It has been quite a productive day

So I am still a bit lonely this week but it has gone by pretty quickly since I have been working 14 hours a day everyday since Wednesday. Today since I ended up having the house to myself again I was able to sleep in. Today I woke up at 9 AM which is the latest I have slept in in a long time. I got everything I wanted to get done today and I did it all before 12:30. I did my make up workout from yesterday and it seems that I was right, yesterday was the last day of phase 2 and I will be starting phase 3 on Monday. Once I finished the workout I took a quick 10 minute break and then I mowed the lawn. After that I was a bit tired since the workout from yesterday was a cardio and lower body workout. After the lawn was done I put on the running shoes and wend for a two mile walk/run, mostly walk. I got out of the house and started to run I got about a quarter of a mile and the backs of my legs started killing me so I walked for a bit and started running again. Once I got another quarter of a mile or so I had to pretty much give up on  the running but going two miles total even though my legs were as sore as they were is a win to me. I will let everyone know how the first workout of phase three goes after I do it on Monday. Next week I will be staying to the EA Active workout schedule since I have Monday and Tuesday off I won't have to wake up at 4:45 in the morning to do the first two workouts this week, make the last two easier in my mind.

Don't judge me!!!!

So the alarm went off at its normal 5 AM so that I could get up and workout and complete what I think is the final exercise of phase 2. The reason I say I think is the final exercise of phase 2 is because when it went off it dawned on me that I just finished working two 14 hour days in a row and had one more left today. Needless to say I decided to wait and make the workout up tomorrow. I am still in the 180 lbs so no harm no foul. One thing I can't seem to explain is why I am getting more sore rather than less sore. For now I am just going to chalk it up to building muscle mass but feel free to chime in if you have another suggestion. I only have today and tomorrow without my family before I get to see them again on Sunday so I am pretty happy about that. I will be out of town on Sunday so I am going to try and get a lot done tomorrow, here is what I am planning; Make up today's workout, mow the lawn, get a website built, update another site, run around the neighborhood a few times, and try and round up a little side work to bring in a few extra dollars to help pay for our upcoming move. Tomorrow will be a better day and I look forward to my workout as well as seeing if I will be entering phase 3 on Monday, which also happens to be a day off of both jobs. I will let everyone know if I am done with phase 2 tomorrow.

Its the final count down......

Enter 80's hair rock anthem here.

So after a much needed rest day yesterday I did my scheduled Thursday morning workout and you can only imagine how happy I was to see that 40% of the workout was upper body and 25% of it was core and only 8% was lower body. Needless to say my legs are still a bit sore from the workouts of this past week. Which makes it ironic that I get winded climbing the stairs, not from still being fat but from the amount of effort it takes to make the sore legs get me up them. Small price to pay if you ask me. The one thing that got a bit old this morning was the four count them four sets of mountain climbers that I had to do. When the workout was over I burned just under 250 calories which was a little bit more than what was expected and I felt pretty good had I had a little more time this morning I may have tried doing some yoga to help my legs stop hurting but the clock was against me. The reason for the name of this particular post is that although I spent most of the month thinking I was not going to be able to get to my 180 lb goal before it was over I reached it this morning! This is great news for me since every time I reach a goal like this all it does is motivate me to work harder to get to the final goal of 100 lbs that I am sure all of you are tired of hearing about. Now I have a 5 day head start to get to the 165 I am trying to get to before the end of next month. If that happens I will have lost 100 lbs in six months and be in the best shape I have been in since about 2002 or so. Today I decided to attach the graph of today's workout rather than the month so you can see how it went. I am pretty sure tomorrow is the last of the phase 2 workouts and I should be moving into phase 3 on Monday. Be sure that you will hear from me on how that was, I am going to go out on a limb and say it will be a bit rough. Wish me luck and lets see if I can get to that 100 lbs lost before the end of June. Thank you and welcome to any Facebook friends that stopped by to read.  

Not a whole lot today

So today was a rest day and I had originally thought about getting up and doing some Yoga on WiiFit just to try and stretch out a little and try not to be too sore. Unfortunately the alarm went off and that was the end of that. Thinking back on it I don't think it would have been all that bad an idea to do the yoga because I have been pretty sore in the legs all day today. Tomorrow is another scheduled workout so I will let everyone know how that goes, I am thinking it is going to be a little rough if I continue to be sore in the morning. I didn't weigh myself today because my wife was going out of town for a few days this morning and I didn't want to take time away from being with her even if it is only a few minutes. I can't wait to see where I am at tomorrow, if things keep going the way they have been I should be pretty close to that end of the month goal I am shooting for. It will be nice to put all this behind me and try to keep it off but it has been nice to watch the success that I have had so far. I think when I am done and get to the 100 lbs lost I am going to contact EA and show them what EA Active products did for me. (Perhaps I can be EA's Jared, I will do it for less. I think one million dollars would be fine.)

