890 calories in with a 506 calorie daily cardio output and 1.7 lbs of weight loss which translates to 5,950 weekly, 850 calories of deficit daily my calculated BMR is 2,234 calories. Again, this is right in line with the guides. I either cheat on every number or I’m hitting them pretty close to reality. I chose to believe the latter as I have no reason not to.

All in all I think my weight loss is right on track even if it’s slowing down lately. Looking at where I came from and where I’m going I have absolutely no problem with the slowing down, I actually feel pretty darn good about the whole thing overall.

Here is another installment of “Greg in his underwear”. This picture looks worse than the last one and there is a reason for it. I was carb loading in this picture meaning I was eating excess amounts of carbohydrates on Friday. The reason was that I have a race on Saturday and I wanted my glycogen stores to be at least somewhat full so I would stand a better chance at running a decent race pace. When you load up with carbohydrates the muscles also tend to absorb water along with the glycogen so they look fuller and I look bigger. This is why my abdomen area looks less defined and this is why I look overall more pudgy than I did in the last set of photos. My measurements are very close to the last set, I’m down to 12.75″ on the flexed bicep which is another 0.25″ lost and my chest is down to 38.50″, another half an inch dropped. Everything else is the same as it was 4 days ago.

04/16/2010 Transformation Picture

I’m out of town for the weekend until Tuesday night so the weekly status update, my Friday photo update and some other things will have to wait. I’m also flying solo without aid while I’m out of town with the family and eating out every meal for the entire 4 day weekend. I’ll report back about my weekend and my usual posts as soon as I can!

Tuesday was my very first track day. Up until this point I have been running on bike trails and residential streets in my neighborhood. It has been working out great for me, I just drive up to the trail head and go for a run or walk out the front door and off I go. But Tuesday’s prescribed training was my very first interval training day. Until now, Hal Higdon’s Advanced Spring Training plan was calling for hill intervals on Tuesdays and I have been doing them religiously on the treadmill at work or at home in front of my neighborhood on a 3% incline.

But this Tuesday it said I was supposed to run 200 meter intervals, 16 of them to boot. That sounds like a whole heck of a lot of running. 16 200 meter intervals are 3,200 meters, 2 miles by themselves. That does not sound all that daunting. But when you consider that you have to run them pretty darn fast and you have to jog an additional 200 meters between every single one of them for cool down the distance just doubled to 4 miles. Then you add in a mile and a half of warm up and another mile and a half for cool down and you’re up to 7 miles, 2 of which are at a brutal fast pace.

So my first quest of the day was to locate a track. There is a track at the local university where the local running club actually meets every Tuesday at 6:00PM. I was thinking about going there, and hopefully meeting some other runners. But that track is a bit out of my way so I was looking for a closer alternative. There are actually two tracks in my local school district, one is at the high school and the other one is at the middle school. The high school one is closer but it’s closed. The middle school one is a bit further but it is open to the public any time. Perfect!

So after work, I went straight to the track. When I showed up around 5:30, there were three kids there running on the astroturf in the middle but they were mostly just chatting. I started running my warm-up laps and by the time I was done they were gone. I did a good bit of stretching afterward and I started running my 200 meter intervals. The first one felt great but my enthusiasm and effort quickly declined after the first one. The plan called for an 800m race pace effort, which for me is around 5:39 minutes/mile. I ran every single one of them way faster than this.

As I was running the intervals a couple more people showed up and they started walking/jogging/running around the track. None of them were what you would consider elite athletes, they were there to lose weight or get their daily basic cardio exercise in. I look at folks like them with a completely different eye now. Before I was thinking they’re just wasting their time and why would anyone walk around in circles? But now I think that they’re making a difference in their lives and it’s great to see more and more people outside getting or staying in shape.

I actually talked with one of them, a man in his 60s who was still running 25+ miles a week, and he told me that he used to be pretty darn fast and could run 5 minute miles when he was in his 40s. Looking at my interval times you can tell that I can barely run that pace for 200 meters, 1/8th of a mile. We had a good 20 minute conversation after my run and cool-down and I’m sure I’ll see him at the track next week.

Even though the training felt pretty brutal and I was close to full exhaustion I’m actually really looking forward next week’s intervals, that time they’ll be 10x400m.

Last Sunday I had my usual weekly long run but it was anything but usual. There were a lot of firsts on this run and I have enjoyed every one of them.

