Weekly Status, Week 32
It’s been over seven months since I have started this journey and I have been tweaking my transformation and modifying my plan along the way to get to where I am today. This week’s update also brings some changes.
1) I am no longer going to track waist size. My waist hasn’t changed a bit in the last 3 weeks. I’m still measuring 33″ (84 cm) around the navel and I’m wearing size 31 waist pants that are now getting a bit lose. But I think my waist size is stabilizing so there is really no point in charting it any more.
2) I am no longer going to track body fat percentage and lean body mass. Unfortunately my trusty scale that I had been using all along is now giving me grief. It actually has been giving me grief for the past two weeks where it puts up “Err.” instead of giving me an estimated body fat percentage. It is still accurately measures my body weight but I just can’t rely on the body fat percentage numbers any more. This morning it told me I’m 23% body fat which is clearly ridiculous. If I’m over 13% I’d be very surprised. Since I no longer have an accurate, not that it has been all that accurate lately, method to measure body fat I will no longer measure it or post the data as it would be mostly wrong. I know where I’m heading and I know that I’ll see it when I get there. Until then there is really no need to measure it with an estimate that is not right.
3) The daily calorie chart might show blanks. As you can see there is no chart for last Monday in the calorie chart. The reason being is that I simply stopped counting calories for the bigger part of the day. I ate pretty good but I just couldn’t get myself to log everything and measure every single potato chip that I consumed by the poolside on Memorial Day. So there might be days from now on when calories won’t get counted nor posted. I still feel like I need to track my calories if I want to shed the last couple of pounds but if I skip for a day it’s not like I would gain it all back so I will allow myself cheat days or days where I just don’t track.
With all these changes in effect my week still wrapped up nicely. I have lost 1lbs (0.4 kg) on the rolling average scale which I’m happy about. Average caloric intake was significantly higher this week than any other previous weeks. Not including Monday, I have averaged 2,644 calories per day with 141 grams of protein. The interesting thing about these two numbers is that 2,644 calories sounds like a ton of food but when you put it in perspective with respect to the amount of exercising I have done it’s not bad. The other interesting thing is that while i used to eat 40 grams of protein supplements daily before to achieve 140 grams of daily protein at the beginning of my diet, now I’m struggling to keep it under 140 grams without eating anything but whole foods. I love meat and I have no problem with keeping protein at a high level. It’s actually a bit too high for me with all the running, I should be eating a bit more carbohydrates instead. Regardless, it was a good week in terms of eating. It’s quite amazing that I had 800 calories more per day this week than I had when I was in the beginning phase of my transformation and ate 1,800 calories a day.
I don’t feel like talking about strength training this week as it has been non-existent. I really need to quit socializing at lunch and head for the gym instead. I’m also thinking about buying a pull-up bar for home so I can just crank out my upper body workout at home without the gym if I need it.
I have been concentrating on my running exclusively this week. I have broke 600 miles ran for the year and I also broke 45 miles ran for the week, the most I’ve done in a single week. I actually ran 45.3 miles (73 km) this week and I feel fantastic about it. I have also started tracking my mileage and workouts on dailymile.com. It’s another venue for me to find active runners in my community and for others to keep tabs on my workouts. I still have the lot more technical runs.gregstransformation.com database running which not only lists my runs but it shows my logged data for every run. I also had my first group run this week which was great! I really enjoyed running with the pack on the weekend and I will do a lot more of that in the future.
I’m very pleased with the way my week turned out, a couple more of these and I’m right where I want to be!
