I had some ideas about what to use my geekhive.com site for but they’ve been on the back burner. To be honest I lack the time, energy, motivation, etc to piss around with web coding.
In the absence of anything useful to use my site for I think I’ll get back to good old fashioned blogging. The topic of the blog will be weight and how I intend to shift it – a chronicle of my attempt to get healthy.
As of right now I weigh approximately 185lbs and I’m 5’4″ tall. My BMI is 31.8 which puts me almost 2 points into the obesity category. I quit smoking about 2 and a half years ago and put on a few pounds. Since quitting smoking I’ve found myself feeling a lot more healthy but I really want to shift the weight. A secret goal of mine is to not only be more physically fit but also able to get up and go for a run at the drop of a hat.
A running program will come later – right now I need to identify my key areas of improvement and come up with a realistic starting point to a healthier lifestyle. If anyone has any suggestions or has successfully reached a healthy lifestyle goal then I’m all ears. You can comment at geekhive.com or, if you’re reading this on Facebook, comment on the FB note comments.
Thanks.
Image below is not me :p
4 Comments
I lost a few pounds over the last several years. My experience has been consistent with the common-sense view of losing weight: exercise, eat well. But stress the latter over the former. I’m not an athlete, so I don’t want to spend too much time exercising, I want to focus on other areas. This turned out to be convenient, running for half an hour burns just over 500 calories, but running is painful, I find it much easier to just eat healthy. For instance, a medium pizza is between 1500 and 2000 calories, a proper meal for my weight is 720 calories. So I have to run 45 to 70 minutes to turn that pizza into a normal meal. That’s out of my acceptable range, way out. This is an extreme example, but it generally conveys my experience, it’s easier to not gain the calories than to gain the calories and burn them off.
I do, however, exercise regularly. Right now I play badminton because it’s nicer to play off the calories than to run them off -I hate running, I do. But disregarding badminton and substituting an equivalent (30 mins of running), my weekly exercise routine is simple: 30 minutes of running twice a week, 75 minutes of weight training split across two days a week. This is a total of two hours and fifteen minutes of exercise a week. Although sometimes I begrudge the exercises, I should be able to spare that time, after all, it accounts for only 2 percent of my waking time.
Losing weight through diet can be a bit of a nag at first. Nothing beats raw data, the iPhone has an app to track calories eaten and burned called Nutrition, Android has a similar app called CalorieSmart, Linux has some inferior programs, and the web has FitDay.com. Getting an idea of how many calories you are eating and burning from exercise will give you certainty. From my experience, guesswork in this area leads to self-deception.
The easiest way to lose weight is to pick a mass within your recommended range, and eat the number of calories neccessary to maintain that weight. So if I weight 77 kilograms, I need to net 2260 calories to maintain that weight. If I weight 100 kilograms and I ate 2260 net calories a day, eventually I’ll weight 77 kilos. At first I’ll lose weight fast, then the closer I get to 77 the slower I’ll lose weight. I was not in a rush to lose weight, and there was no health imperative that ought to provoke an aggressive response to weight, so I did it the slow and easy way.
Both your body and mind compete for certain resources, so one thing you’ll want to do is ensure you are eating highly nutritional food. The macronutrients that B&M compete for are protein and fat, so I eat a little more than what Health Canada recommends -I probably would do fine eating according to their recommendations, but I’m not interested in finding out whether that’s true. B&M also compete for a variety of vitamins and minerals.
I’ll supply a PDF to help you determine your ideal weight range and the calories associated with that weight. My experience has been the Internet reports these values wildly differently, so I took a source from a well-regarded medical doctor. I’ll also supply Health Canada’s nutritional recommendations, the important values are near the end of the document. I’ll leave those there for at least a month.
http://mediothe.ca/mt/
Wow! Thanks for the info. Definitely a lot to consider. My first big step has to be my “dependency” on soda. I think I kind of replaced nicotine with pepsi when I quit smoking 2 and a half years ago.
Potentially so. There’s a quiet Internet rumour going around that refined sugar isn’t a healthful drink. For health purposes sugar can be a drag, but from a purely weight loss perspective you might get away with keeping, or halving, the soda jerks. That’s why taking and then examining the data could be usefull. You might find nursing the Guiness’s would do the trick. I have friends that’ve failed to construct their weight loss utopias because, I think, they did too much at once. Exercising sucks, eating healthy is boring. A sudden switch to an extreme lifestyle (relative to your current lifestyle) can be misery inducing.
I guess the fault was mine for living vicariously through their unrealized utopias.
Guinness?? You serious? I thought there was a million calories in Guinness. Can’t see that being too healthy, unless you drink and don’t eat a lot else for the rest of the day.
I lost a lot once before. I eat a little better and took a 45 min every day. Took a few months of a pound 2 a week but it paid off. I’m a big believer in gradual weight loss as opposed to “lose 30 in 4 days” and all those other bullshit claims you see in the stupid section of the magazine rack.