They say learn something every day

I can say that I did that two times over, how did I do that you ask, well I learned two life lessons today. The first one is a workout the morning after you gave blood is a very difficult thing. I think that I sweated more this morning than I did when I lived in south Florida in August. My workout today burned just under 300 calories and I think I would have made that 300 mark had the heart rate monitor not need a battery change. For those of you that don't know this is the worst part of EASA 2, when the battery is low the game will tell you about it every ten minutes or so throughout your workout until you change them. I didn't feel like dealing with that today so I decided that would change the batteries a few workouts in which is reflected in the drop on the heart rate graph. After I changed them it didn't register that I was alive for a few minutes and once it did it thought that I only had a 86 BPM although my heart was beating out of my chest. Er go if it had registered correctly I think it would have shown the 5 extra calories I needed to break 300. The second thing that  I learned is that it seems one pint of blood weighs about 1.1 lbs as that is how much weight my weigh in said I lost since yesterday. That brings me to 181.9 lbs and very close to my month and final goal! good for me. Tomorrow is a rest day and trust me I will be using every bit of it. I need to get back on track with the EASA 2 calendar so that I can give my legs the two days rest that they seem to be needing on the weekend. Right now my legs feel like jello and I thought I was going to fall right out of the shower this morning. Not fun for me but I know a bit of it had to do with my donation yesterday and once I was able to sit down after the workout (since I normally have to start getting ready right when I am done) and do a little reading and eat I felt much better. Again not fun but the 84 lbs I have lost so far tells me that it is worth it.

How much does a pint of blood weigh

We just might find out the answer to that question tomorrow morning. Let me explain, today we are having our quarterly blood drive at the office and I am scheduled to give at 9:30 today. On thing I am going to say is that I am a little worried about how things are going to go since the last time I gave blood I was 82 lbs heavier than I am today. People have been telling me that I should feel better than I did when I was bigger but I always felt fine when I was bigger. I just have this fear that the lights are going to go out on me today and I will be too proud to say anything which is pretty stupid I know. I will post tomorrow what my weight is to let everyone know if the pint of blood loss turned into any additional weight. :-) Anyway I did today's workout as scheduled this morning and it was not all that bad. As a matter of fact it was the least amount of calories that I have burned since the first workouts of the 9 week challenge. Just so you know I am pretty OK with that. I am starting to feel the way I did at the middle to end of phase three of training camp, my legs seem to still be sore from the previous workouts even after a rest day, so it was nice to go a little easy today. I am beginning to get a little worried about how the final phase of the challenge is going to go since I am already feeling sore and talking about to toughness of some of the workouts and I have not even entered phase three yet. For those that missed it I did the 60 day challenge for NFL training camp on easy and am doing the 9 week challenge in EASA 2 on medium. By the looks of the little progress bar I think that I should be moving into phase three by the end of the month so if that is the case be assured I will let everyone know just how the final phase is going. I weighed myself again this morning and was down another 1.8 lbs putting me at an even 82 lbs lost since January third and only three lbs to go for my end of the month goal of 180 lbs and 18 lbs away from my ultimate goal of losing 100 lbs since this all started. Man I can't wait for all this to be over so that I can focus on maintaining a healthy weight and getting fit and stronger. Good luck to anyone else going through what I am going through. As you can see from the picture I was not kidding about the low calorie burn today. It was less than 250 calories.

This is getting harder and harder I tell you

Ok so here is another post from my iPad so please ignore the additional typos in this particular post. Yet again I decided to skip my Friday workout to make it up today and I can say that I am glad that I did. I weighed in again today and was down another .7 lbs so I can go ahead and say that I an pretty sure I got through the month long slump I have been in. Today I was introduced to the world of reverse lunge into high knee jumps. Ok I you don't know if any of you have enjoyed then but I can say they really really suck and don't look forward to doing them again. I am going to try and find the time to do my upper body extra workout tomorrow and today I still need to mow the lawn, I am thinking that I am going to have a productive weekend and now that I am only four lbs away from my end of May goal I am feeling better about getting there. I am also only 19 lbs away from my total goal of 100 lbs lost since I started doing this so it is nice to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Sorry if this post is all over the place and typo riddled but I am watching a movie while I type. (just trying to get my money's worth of my netflix.) Until next time.

Another big event!!!!

