Mush - Day 1

Okay…so I’m ready to start my “Day 1” of the weight loss with March 1 rolling around. I’ve thought about lots of possible ways to lose weight as I've gotten advice from a number of people: I’ve contemplated just working out; I’ve had success in the past doing a South Beach style diet; I’ve been intently reading about a wheat-free diet in a discussion that Team AllEars members have been having on a board (I ended up getting the book to read it); I’ve thought about tracking calories; I’ve looked into eating normally until around 5-6 pm and then stopping; I’ve even looked into a fruit-only diet (Okay, I haven't, but I have been reading the Steve Jobs biography recently, so I'm going to count it). I decided that I’m going to go with South Beach for now - I've lost around 50 lbs following it once - and, while doing that, keep track of my calories (sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll talk about calories and calorie counters in a post on here). After I take off around 10-20 pounds and hopefully get my IT band issues cleared out by not running, I’ll start jogging again and hope to get several 5-10Ks in this year.

I know that, many times, people will have a “before” picture, where they hold a newspaper from that day and a wear a fairly revealing outfit. The goal is not to look too good while showing the body fat (you know…frowning, hair messy, poor lighting, etc). I had a newspaper, but I didn’t have anything revealing. I found some old shorts and tried putting them; unfortunately, I stretched out the waist, and they fell off - it was definitely revealing.  I got some speedos to wear, but they snapped off when I tried to put them on and nearly killed my wife as they flew through the air at an astounding speed (we settled out of court).  I went with sweats and a t-shirt and had my wife take my picture...no shirt...untanned...hair unkempt...frowning - and her $600 camera broke (we settled out of court for that, too).

Okay, getting serious here for a minute, I decided to just go with a recent photo of myself from Marathon Weekend. This one is a painful one to look at.

Photo Courtesy of Laura - from Team AllEars

Ugh.


So here I am. Day 1. I’ve weighed myself, and I’m at 256 lbs and have measured my neck (18.5), waist (48.5), chest (49), arm (15), and thigh (24.5). The hope here is that, by posting these numbers, I'll have more accountability to have them get smaller...I’ll (gladly) let y’all know of any changes in the right direction. I’ll try to post an update every week on here with the (hopefully smaller) numbers.

Here we go!!