4XLT

Yesterday I took my friend Jessee to 24hr Fitness (where they are having a free guests promotion this month) for my cardio day.

I hate cardio days. Minutes upon minutes of pain. At least with weight days, the work is seperated by sixty second spaces of glorious rest. Not on cardio days.

But it’s always a good feeling to have gone, regardless of how sore my legs are today!

As I was heading home from my church’s worship team practice later that day, I got an intense craving for some orange pop. I’m talking crack addict levels of craving. Normally this would be an occasion to pick up a two-liter of Safeway’s generic orange-flavored soda and go to town. It’d likely be finished off within twenty-four hours.

Truthfully, that wasn’t anything that was terribly out of the ordinary in my life. I’ve always kept my fridge stocked with pop. Really, I think my massive regular intake of pop and all its “empty calories” has played a pretty big part of my college weight gain. I’d also identify my ongoing switch to diet pop as a big part of my weight loss so far. Simple, simple stuff, but when I did some simple math and figured that a 32oz. pop from 7-Eleven ran in the neighorhood of 400 calories, it really opened my eyes!

So, there I was, wanting some orange pop like you wouldn’t believe. When before I would have just binged on orange pop, I decided to just cheat. I picked up some Diet Cherry Coke (Being that Diet Coke is manna from Heaven, I was shocked to find its diet doppelganger. They have Diet Cherry Coke?? Who knew?), but stopped on my way to the truck for a can of orange pop from the soda machine.

So, yes, I got my orange flavored carbonated fix, but the fact that it’s zero calorie drinks in my fridge made it all the sweeter.

Todays weigh-in: 423lbs!

I hit the gym like a angry beast this morning (because I should have gone last night, but work prevailed over me), pushed through my weight routine, and then pushed out ten minutes on the elliptical machine when I finished up because I had some spare time (namely ten minutes, heh). I wished I was training in Siberia like Rocky Balboa when I got wrapped up, so I could throw myself into a giant snow bank! Fortunately, the drizzly overcast nature of Portland’s winter weather sufficed.

Shortly thereafter, I meet my pal Ben at the hospital for our weekly weigh in. As I mentioned yesterday, I was curious as to how things were going to work out this go round, especially after Ben’s nine pound miracle last week. So, we hop on the scale and Ben’s only down two (but still down pounds after he admits to a poor week, which is awesome for him, regardless!).

I hop up on the scale and watch the hand spin around the dial, where it stops to rest at 423 pounds. I’m down seven pounds from last week (and I’m now ahead on the Twenty Pound Bet)!

Needless to say, I put the theme from Rocky on repeat and listen to it all the way home.

Goal #1 – under four hundred pounds by March 24th – seems a lot more feasible now, and that’s a great, great feeling.

One of my better friends here in Portland is a fellow portly fella named Ben. We both are part of the Chi Alpha Christian community of folks here in town (where I’ve been on staff for the past year plus), so we see each other pretty often from week to week. On occasion, we’ll gripe about our weight and health. And leave it at that.

About two weeks ago we were in a van together on our way back from California and started griping about our weight again. This time, to help give us an incentive to get our respective acts together, we concocted a harebrained scheme.

We’re having a twenty pound weight loss race. The wager? Well, we’re both poor, so we’ve gone with public humiliation of some sort.

We started about two weeks ago. As of last week, Ben lost nine pounds (in a single week) due to cutting out carbs. Dagum Atkins diet. Grar! We go to our weekly weigh in at the hospital tomorrow, and I’m down four pounds to the guy. I may be in trouble if he pulls off another miracle week, but I’m in this to win it!

My gym time this week has been really off the charts – I’m starting to really enjoy going and lifting, although my right shoulder is still sore from my workout Sunday night. Eating hasn’t been the nightmare of large Dr. Peppers and fast food as it has lately, but I need to get a gameplan to my diet in the same way that I’m attacking the gym.

As it is, I’m eating relatively healthy when I do, but my eating is really, really sporadic. I haven’t been doing five smaller meals a day and I haven’t been tracking my intake. My water level is not were it needs to be, but not were it used to be. I’ve been hitting the diet cola a lot, which, odd as it may be, is something I’m really damn proud of. Apart from my diet pop victory, my only other extremely high point is that I’m making sure I eat protein right after I get done working out. Mmm. Muscle fuel.

I went and purchased The Abs Diet a few days ago – I’ll be building some food plan based on it and we’ll see where that goes. I’ll check in tomorrow on my weigh in! Here’s for another good week!

I’m sitting here at my pal’s apartment waiting for the Super Bowl to get started, and I just unloaded my bag of goodies from Safeway. I was rolling through the isles of of the grocery store just a few minutes ago, sorting out what I could grub on this afternoon. My friend (who is also trying to loose weight) said that Sundays are his off day, and I thought how it would be easy to call it off today as well.

It is the Super Bowl, right? What better time to have an excuse to cheat?

But nah, man. I can’t. As much as I’d like to O.D. on chips and dip, pop and beer, burgers and brats (and then not get to the gym tonight), I’ve got to keep my game going strong.

So, chili and Diet Coke it is. And then I’m going to the gym tonight and going to totally dominate my routine.

And then some.