Deflabbify

Silver Fit Bank, following dogs, and taking it easy

I just crossed the 20-hour mark in Fit Credits on Wii Fit. My Fit Bank got an upgrade to silver. It’s all shiny and stuff.

Tonight I put over an hour on Wii Fit because my wife found out how to take different routes on the Island Lap run. We had wanted to find the fifteen hidden retro Nintendo characters scattered all over the island (like Mario and the mushrooms from Super Mario Brothers) but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to run the different parts of the island. I knew that I had done it before — that was the frustrating part.

The trick is to follow the dogs. At certain points in the run a dog will com up from behind you. If you pass your guide, then the dog becomes the new guide, and takes you through a different route. What had happened is that I was fooling around during the first couple of times I did the run, and I deliberately passed my guide just to watch my Mii trip and fall. (Simple jokes for simple folks.) But for the past couple of weeks I took my time, and did a nice, steady pace, and saw the exact same route every single time I did the run. Well, my steady pace didn’t let me follow any of the dogs! Bingo! (That’s his name-o.)

I’ve been holding off on the 100 Pushups Challenge for the past week. My chiropractor told me that the hand position for standard pushups can cause the hands and wrists to tighten and become a bit painful to move. Holding off on that during Week 3 helped fix that, but then my right shoulder started to act up. The little pains in my shoulder reminded me of a time a few years ago when I had a likely rotator cuff injury. I was dumb and tried to launch my old dryer drum into the front yard before we took it to the dump. (I took it easy for a week or so and it healed, and remembered not to shock my shoulder like that.) Since basically the only way to heal that kind of injury is to immobilize the shoulder, I’m pretty careful, and if it starts complaining, I take it easy.

Well, that’s my update. How are you doing with your routines?

Mix up your exercise with some volunteering

This weekend I participated in our Lions Club’s highway cleanup.  We have a stretch of road about a mile long that we walk over every couple of months and clean of any trash we find.

It’s great to provide some community service.  It’s also good exercise. Bending over, going up and down inclines in the median, carrying the bag of trash all exercise muscles that I don’t typically exercise.  And at this point, any exercise I can get is a very good thing.  I sure felt it afterwards.

For a lot of people this kind of work is part of an everyday routine, but for a desk jockey like me physical labor is something I have to go out of my way to do.  One disadvantage of desk jobs is that they’re sedentary, so weight gain can creep up on you (as it did me) unless you take active steps to exercise and eat right.

Volunteering and sweating out in the sun for a couple of hours is one way to do that.

Seven things I’ve already noticed since I began exercising again

I’m very thankful that the positive feedback that comes from beginning an exercise program comes quickly. Here are seven little things that my wife, myself, and others have noticed already about me since I began exercising again:

• I feel better. This happened almost immediately. Just the act of finally doing something about my weight made me feel better. Overall, I don’t ache as much, and I have more energy.
• My wife used to only be able to hook two fingers behind my back when she was hugging me. Now she can grab her wrists.
• I can wrap a towel around myself without worrying that it will fall off.
• My mother-in-law says that I’m walking straighter
• My triceps are getting a little bit of definition with the push-up routine.
• I can see a hint of my cheek bones again.
• My wife says I have more “sparkle.” I’m losing the glumpy caveman look, and I seem to care more and be happier.

If you’ve lost some weight, what were some of the first things you or your spouse noticed about you?

Hundred Pushups, Week 4, days 1 and 2

Two days’ worth of updates:

Week 4, Day 1, Column 1: 16, 13, 13, 11, max = 21 (total 74)
Week 4, Day 2, Column 1: 16, 14, 14, 12, max = 20 (total 76)

I’m still being pretty generous with the breaks in between the different levels but I cut them down a little bit tonight. (I should be resting 90 seconds in between the sets, but I’ve been taking more like three minutes.)

It’s nice seeing a small amount of definition in my arms again.

If you’re interested in keeping track of your workout on your iPod, Peter over at Quick to Fit has just the download for you. (Or you can get my analog version here.)

