For those new to this blog, I and a bunch of other tweethletes embarked upon this year’s 10in10 challenge, with the outcome goal to lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks. This report covers progress through week 4 of 10.

How’d I do? (The Outcome Goal) This week closes out the first month of the year and I’m excited that with all of the ups and downs I succeeded in losing an additional 1.5 pounds bringing my total loss for the month to 4 pounds for a current weight of 212.5 pounds. I weigh myself at the same time of the week and the same time of the day right before I workout in the morning. The amusing thing is how much weight I lose when measured after a workout of only one hour. After today’s workout I dropped from 212.5 to 208 pounds. What I like about it is that the post workout weight makes a great target for the next week’s pre-workout weigh in.

I use three levels of performance measures. Less than Expected, Met Expectations and Exceeded Expectations.

Met Expectations Overall, for week 4 of 10 I gave myself a self assessment of Met Expectations, recovering from last week’s slide and got myself back on track. And I was definitely concerned because I know that the sins of one week definitely carry over to the next. So this result even though it may not seem big from a magnitude standpoint, was pretty pleasing to me.

Report Card – Week 4

January 25 – January 31:

Caloric Intake/Nutrition = Met Expectations

Portion size: Much better, the only poor day I had was Sunday evening when I splurged on CPK and tried both their fish tacos and had my traditional Halloween pizza.

Eat Healthy Breakfast: Are you kidding me. Being in New York this week, our friend Carolyn provided us with fresh squeezed juice every morning. We even took up the daily ritual entitled, “Guess the secret ingredient”, which included lime, cactus fruit, pineapple, ginger, apple, and others depending on the day.

Eat light every three hours: Much better at this as well.

Eat fresh whole foods: I throw the daily fresh juice into this category as well as great salads almost every day.

Avoid junk food and sugar: Pretty good except for an ice cream party on Saturday night that accompanied the game “Apples to Apples” with a whole slew of characters in the old neighborhood.

Eat protein first: Still difficult to get enough isolated protein to make this work.

Stop eating 60 mins. before going to sleep: Nah, we stayed up late and crashed by necessity.

Caloric Expenditure/Positive Stress = Met Expectations

January 25 – January 31:

Workout early: Not really but it didn’t hurt my ability to get my workouts in.

Min 45 mins of Cardio: Had a great week in this area primarily because my friend Kamal secured a pass for me to workout at Equinox in Scarsdale. Special thanks go out to Anthony Cichessi, the manager over there who couldn’t have been more helpful and generous. I really took advantage of both the Stairmasters (4600 PT) and the Gauntlets (SM916) as we don’t have access to either of those machines back here. I also adjusted my training schedule for the Los Angeles Marathon a bit so that I could run 20 miles in 18 degrees with my good friend Phil at Rockies on Saturday. And I have to say that the result of that run was very encouraging. By the way, help me wish good luck to Phil who’s running his first stand alone marathon in Austin, TX next Sunday.

Resistance training: Again, I took advantage of the access to Equinox to lift most every day I could.

Recovery/Adaptation = Met Expectations

Sleep min of 7 hours per night: I slept a lot.

Conclusion: A solid week that resulted in only a pound and a half of weight loss but put me back on schedule in almost all of the right areas. Good job. Results from all of the other great folks participating in this challenge can be found at the 10 in 10 blog. Have a great week.