First of all if there is one think I can say about EASA 2 it is that it does not do the best job of slowly ramping up the difficulty level on some of the workouts. Today I did what looked like the halfway point of Phase 2 workout and even though it burned about 40 calories less than the other workouts I did this week it also seemed like the most difficult one that I have done since starting EASA 2. I actually had to pause once or twice in the middle of a set of exercises and rest because I knew I was not going to get through it unless I did that. On that note I didn't weigh myself yesterday but did today and it seems that I lost 3.1 lbs since that weigh in which means that I lost a total of 5 lbs since Monday. I am trying not to get too excited about it since every time I do the weight starts to go up again. The good thing is with today's weigh in I have reached the 80 lbs lost mark and am even closer to my goal. Here is hoping I can still get there by the end of next month.

Something never done in EASA 2 yesterday

Ok so yesterday I took the day off and went and looked at a few houses, one of which we will be moving forward on. When we were done we stopped and had lunch and let me tell you something, I ordered a lunch combo with a salad and chicken fajita wrap thinking it was healthy turns out to be a total of 760 calories for a tiny little lunch. Lesson learned, check nutrition facts before ordering even if you didn't know you would be going to out. (Smart phones people) Needless to say I was not all that happy about that, I was still able to have a net calorie intake around 1200 or so for the day thanks to yesterdays workout. Which brings me to my post title, When I started the workout it told me I could expect to burn 295 calories, as it turns out I burned 10 calories over that number giving me a total calorie burn of over 300. That is the big news, it took a few workouts into Phase 2 but I finally burned more than 300 calories on a workout. I hope that the trend continues since I am still having a bit of trouble getting the scale to go down. Like I said on Monday, I had a good weigh in and was down a total of 2.6 llbs, and even had to teach that night, which usually burns a few more ounces from my weight. When I weighed in Tuesday morning I was up .2 lbs. Again nothing to complain about since I am sure it has to do with the muscle that I am seeing start to show up but I would like to see the scale go down since I am still at about 3.5 to 4 lbs lost the entire month. Anyway, I will continue on the journey. I was going to use today to do some running like I have been trying to do but it was a bit chilly this morning and I decided that I was not going to do myself any favors by not letting my body rest after the first two workouts this week.I am pretty sure I remembered reading somewhere that if you don't let your body rest and mix things up then you will not see results. Please correct me if I am wrong since the tempurature is about  to start climbing again and it would be a good oppertunity to run if I won't screw anything up with the rest of my program.

Hello old friend

Who is my old friend you ask, he is the fifth workout a week that I try and do. Yesterday I got home from visiting some family in Alabama and had a little bit of time to do the custom upper body workout I created so I went ahead and did it. If any of you remember I did this workout a few weeks ago and said that I would be tweaking it but I never did it again due to having such a busy schedule lately. I did it yesterday with my medium resistance bands and remembered that it is a pretty good muscle building workout even though it only burns around 165 calories or so. I do plan on adding bent over rows with triceps kick backs to it now that I finally figured out how to make it register all my movements. (Turns out if you let your elbows go to far from your body it will not register the move.) I was also excited this morning that I weighed myself and was down 2.6 lbs from the last weigh (did it last night late so it was high) but I think that I can expect the weight to start moving again through the end of the month. I am down to 188 lbs from where I started at 265 at the beginning of the year with EA Active. I am still hoping to get down to 180 by the end of the month and I think it should not be all that much of an issue but I have been wrong before. One thing did happen to me this weekend that has not happened since I started to workout and diet. I didn't make the 5 lbs lost in two weeks goal that I set in WiiFit :-( the good thing is that is the first time in five and a half months that happened and I got to set a new two week goal of 5 lbs lost and I am already down 2.6 of those so I don't see that happening on this set of goals. The best part about getting to the 188 is that my wife and I are trying to get life insurance and the woman we spoke to said that since I was at 190 when we talked if I could get under 189 before the nurse came to do what she had to do to make sure we were insurable I would be placed in a different health group and would get a lower rate. WIN. When you look at my tracker graph you will see the one bar that is much lower than the rest, that is my upper body workout from last night (proof that it does not burn all that many calories) I am not all that concerned with the calorie count on that workout what I am more concerned with it that it helps build muscle. I am sure if you are reading this (all 2 of you) you know that muscle is the key to maintaining weight loss, fat just sits on your body and does nothing but when you can build muscle your normal activities burn more calories due to the added muscle on your body that is working to make the activities happen. I am seeing the benefits of that now since I can feel my stomach getting a bit firmer you can actually see a muscle in my arms and legs, and I can feel definition in my back and shoulders. Because of this new definition I was able to eat pizza and firehouse subs and other naughty things without gaining weight! I took the day off work tomorrow so I can sleep in and still get my morning workout in, later in the day the life insurance nurse will be stopping by then I am looking at house. After all that is done I am going to go running and see if I can't start to get some kind of consistency with that so I can start to plan on running the Race for the Cure when it comes to Nashville. Little bit of a rant today but I think it all needed to be said. 