One ounce at a time

Someone passed on a copy of Fred Brooks’ software classic The Mythical Man-Month to me. The introductory page to the chapter on progress tracking has this question and answer:

Question: How does a large software project get to be one year late?
Answer: One day at a time.

Small slippages here and there add up, and if left unchecked, they add up a lot.

But this is a weight loss blog, not a programming blog, so:

Question: How does a large guy get to be one hundred pounds overweight?
Answer: One ounce at a time.

I weighed 140 pounds at one point of my adult life, in my first year of graduate school. Through the next few years I put on some weight, had an operation to fix the effects of Crohn’s disease, and subsequently went up to about 180 pounds. I worked off 30 pounds of that over the next year or so just doing a lot of cardiovascular workouts. Then I started writing my thesis and that took precedence. Then I moved to my current location. Then I got married. A year after I was married I was 210. Five years after that I’d crept up to 240. That’s up 100 pounds.

One pound is 3,500 Calories. One pound is sixteen ounces, so one ounce is 219 Calories.

Each day that I consumed a can of soda, a beer, or a candy bar more than I burned off, I put on an ounce. One day doing this, and one day exercising a little harder or one day pushing that soda away, evens out. But when those offsetting days aren’t there, that’s when the weight creep shows up, one ounce at a time, and it adds up.

I gained this weight one ounce at a time. I have to take it off one ounce at a time, too.

Carnival participation

I appreciate the inclusion of my article on working out with Wii Fit in the Carnival of Weight Management and Fitness #20 over at Weight Master!

Hundred Pushups, Week 3 wrap-up

Got through another week!  I thought week 3 would get me but I squeaked by.  Here’s my progress so far:

One thing I did find myself doing is “powering through” the pushups more (meaning I did them faster). That and I continued to take a little extra time in between the levels (somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes rather than 1 to 2 minutes). I can see the number of pushups I’m doing going up steadily, so that’s what really matters, I guess.

Sticking with the program is going to be most of what gets me to the hundred. Since I was so fat to begin with I set my expectations of getting to 100 in six weeks as being zero.  I’ll be happy if I can get there in anywhere close to six months.

But that’s all right.  It’s helping me to get into better shape.

My biggest health or fitness vice

Nickel at Fit36 tagged me to post on my biggest health or fitness vice.

I just plurked on this:

I love beer, but beer doesn’t love me back.

Beer might have some health benefits but for the most part it’s empty calories, and any health benefits I might have gotten from it are offset by the extra pounds.

One thing that helps is my wife plays “beer fairy” and hides them where I can’t find them, thereby allowing her to ration them a little more. (I play along and don’t look for the beers.) That, and it is a bit fun to summon the beer fairy, I must admit.

Hmmm, who to tag next? How about:

• Pete over at Quick To Fit
• Kevin over at Weight Ladder
• MizFit over at MizFitOnline

(Rules of the Meme: 1) Post on your biggest health/fitness vice; 2) link back to the person who tagged you; 3) tag some more people and let them know they’ve been tagged! Oh, and have fun!)

Hundred Pushups, Week 3, Day 1

This one was tough, and I thought I may have pulled a muscle in my right arm doing it. Powering through sixty-four pushups isn’t a good thing to do if I injure myself in the process.

Week 3, Day 1, Column 1 (based on my exhaustion test result of 19): 15, 12, 12, 10, max = 15. (No overachieving on the maximum this time around.)

This week may be one I’ll have to repeat since I’m coming close to injuring myself in the process. I probably overdid things a little bit by also doing Rhythm Boxing on Wii Fit
at the encouragement of my coach, who came back this evening with her mother from a trip to West Virginia.

My arm is feeling better as I write this, but it’s something to watch and be careful about. I do some stretching of the push-up muscles but a warm-up period and more stretching probably wouldn’t hurt.

Hundred Pushups, week 2 summary

Well I just managed 19 pushups for my post-week-two exhaustion test. Here’s the progress so far:

My 19 pushups will put me in column 1 for week 3, which is just fine with me since I think that will be plenty. However, it’s really nice to see that I can do more than twice as many pushups in a row as I could a few weeks ago!