It Begins...

Today is my first posting on this blog.  I've spent the past 2 weeks reading others blogs as they begin and continue their weight loss journeys.  I am not much different from many, overweight, looking to lose but I'm going to make use of a lot of stuff I've read from others and try to adapt them into my weight loss journey.

A bit of background first.  I'm a 39 year old father of 2 and husband to a very supportive wife.  At around 24 years old, my desk job started to affect me physically.  Slowly putting on pounds, I almost didn't even notice it at first.  In my early 20's, I was almost sickly thin.  My diet and eating habits went in the toilet and I grew, and grew and grew.  At the beginning of this year, 2012, I weighed the most I have ever weighed in my life.  310.6 pounds.  After many failed attempts, a gall bladder removal and my kids finally old enough to know my size isn't where it should be, I'm heading into a new lifestyle full thrust.

First thing I had to wrap my head around is that this is first and foremost, a lifestyle change.  I'm not going on a diet and start suffering by eating things I can't stand and working out more than I really want to.  Reading so many blogs and forums posts has helped me come to this realization.  The second biggest thing I had to grasp was that this was not going to be a quick fix.  At first I thought, I could lose 130 pounds in a few months.  That was quickly squashed by educating myself on healthy and proper weight loss by taking my time and getting there the right way.  I didn't put the weight on in a year, it's not coming off that fast either.

I started changing my eating habits and performed my initial weigh in on January 10th, 2012 at a weight of 310.6 pounds.  I recorded my first and second weigh ins and kept a personal journal that I'll now translate over to here:

WEEK 1  |  January 17, 2012  |  Weight: 303.8 lbs  |  Loss of 6.8 lbs

This is my first weigh in of my journey to lose weight and get back to my healthy size.  My initial goal was to get down to 180 pounds by my 40th birthday.  That gave me about 51 weeks to accomplish this.  While this is aggressive, I have no fear of missing this date and if so, that is fine by me.  My absolute goal is to have my ideal weight for the summer of 2013.  Again, I've come to the realization that putting an end date on weight loss is something that I should just not do.  I'm going to take it day by day and I will get there, when I get there.

That said, let's talk about my first week.  Whilst Roxanne (the wife) began exercising this week, I refused.  I have signed up for Loseit.com and started counting calories.  I didn't want to do any extra workouts just to see if counting calories works.  To my surprise, I lose 6.8 pounds this week.  Given this is my first week, I'm attributing much of this to water weight and simply the fact that I stopped eating junk at night.  At the beginning of this journey, I feel my biggest issues were snacking on unhealthy foods at night.  It seems my craving for food was not just simply for junk but because I was actually hungry.  You see my regular dinner time historically has been around 4:00 in the afternoon and as a result, I always became hungry later in the evening and not wanting to cook a second dinner, I grabbed what was handy - junk food.  One thing to help this situation was to adjust dinner time to 6:30 each evening and to have a light snack at around 3:00-3:30 in the afternoon to help sustain me while I waited for the later dinner.  This week we did this and it seems to be working.  I do get hungry before dinner while I wait and get a slight urge later in the evenings for food, but I think I can keep these under control.  That all said, I have planned to pick up a treadmill at the end of the month (about 2 weeks from now) and start with a nice walk/jog if I can handle it lol each night to start.  For the next week I will continue to count calories and see if I drop a couple of pounds.

WEEK 2  |  January 24, 2012  |  Weight: 299.2 lbs  |  Loss of 4.6 lbs  |  Total Loss 11.4 lbs

I haven't cut out the meals I enjoy and have only decreased the portion size a small amount.  I severely cut out the snacking though.  No longer am I eating a full can of pringles or a full bag of ruffles chips in the evenings.  We've been pretty successful in moving dinner to 6:30 and that seems to be our comfort zone.  I do find it interesting that I seem to have a couple hundred calories left over each evening all the same and usually fill it up with a fruity beverage or two.  I can't expect to continue losing all this weight at this rate without more dietary changes so I'm sure we'll have to make more adjustments in the future.  I've planned to pick up a treadmill at the end of next month and start in on walking and jogging on it.  I think I'll enjoy a good run and will hopefully lose weight from that.  I still haven't done a minute of exercise yet and I'm going to hold off yet again.  I'd really like to hold off till I can start running as I don't want to start running until I get a pair of good running shoes (also at the end of next month).  I am very happy with my weight this morning and I have been keeping an eye on it daily.  This weight isn't the lightest I've been this week and watching it, but not recording it, helps me determine what changes I may need to have on a day to day basis to help with my weight loss.  Next weigh in is scheduled for Tomorrow (I weigh in each Tuesday).