New Member in MD, USA

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mdgivens
mdgivens Posts: 206 Member
in Introduce Yourself
Greetings all. I'm a 38-year old husband and father from Baltimore, MD. I started changing my lifestyle on July 1, 2013, at a body weight of 350 lb. I realized that I had reneged on some promises that I had made to my first child when he was born in 2009, and it broke my heart.

I initially didn't do any calorie counting, just 6 weeks of lifting heavy, working out hard, and not eating a lot of junk. This was (and is) working great, but I joined MyFitnessPal earlier this week after coming back from an 8-day cruise and not seeing any change on the scale from my pre-cruise weigh-in. I figure I'll be using this tool religiously for a couple of weeks to get a feel for how it works, and then I'll probably log just weight and continue to do trend analysis on my daily weigh-ins. If my strength and conditioning numbers aren't going up, or my body weight isn't trending down, then I can track more closely and dial in my diet as necessary.

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  • mdgivens
    mdgivens Posts: 206 Member
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    Someone recently asked me about what I do to keep on track. I wrote up this response to him, and I figured it might be good to share with whomever happens by this post. I'll mention the two major things that I'm doing now, other than calorie counting, that have allowed me to progress as I have.

    1. I've been using a strength and conditioning regimen called the Greyskull Linear Progression. If you're interested, you can read about it at www.strengthvillain.com. It's basically a weekly cycle, alternating days of strength work and conditioning for 6 days on, with a rest day off before repeating the cycle. Also, every strength day starts out with a 30-45 minute fasted walk, first thing in the morning.

    2. I weigh myself every morning, and I do trend analysis on the numbers. I got the idea from a book called The Hacker's Diet. It's freely available on the Internet, and it was written by the guy who founded AutoDesk. In the book, he describes the systems and practices that he used to lose 70 pounds back in the 90's and keep it off to this day. One of the things he teaches is how to analyze your daily bodyweight numbers, taking measurements that can vary wildly from day-to-day and seeing where the numbers are really trending. It helped me to learn not to live and die by the scale and just treat every day as another data point. This was HUGE for my mental outlook on what I am doing, and this thing is 80% mental. The trend lets me know whether what I am doing is working or not, and gives me time to make corrections and dial in my diet before things get out of hand.

    So far, what I'm doing seems to be working for me, and I am a firm believer in the KISS principle and not fixing things that ain't broke.

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