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 7 of 10.

How’d I do? (The Outcome Goal) The bagel week. This was a crazy week and the bottom line is that I ate too much and worked out too inconsistently. The result is that I lost another 2.75 pounds. Hunh? Proves yet again that this weight management stuff is highly irregular, the benefits are cumulative and not even close to linear. I’m down to 209.75 pounds which is really exciting but I can’t say that it’s due to a great week on my part. Only tangentially related to my weight loss objective, my athletic performance continues to climb, including having paced out a 16-miler at a 9 min/mile pace, which isn’t fast historically but it’s the fastest I’ve run distance in quite some time.

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

Less than Expected Overall, for week 7 of 10 I gave myself a self assessment of Less than Expected. How can I say that when I had my largest weight loss week to date? Because the focus must remain oon the process goals if I am meant to achieve the objective and then sustain it after the fact. I’m totally supportive of the motivational mantra of celebrating small victories but I can’t let the variability of the outcome goal give me a false sense of productivity. With some significant changes to my routine coming up, I really need to step it up this week.

Report Card – Week 7

February 15 – February 21:

Caloric Intake/Nutrition = Less than Expected

Portion size: Actually pretty good this week.

Eat Healthy Breakfast: I’m not sure about healthy but I ate breakfast most days.

Eat light every three hours: Think this stretched to four, five or even six on some days.

Eat fresh whole foods: Good. Salads almost every day.

Avoid junk food and sugar: Ice cream a few times this week. Just silly on my part.

Eat protein first: Sort of.

Stop eating 60 mins. before going to sleep: Crappy as all get out, eating too late almost every night.

Caloric Expenditure/Positive Stress = Less than Expected

February 15 – February 21:

Workout early: Finally got out for a 5:30am run this week, but only once. Still having trouble waking up full of energy.

Min 45 mins of Cardio: Didn’t work out from Wednesday morning until Saturday, but when I did the quality was good.

Resistance training: I know I needed to do more but got a bit ill on Thursday so I only got one day of lifting in, which I focused on my legs on Saturday and definitely am paying for it.

Recovery/Adaptation = Met Expectations

Sleep min of 7 hours per night: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Conclusion: It’s great that I dropped the 2.75 pounds but there is no rational reason for me having done so, and that can’t continue. More resistance training this week and a ruthless commitment to stay away from the sugar.  Results from all of the other great folks participating in this challenge can be found at the 10 in 10 blog. Have another great week.

It’s almost March which means a full two months have passed since most of us made our annual commitment to be better people, save the world, stop smoking, find more time for friends and family or get out of debt – some of the more popular New Year’s resolutions made each and every year. For those of you that follow my blog, you know how opposed I am to the term resolution, because it is such a weak term and lacks basic accountability as evidenced by how much meaning is put behind a resolution in Congress. But hey, it’s a whole lot more catchy and less corporate than New Year’s Objective, a term which actually creates visions of drinking oneself into oblivion while hooking up with strangers at a New Years party. So New Year’s Resolution it is.

My own objective/resolution was to lose ten pounds in ten weeks, and I’ve been pretty darn dedicated to doing this including posting weekly results on my blog and being a part of the 10in10in10 Challenge. Even with my background in health and fitness, I have found this seemingly simple task quite the challenge. I’m down four pounds so far but it has been quite the yoyo experience, lose two pounds one week, gain one-and-a-half the next, and so on.

Having recently moved to NE Ohio, I have found both the good – lack of typical restaurants, and the associated calories, that I would typically frequent in NY, and the bad – Duck’s kitchen. OK, in all fairness, I have to openly admit I absolutely love Duck’s kitchen because it is incredibly warm and friendly with family members and friends stopping in at all hours of the day and night to sit down and partake of any number of delights that she has somehow constantly bakes throughout the day. I’ve often wondered to myself if this is how Mrs. Fields got started. The bad part is that the house should essentially be built out of gingerbread. There is sugar everywhere, cookies and pies on the kitchen table and counter tops, bins of cookies stacked five feet high in the family room, pancakes and waffles being made as soon as you wake up and more deserts being prepared right before you go to sleep. It’s utterly a diabetic shock waiting to happen. This is what I have to navigate through to get from the living room to the kitchen table, and again, this is not for any holiday, this is just what it looks like during the middle of any typical week and I’m not even showing the bins of cookies.

So as I’ve been going through this 10in10in10 Challenge, I have been hard pressed not to partake in any of these sugary treats and have been outstandingly successful. I think this is a positive indicator of how committed I am, this and the fact that there is a Cold Stone less than 10 minutes from my house and I haven’t been there once; alright, that’s not exactly true, I went there once but they had just closed and I didn’t have a sugar tantrum and try and break the door down as I probably would have done in past years. Long story short, once again, I have proven to myself that objectives/resolutions/goals or whatever you may call them are best achieved when they are realistic and when a clear road map to success is set out. I hope your resolutions are still top of mind for you and if not, perhaps this is yet another opportunity to get re-focused. And if that doesn’t work, just stop by Duck’s kitchen and put yourself into an insulin coma. Hey no worries, Duck can take care of monitoring that too.

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 6 of 10.

How’d I do? (The Outcome Goal) Well last week I gave back all of my losses from the prior week and this week I recovered it back losing 1.5 pounds and dropping to 212.5. I’m starting to sense a pattern here and it’s not yoyo dieting, it’s yoyo weight loss – two steps forward and one step back. Losing the 1.5 pounds only took running over forty miles including a 20-miler on Friday and a seven-hour spin class on Saturday. Clearly cardio is not the issue, and while my diet wasn’t perfect, the one thing that was missing was resistance training. It’s pretty darn obvious, to even get close to reaching my objective this month, I need to hit the weights.

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

Less than Expected Overall, for week 6 of 10 I gave myself a self assessment of Less than Expected, mostly because the nutrition needed a lot of work and I did hardly any resistance training. Need to step it up this week.

Report Card – Week 6

February 08 – February 14:

Caloric Intake/Nutrition = Less than Expected

Portion size: OK except for Saturday night after the Spin-a-thon and Sunday when we went to Troy’s birthday party. Pasta and salad seem to be the Ohio staples of dietary nutrition and I needed to prepare better.

Eat Healthy Breakfast: Pretty good each day.

Eat light every three hours: OK.

Eat fresh whole foods: Salads almost every day.

Avoid junk food and sugar: Cake at Troy’s birthday party threw me off a bit.

Eat protein first: Failed miserably.

Stop eating 60 mins. before going to sleep: Ate right before going to sleep almost every night.

Caloric Expenditure/Positive Stress = Less than Expected

February 08 – February 14:

Workout early: Not even close.

Min 45 mins of Cardio: No problem with the cardio this week but it wasn’t as moderate nor consistant as I would have liked. I did get used to pounding out 10 milers on the treadmill and did a 20-miler in McDonald and a 7 hour ride at the Spin-a-thon in Y-town.

Resistance training: After a great week at Equinox, I failed miserably at lifting this week.

Recovery/Adaptation = Met Expectations

Sleep min of 7 hours per night: Sleeping has not been a problem.

Conclusion: It’s great that I dropped the 1.5 pounds but it took an irrational amount of cardio to do it, an amount that I obviously can’t continue. Need to get back to basics this week.  Results from all of the other great folks participating in this challenge can be found at the 10 in 10 blog. Have another great week.