@bmotisko Welcome aboard!!

@apple852hk Congrats on not having fold any cubes this week! That is amazing progress and you should feel proud!!

@TeresaW1020 "Jazzy Janitress" - that's hilarious! Also happy birthday for this week

@dignow96 Congrats on your loss this week! What an epic effort! Thanks for sharing a little of your story and those gorgeous pics.

@Cornanda I love your attitude: "This is not going to send me off the rails" - fits very well with this week's theme of consistency and not perfection, don't you think?

@trooworld An entire tyre gone?! That's amazing, well done!

@mlhopp93 Wow, great loss this week - keep doing what you're doing because it's clearly working!

@Katmary71 I hope you can come to a decision soon about the pain clinic. If they can help you more long term, then maybe giving up the cannabis for a while might be worth it. Are you sure it's a month to clear from your system? I only ask because I work on a mine site where we are subject to random drug & alcohol tests and I know there are certain people who work here who will smoke weed during their 7 days off and they can still pass a urine test when they come back to work - I know smoking it may be different to drinking it and I don't know whether they do a urine or blood or saliva test at the clinic, but it might be worth checking into that if it helps with your decision!

@raleighgirl09 Sending you all the positive vibes for a better month in March!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My intro:

Hiya, I'm Christie and I'm a 30-something Aussie mum of one awesome little dude (hereafter called: the toddler). I've been overweight forever (later explained by a PCOS diagnosis) and in the past I have done every fad diet and yo-yo-ed my way up to a weight that I never want to see on the scale again. I joined MFP first in 2012, and have come back to it a few times over the years but never really stuck with it. Now I have found groups like this which are super supportive and I am on track to improve my health more than I ever have before.

I am a huge Harry Potter fan, so sometimes you might hear me talk about a Hogwarts challenge that I'm in here in the MFP groups. It's really great!
I work full time as an accountant at a gold mine in a small country town. Hubby is the stay at home parent with the toddler, which works really well except I don't get a lot of time with the toddler - a couple of hours after I get home from work and then it's dinner & bed time for him and I'm gone before he gets up of a morning. So we make the most of our weekends and I try to include him on my fitness journey so he can grow up with a good role model - we go for walks or go swimming when the weather allows.

Here's a cute pic I took at the park on the weekend - because I love to share him with everyone!!


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My February Recap:

February was a successful month for me. I smashed all the goals I set for myself, and in doing so, lost 3.5kg (7.7 lbs). I feel like I've hit a bit of a rhythm and I hope I can continue this into March!
So far, I am down 8.9kg (just shy of 20 lbs) from my highest weight, which has reduced my BMI by over 3 points! I hope to continue this trend in March and throughout the rest of the year!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
March Goals:

My goals for March are:
1. Sleep for a total of 213 hours (average 7.0 hours per night).
2. Record an overall calorie deficit of 17,000 calories.
3. Complete 870 minutes of intentional exercise (average 28 mins per day).
4. Meditate a minimum of 13 times (average 3 times per week).
5. Limit Facebook scrolling to 45 mins per day (23 hours maximum for the month).

Good afternoon folks! I've been threatening to do a proper introduction for a while now, so here goes. I'm Stewart. Born in Lousiana, raised in the south, high school in GA, undergrad in CO. I grew up in the Army and was in Air Force, so I've lived in 38 states and 14 countries. My undergrad was in engineering, but the rest of my education and professional life has focused on business and, more specifically, capture management and proposal development - within the government/defense contracting realm. And yes, that is every bit as exciting as it sounds. My mom still lives in Columbus, GA (Dad's last duty station was Ft Benning). My sister and her husband live in Wilmington, NC, where she's a teacher. Dr. Pelletier (her husband) is a professor at UNCW. My daughter lived in the hot with me until she hit 16. Around 15, she came home from school one day and said she'd like to go home and be American for the last few years of high school. She lives with her mom back in my hometown of Columbus, GA - so my mom is pleased as punch! Unfortunately, COVID derailed her Junior year, and her Senior year has all been online. She's done well despite all of that. We found out around Thanksgiving last year that she had been granted early acceptance at Mercer University. She's starting this fall, and I'll either be heading home for high school graduation or - if that doesn't happen - the first day of Freshman year!

Outside of meal prepping and lifting, I do have a few other hobbies. My daughter and I are HUGE LEGO fans. Well, ok, she was when she was younger but MAY have grown out of it a bit lately, and it's just now my obsession - maybe. We built a little city - Godwins Hollow of Outer Godwinia. I used to have a fantastic 1% of an acre garden on my roof in Kuwait. It was more a proof of concept for my apocalypse skills - if I can grow corn, watermelons, blackberries, and 47 other species of fruit and veggies on the roof of a building in Kuwait - I can grow stuff ANYWHERE! I just moved into a place in Dubai with a bit of a backyard and am already planning out my planting for this fall. I'm a photography enthusiast and drone flier. I could speak only in movie quotes (another end of the world skill - you always keep around the guy who can do the one-man play edition of Star Wars as well as Steel Magnolias). Outside of my day job helping local companies capture business with the US Government/UN/NATO and US firms do business safely in the Middle East, I also do a bit of social media marketing, coaching platform development, and other quasi-creative things for the occasional client. I also like to cook - thankfully, my body responds well to a low carb, high protein, reasonably high-fat diet, so I get to cook yummy things quite often (ribs are soaking up some rub right now and will hit the smoker tomorrow morning!) So that's me. I'm sure I've missed something, and there are tons of folks to thank along the way, but if you'd like the LONG version of the story, feel free to ask.