First of all, this was my first long run that I would actually start considering long. Up until now my longest run has been 9 miles. My Sunday run was a whopping 10.7 miles (17 km). This I would consider a long run. It  went really well, I have managed to run 10.7 miles in 1 hour 29 minutes and 55 seconds for an average pace of 8:24 minutes/mile. It was also my fastest long run by 5 seconds in terms of mile pace.

This was also my first run when I did not run alone. Sure, I have seen other people running before, I’d wave at them on the trail but I never ran with anyone else for a run. This time I ran with a co-worker. He is training for a marathon race in May and he’s well into his training which included a really long run for this weekend. He had to run 20 miles while my schedule called for 10. Running with someone was definitely interesting and great fun. Time goes a lot faster when you can chat with someone and discuss a lot of running stories or ask each others’ opinion about stuff. We also talked about non-running related topics and I think I got to know him better on the run as well. This is the beauty of a long run. It’s long and you have to run it at a conversational pace so you have time and energy to chat. Luckily we are very well matched in pace so we could run together just fine. I just wish I could find someone else to run with on a regular basis, he lives in Canada and he’s only down here two weeks at a time and then he goes back for two weeks. Maybe I’ll start looking for a running buddy at the running store although running seems to be a loner sport.

The fact that my co-worker had to run 20 miles and I had to run 10 caused another first. I had been running on loops and out and back courses. But this time I ran a one way run. We met at the trail head then drove his car to the other end and we ran to my car. I jumped in my car and drove home while my buddy had to run back to his car to cover another 10.7 miles. This setup worked out excellent for me and my co-worker listened to some tunes on the way back. It was also a great way to respect the distance a bit more as I was driving back to the other trail head I really got a feel to just how long 10 miles really is. It feels pretty long even in a car let alone running. I also lucked out on the elevation lottery as the run had ups and downs but overall I have lost 180 ft of elevation. Had I run the other way I would have ended up gaining that same 180 ft of elevation.

So you might wonder where I would find a 10 mile long trail. Actually it is a 20 mile long trail with a couple intermediate trail heads along the way. It’s called the Lake Mineral Wells Trailway. It was the first time I have actually ran this trail. It’s on the remaining bed of an abandoned railroad track which means it is relatively flat and the elevation chart is super smooth. There are no sudden hills or high climbs just some gradual elevation change that lasts miles at a time and is barely noticeable. Was it not for my heart rate monitor I would not have noticed that my effort was changing between climbs and descents. While the trail is not only nicely graded it is gravel which is a lot easier on your feet than concrete. I really liked the trail, I think I’ll use it for my future long runs too and I might take the family out there for a bike ride or two.

Overall I had a great time on this long run and I can’t wait to do it again. This coming weekend I’m running a 10K race so I won’t be doing a long run but I’ll be sure to come back at a later time.

I took the 4 day photos again. As far as looks go, they’re close to the last set with a bit more definition going on pretty much everywhere. I can see it in the triceps, hams, back and abs. It is true, that the closer you get to lean the quicker you see the changes in definition. I still have about 8 lbs (3.5 kg) to go but I think these last 8 lbs will be the most interesting in terms of visual change. My measurements haven’t changed much. I have also done a 3-point caliper measurement on myself and I’m coming in at 14% with it. I’m getting better at using the caliper and getting more consistent results. It’ clear to me at this point that my BF scale is more of a BS scale. The scale is telling me I’m still 20.6% BF but there is no way that it’s even remotely correct.

04/12/2010 Transformation Picture

I’m getting really tired. Tired of not sleeping enough and tired of eating 1,800 calories. I have been very strict on this diet and I’m getting so close to my target weight. But lately it is becoming a chore to eat at my diet level. With all the running I’m just “hungry like the wolf”. But I still managed to eke out a decent week in terms of diet so I don’t have that much to complain about.

I have averaged 1,852 calories a day for the week which is not that bad. I had one low day and several higher days over 1,900 calories. I definitely feel like I’m easing up on the diet even if the numbers show otherwise. Protein wise I have eaten 119 grams on average which is the lowest number I’ve had since Week 10. I have actually slowed down with the protein shakes, I don’t have one every afternoon and as you can see I’m eating more and more carbohydrates. I’m trying to limit my fat intake and some days it works some days it doesn’t.

