Most Days

About a month ago, I discovered I had gained somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 lbs over 6 months. EIGHT POUNDS, my friends. That's more than 5% of my body weight. Holy moly. I currently weigh what I did my senior year of high school, when I was about 10% body fat, had really awesome abs, got about 4 hours of muscle-building exercise per day, beat boys in arm-wrestling, could do one-armed pushups with my legs elevated, and could lift 100lb girls over my head without assistance. I was, as they say, butch. Today, I am not. We're talking 8 lbs of pure fatty gain; my pants don't fit no more.

I was in total. utter. shock. I wasn't in awful shape, and I hadn't actually totally neglected working out. I can still run the 3-mile trail through the park. But the 1-giant-meal-at-night-before-bed during surgery, the weekend binges on gummi bears in front of the tv, the free buffet-style lunches (with cookies and pop) during internal medicine, the driving to work instead of taking public transit... none of that helped.

The reality is: At 3500kcal/lb, adding ~100 calories a day for 1 month is an easy 1lb weight gain per month. Subtracting ~100cal-burning-exercise every day by driving, sitting in front of a computer, etc for 1 month is another easy 1lb weight gain per month. So I really shouldn't have been in utter shock. But I was.

So Eric & I, in an attempt to not only get rid of our excess busy/lazy/engaged-and-complacent weight gain but also to prevent it from ever coming back again, have hit the gym. Hard. We used to either run or do weights, but we're combining both into daily routines. The goal: work out 5/7 days of the week. We do 30 minutes of cardio on the majority of days, and abs most days, with alternating upper & lower body strength training. I've decided to post our progress on this blog as a sort of motivation to keep it up - how embarrassing would it be to write this huge long post about my new lifestyle modification, then fail!? So I apologize, it may get boring some days.

In case you, too, have some extra poundage you'd like to lose: The current medical guideline for weight loss in overweight/obesity (I know I'm not obese or even close to being overweight, but just wanted to share the guidelines) is to set a goal of 10% total body weight loss over 6 months by doing a number of things: 1. cutting 500-1000 kcal/day, 2. consuming a diet of multiple small, nutritious and high-fiber meals throughout the day, 3. getting at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise most days of the week. Feel free to ask any Q's. We can do it together!