Saw something that I wanted today

Well as always it seems a night at school helped to get the weight to fall again. I went down 1.3 lbs or so which now puts me  1.1 lbs away from my 5 lbs every two week goal that ends tomorrow, it is going to be close but I think I can get there. Today's workout seemed quite difficult today even though it only burned 250 calories. I think a bit of it had to do with the fact that it was quite a bit of lower body today but I think it has more to do with the fact that it was the 4th workout in a row that I did so now my legs totally feel like jelly. That is all I really have to say about what is going on today but here is my latest calendar tracker with the last four day in a row filled out.

Scale finally started moving again

Too bad is was in a direction I didn't want it going. For the last two days my weight has increased. It has not been all that much of an increase but it has been an increase none the less. After today's weigh in I have now lost a total of 2.5 lbs, ALL MONTH! I think it goes without saying that I am getting more and more angry with this. I know people say (and it is true) that muscle weighs more than fat and now that I have am in the muscle bit of my weigh loss rather than the fat burning since I am no longer 80 lbs overweight I should expect some muscle weight to replace the fat weight. Trust me I would love to believe this and I do to an extent but I don't know that I totally believe it since I am not seeing a difference in my body appearance or muscle tone. My wife says that I am crazy and she can see a change but she is my wife and I would not expect her to say anything else. One thing that does make me feel a bit better is that pants that I have been able to fit into again that were fitting correctly are now just a little bit bigger than they once were and my final belt that I was wearing on the last hole seems to have gotten bigger as well. I guess I will have to hold onto that for a little while and hope that it is correct. On a happier note the race for the cure is coming to Nashville in October and since I said I wanted to try and do a 5K as part of my goal for beginning to run I figure this will be a good one to do since it is such a great cause. Right now I am having a little trouble finding the time to run as much as I would like but I think I can get enough training done to be ready for it. Worse case is I register as a running and end up walking some of it but I would think that in 5 months I could get in good enough shape to run the entire thing. Wish me luck on that endeavor. I am looking to get some good running in this weekend when I go down to Alabama for a few days to be with my wife's family. If I can get a few miles of running in this weekend I thing that I would feel a bit better than I do right now. I guess we will see. By the way a little change of pace, here is my last 30 days workout chart.

Damage Report

I finally got up the strength to get on the scale this morning after my gluttony from this weekend. I was going to go for back to back workouts this morning to get caught up from the one that I missed yesterday but my child woke up so I didn't have time. I am going to try to squeeze it in later tonight. I also have mowing the lawn on my to-do list for today so that will burn some fat as well. One thing I will say is that I was surprised when I did get on the scale this morning and found that I had lost .2 lbs. I know it isn't all that much and I have only lost about 3 lbs all month so far but after Sunday I consider that a win. If I have the time today I plan on working out again, and mowing the lawn like I said that way rather than using tomorrow to get caught up on the workouts I can go for another run as that seemed to do the most good for me and getting my weight down. I am sure by now everyone is getting tired of my talking about goals but this newest goal is not a weight loss goal but a running goal. I have decided that I am going to make an attempt at getting ready for a 5K i figure it is just over 3 miles and running has not been as hard as I thought it would so I think a little determination will get me to that level. Everyone can count on my talking about how the running is going along with the EA Active until I reach that goal. As part of my new addition of screen shots here is my first Phase 2 workout results. I was just short of 300 calories burned.

No post mother's day word yet

Well, the alarm went off this morning and I was pumped to start my phase 2 workouts but my Monday's are very long and I normally don't get home until after 11 PM so I decided to sleep rather than workout. I have not weighed myself since Saturday (Which running helped me lose 1.1 lbs) and I ate quite a bit for dinner Saturday night and went crazy at the mother's day brunch Sunday so I am sure that when I do get back on the scale it will be ugly. I am planning on working from the house tomorrow so I will be waking up at my normal workout time to do tomorrow's phase 2 workout and if I have the time and energy I will try and do the makeup workout from today. Tomorrow could be the first time I go for a double workout day and a lawn mow in the afternoon. I will let everyone know what the damage from this weekend was and if I was able to workout twice and mow the lawn tomorrow. One thing I have been reading is that if you eat low calories for an extended period of time you body will get used to that and will stop losing weight so eating more than you normally do every now and again will get your body naturally burning more calories so when you go back to you dieting amount you will start losing weight again after you have hit a wall like I have this last week. Here is hoping that is correct if not I think I am going to have a good up hill battle to undo the damage of this weekend.