I’m particularly happy with how the weekend turned out. On Saturday we went to a big party with 60+ people and everyone brought cookies, coffee cakes and the like but I stuck with my diet and had none of the sweets and only a handful of the savory snacks which were all home baked goods. Then after the party we went to a birthday party with my kids and I resisted any and all temptation over there too, I had nothing to eat or drink. Then we ended up going to Macaroni Grill for dinner before we headed out to see John Bon Jovi at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.

At Macaroni Grill I ate a whole bread, 510 calories, but it was OK. I had very little food up until this point so I could afford to pig out on the bread plus I knew I was going to do a long run Sunday morning and I needed the extra carbohydrates. But after eating that much bread I went with their new dish, the Aged Beef Tenderloin Spiedini. It was basically a couple of pieces of beef tenderloin and roasted vegetables with some roasted potato. It was a total of 410 calories, low on fat and great on taste. It was an awesome meal! I’m so happy to see that Macaroni Grill is offering entrees like these. The really weird thing though was that while the steak only had 620 mg of sodium, the chicken version had more than twice that much. It’s a good thing I had the beef, especially after that peasant bread that was smothered with salt.

So I had my long run of 10.7 miles on Sunday morning and overall I ran 37.7 miles (60 km) this week. It was a great week with lots of hard workouts. It was one of the hardest weeks so far and the one with certainly the most mileage. This was the last week with hill training, starting next week I’m heading to the track for speed work instead. I have burned a total of 4,367 calories this week, an average of 624 calories a day but most of the calories came on Tuesday from the hill training and from Sunday’s long run. Combine the daily average of calories burned with the 1,852 calories in and you get 1,228 net calories a day. I have lost 1.8 lbs (0.8 kg) this week which means I have lost 6,300 calories, that’s 900 calories a day bringing my calculated BMR to 2,128 calories. It seems to be correct.

I didn’t work out as much as I should have, Friday was just too hectic and I didn’t have time at lunch and I had to leave on time to take my son to soccer in the afternoon. Bottom line, I only lifted weights once instead of twice last week.

All in all I think it was another pretty successful week. I’m getting a bit worn out by the whole process, I feel like I need a bit of rest and a bit more calories to sustain my running. But just as much as I’d like to slow down I’d also like this thing to be over with so instead of dragging it out longer I’ll just keep my focus and determination for another 5-6 weeks and call it done after that.

• Bought new clothes yesterday again. Shorts: Size Small, Shirts: Size Medium. It's ridiculous that I'm running out of sizes on the other end. #

Well this photo update didn’t quite make it on the site in time (the date is set back, but it wasn’t posted until much later). I’ve been extremely busy but I still managed to take the pictures on 4/8/10 just as I promised to myself, but they never quite made it on the blog the same day. These pictures are actually looking pretty darn good now! My ribcage is starting to show more and more, I can see more and more veins, even in my upper legs now. As far as dimensions go, everything is down from the last set by 0.25-0.5″ which is great. I’ll just have to keep at it for the final 10 lbs to go. I’m getting so close, I can almost taste it!

04/08/2010 Transformation Picture

It’s no secret that I have been tracking my calories since day one of my transformation very diligently and based on the results I’d say with great accuracy and success. When I started I was going to do a simple diet that was going to contain the same food every day. This would have meant no worries about counting calories, you set up the menu once then you keep eating the same thing over and over again until the cows come home. It is a great method to stay on track but it’s also a great method to fall off the wagon due to utter boredom with food. Just because I’m eating at a caloric deficit it doesn’t mean I didn’t want to eat a variety of foods and enjoy the occasional indulgences. And eating the sam thing day in day out is not something that can be sustained for a lifetime. So I had to use a different approach.

I knew if I wanted to eat a wide variety of food items I could not rely on memory and estimation alone to ensure that I’d say within my daily calorie allocation. I had to track it. Luckily there is an abundance of information and websites available on-line that help you with tracking your caloric use. There are even iPhone apps that will do it for you. Since I don’t have an iPhone that was not an option for me. The website choices are abundant, there are plenty of free ones and there are plenty of pay ones.

I have stumbled upon myfooddiary.com somehow and I found the site very intuitive and easy to use. It was relatively easy to use and had a great user interface. It also allowed me to add customized food items and recipes to my profile which was great as I could add all my wife’s home made recipes to it and still enjoy home cooked meals every once in a while once I figured out how many calories they contained. Myfooddiary.com is a pay site that charges $9/month for their service to keep track of your food items. They also have great charting features, progress reports and handy little smiley faces and frowns for things you ate during the day.