So I started out pretty well fitness-wise. My mother was a rabid dieter, and we grew up with some WIERD eating habits. Despite that, I kept things in check as I was in little league everything, was a high school and collegiate athlete, and then was active duty military. Then I got out of the Air Force, and as far as the evidence shows, it seems like I simply sat down and ate nothing but donuts and french fries. Fast forward to 2014 and I had to go to the doc for a sorta serious infection in my leg. When they were triaging me, I got weighed in. I was in a bit of pain and self-medicating, but I was really proud of myself for keeping my weight in check as I tipped the scales at just over 212! Once I got my leg under control, I started to think about that number more and finally got up the courage to ask my doc about it. I told him that the more I thought about it, the more I thought it could NOT be accurate as that was less than I had to weigh at graduation. I certainly wasn't doing enough to maintain that weight. Unless I somehow evolved the ability to convert gummy bears into CO2 instead of fat. Turns out, I was not a mutant. I just failed to check the units. I had weighed-in at 212 KILOGRAMS which was a bag of potatoes away from 500 lbs!

I was FREAKED out that I was close to weighing a quarter of a ton. I'm 6'7" (and incidentally the shortest male on my dad's side of the family in seven generations!) and, back in 2014, had just turned 40. I was NOT going to end on the news one day having to be lifted by a crane out of my bed into the backyard pool to take a bath. So I stopped eating 6 hamburgers for dinner and scaled that back to maybe 3. I only ate giant bags of gummy bears around Christmas and birthdays. Believe it or not, by just making LESS horrible decisions about what I ate, I dropped about 80lbs in three years without really knowing it.

In 2017 we were celebrating New Year's, and I wasn't really impressed with the pictures, so I made a little resolution that year - something completely wimpy like 'I'm going to get in better shape this year.' That's when I turned my research skills onto how to eat better - not how to diet. Turns out I was still eating a lot of crap, and if I didn't do that, I could lose some weight. They also suggested a little app that I could put on my phone to track what I was eating more accurately. I joined MFP and cut out the crap and holy schnikes Batman - the weight dropped like stock values around 1929.

So that worked; what else do these folks say could help? That's when I got turned onto a low-carb diet and went pretty hard-core keto. Move forward to Feb, I get a smart scale, an Apple Watch, and really start paying attention. My first weigh-in with MFP was at 383lbs. Whew, back under the 400 mark - that's a start. I started walking daily back then too. I had run marathons as a kid, so the first day out, I hit almost 3 miles before I thought I would die and was not so pleased with myself. I kept up the walking daily for two solid years. I was getting in 8 to 10 miles a day and actually moving with a bit of speed (13min/miles). The exercise, combined with actually eating, you know, real food, helped me drop another 80lbs.

In 2019, my daughter moved back to the US, and I moved to Dubai. I had hit a plateau that just was never-ending. I could knock out my ten miles without a sweat (not literally - it was the middle east), was eating right (30g of carbs or less per day, right on my macros, MAYBE one treat meal a month). However, I was still having trouble breaking 300lbs. So that's when I went back to the research. Apparently, doing the exact same thing every day and eating the exact same thing every day was very reassuring to your body and makes everything go very steady-state. So, I start varying my calorie count daily, tried carb cycling for a bit, came across IF, and started narrowing my window to about 6 hours a day. Still, things didn't really change until I got back to the gym and started lifting heavy things. COVID really hosed things up for me as EVERYTHING was locked down here in Dubai. I was having a bit of a mental block with bodyweight workouts, but I got thru it and eventually got back to the gym.

Today, I'm still RELATIVELY low carb (I keep it under 80-100g a day - that's about 3 apples' worth). I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting and am really an OMAD guy now as my window is a 2/22 split most days. I do throw in some variability, so there are occasional days that I don't fast or will have a pizza with friends. I do try NOT to eat after dark anymore - as much as is possible with my late-night movie habit. I also try to do a 2 to 5 day fast every 90 days or so. It's something that comes fairly naturally for me, and once I get past that first day's urge to eat at my usual time, it's pretty smooth sailing. I still walk daily but am down to around 5mi a day usually (sometimes more). The gym is 3.2mi away from the house, so I walk there and back on lift days. I've recently (the last three months or so) been gradually working sprints into my walks and have been sprinting the last tenth of every mile. It gets the heart rate going, and as long as my knees hold out, I'm going to keep that up.

My gym time is handled by an app called Dr. Muscle. I am in no way affiliated with them, but the app is amazing. There is a ton of science behind it. It creates variances in your routines based on your performance, makes sure to progressively overload your workouts, is customizable, and is backed by one of the best customer service teams I have ever dealt with outside Disney World. All of that aside - my strength is going up noticeably, my weight is coming down, my clothes fit like I have an actual shape. For the first time since I was, I don't know, a teenager - I have some muscle definition.

So there ya have it. That's probably a lot more about how I eat, and workout than y'all were bargaining for, but there ya have it. You may or may not have been able to tell, but I've got a tiny, itsy, bitsy competitive streak in me, so I'm a big fan of teams, scores, and challenges. I'm really pleased to be back in the F2F group and looking forward to seeing how we rank week to week.