Getting a little more today

Ok, so I have never done two posts in one day but decided today would be a good day to do so. The post for this afternoon was written right before I left the house for a little while to look at some houses for sale. Once I got back I got to take care of everything I wanted to do today (for the most part). Here are some of the highlights, I finished my 12th workout in EA Active 2 which just as I expected was the end of Phase 1. I can say that it was pretty tough since everything was lower body. I did 3 sets of 80 stride jumps, 2 sets of mountain climbers, 2 sets of jump squats, and I think 4 sets of foot fires. (I might be getting the number of sets of foot fires and stride jumps mixed up). Once I got the done with the workout I finally got to go on a run like I have been wanting to do for some time. I didn't run as much as I wanted to but it was a run none the less. I did two laps around the neighborhood, I did a speed walk for the lap to warm up and ran the second. I was able to run the entire .5 mile lap without having to stop. I know that seems like nothing to most people but before I started doing all this I would getting winded just briskly walking to my car. I don't know if I will have the time to do it tomorrow but I would love to go on another run. I will can't wait to see what happens tomorrow when I weigh in. It is late and I am all over the place but after seeing someone else's blog with pics of his workout I decided to do the same so here is today's which just happens to be my first workout over 250 cals. burned. I will let everyone know how the weigh in goes tomorrow.

Just a quick note

Ok so ignore any typos as I am doing this post on my iPad. Well it looks like a will be able to do some running today. I took the day off to do some personal things that should end by noon giving me plenty of time to get home workout and run. I weighed myself again today and yet another day of no change at all. This is the first time since I started doing this that I have not moved one way or another in this long. I guess we will see how looking at houses all day, working out, running, then teaching does for the weight loss. I want to get some more loss under my belt before Sunday as I fully expect to gain at Sunday's mothers day brunch. Until next time.

Time to step it up a bit

Well yet again I had full intention of running yesterday on my EA Active 2 rest day but when I woke up in the morning it was about 45 degrees in May. Can't say I was expecting that. I figure that since I hardly have the correct equipment to start running as it is (Pretty much a pair of shoes and an iPod) that I certainly didn't have the right stuff to run in the colder temperature. I will give it another shot of Saturday or perhaps tomorrow since I took the day off work and see if I can't finally get out and do some running. I did workout number 11 today in my 60 day challenge and if it is anything like NFL training camp tomorrow should be my last workout in Phase 1 and I should be moving onto Phase 2 on Monday but I have been wrong in the past. Things are getting a little more difficult, I know it is only 5 days into the month but when I started it by losing 1.8 lbs I thought I was going to go screaming past my goal of getting down to 180 by the end of May. As it turns out my weight has not gone up or down even a tenth of a pound since Monday morning. That brings me to the title of this post, I think I need to start adding more than just the EA workout to my workout days or make sure that I spend more time doing extra activities. When I started this 73 pounds ago I was having no problem losing a good amount of weight a day but now that I am getting in better shape and I can feel a little definition in my arms and legs it seems to be a no brainer that I need to work harder to lost the last 27 lbs I am trying to lose. I hope the running will help out with that or the next two days of being on my feet all day may move things along a bit as well. I guess we will see. I will post how it goes this weekend.

New month new goal

Well, April came and went and I didn't quite reach my goal of 190 lbs but I got pretty darn close so I can't complain. On the morning of May first I had gotten down into the 193's and when I weighed myself this morning  I was an even 192. I was looking at where I am today and where I said I wanted to get to in order to reach my goal of losing 100 lbs (again) and this is what I came up with. I am getting close to my 120th day of losing weight and as of this morning I have lost a total of 73 lbs. The way I see it if I set my goals to lose 15 lbs a month for the next two months then I will reach my goal at the end of June. I would say losing 100 lbs in 6 months is not all that bad an accomplishment. For the end of this month I am shooting for getting down to 180 lbs which should be do able since I am 12 lbs away from the goal and I have decided I am going to add a day or two of running to my exercising on days that  I am not doing EA Active workouts. I was going to start this weekend but I don't know if anyone has been following the weather in middle TN but it has not been conducive to going outside for a run and is not supposed to dry out until Thursday. I hope that it will be dry enough of Wednesday morning to get a run in since that is my planned first run. I am going to try and go for 45 minutes or two miles which ever comes first. I don't expect to be able to go the entire time without having to stop and walk as I have never done any real running in my life but I will see just how far I can go and build from there.