For example, if you start your day with a high fiber breakfast it rewards you with a smiley face for the day. But if you eat too much saturated fat you get a frown. It’s a great motivator but I’m not sure I agree with all the smileys and frowns. For example, if you eat a nice shrimp and veggie stir-fry with half a pound of shrimp you will end up getting a big fat frown for the day for going over the cholesterol limit. I think it’s stupid, there is no study that links food cholesterol to blood cholesterol, really. So go ahead, eat all those eggs, you’ll be fine. You also get a frown if you eat, what the software considers, too much protein. I have hit that wall on numerous occasions with some nice red frown faces. But the software simply follows the USDA recommended servings and ratios so I can’t really fault it for these minor things. All in all I was very happy with the way it tracked my calories.

But there was one thing with it that it simply did not do. There was no way for me to look up dates when I ate something last. This was frustrating because sometimes I was curious about when the last time was I had a cookie or when I had red meat last time. I couldn’t do it. I have asked their customer support about this feature and they told me it would not happen in the foreseeable future as their improvements are all planned out in advance and it’s not on the near future plan.

There is one other issue with these on-line tracking systems. If you quit paying your dues all your data goes bye-bye. So it seemed like I was on the hook forever, unless I was ready to give up my precious nutrition data that I oh so diligently logged into the system. They provided no means to back it up or export it.

So I started to look for alternatives, I was thinking about having some kind of web app running on my own server to log my food diary, it could not be all that hard to write something like this, but I hate to reinvent the wheel so I figured someone must have done it already. And I was right. There were open source web applications that already did calorie tracking on your own server with your own database. But they didn’t even come close to the detail and sophistication of myfooddiary.com. Then I finally found an open source app that actually does everything that myfooddiary does and then some!

Say hello to CRON-o-Meter. CRON-o-Meter is an open source multi-platform application that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes pre-loaded with the entire USDA food database and you can add your own custom foods as you need them. It also does a heck of a lot better job with setting up portions for your food items. One of my major gripes with myfooddiary.com was that you could only set up one unit of measure for every food item and most foods should have more than one unit of measure. Sometimes I measure my veggies by the cup, sometimes I weigh it on the scale. Sometimes I want a tablespoon of flour, sometimes I want to use two cups of the stuff. With myfooddiary.com this was not possible. But CRON-o-Meter handles units just the way the USDA defines it which is awesome. So I have decided to give CRON-o-Meter a test run.

I’m happy to report that I have been using CRON-o-Meter for my nutritional tracking for a month now, and it works great! I can log all my food items the way I want to, I have built custom recipes with it and I can enter all my custom foods with different units of measurement. And best of all, it’s free! So what’s the catch then?

Well, the biggest issue was, how was I going to save my data from myfooddyary.com? Luckily they provide a daily detail page that lists all the food items for that day with nutrient breakdown in a tabulated format. I had to manually copy/paste every day into a spreadsheet but now I have extracted all my data for myself, stored on my home PC. I had to write some Excel macros to be able to convert and format the data but even with the over 1,500 items of food that I had consumed over my 4 month myfooddiary.com tenure it was a relatively painless task.

The only drawback to CRON-o-Meter is that it lacks the nice charts and statistical summaries that were present in myfooddiary. But since I’m only really interested in daily total calories and macronutrient distribution, I just copy those over into an Excel spreadsheet and I can produce the pretty charts myself. I have actually been doing that since the end of January so it wasn’t that big of a deal to keep doing it. Now, CRON-o-Meter still doesn’t provide a search feature in historical data, ie. the last time I had candy but I now keep a food diary in Excel that is just a copy of the daily food items from CRON-o-meter. And Excel allows a quick search of this data which is great. And this way all my data is mine, on my PC and I can data mine it all day long any way I want to.

This all might sound like a ton of work but it really isn’t. Once you get the system down, logging your calories really becomes second nature and takes hardly any time at all. And while I used to do every single meal as I consumed it, now I just enter them all in bulk as I’m getting pretty good at keeping a mental count of my daily calories. When you do it as long as I have been doing, you just look at a slice of whole wheat bread and you know that you’re looking at 100 calories worth of complex carbs with a couple grams of protein and fat.

Bottom line is, myfooddiary.com out, CRON-o-meter in! My monthly subscription on myfooddiary is expiring in 3 days and I’m certainly canceling it. It helped me tremendously but had I known about CRON-o-Meter from day one I would have just used it instead.