A minor loss, but a loss all the same. This coming week will be filled with some tough situations, since I know I’ll be eating out for dinner every night from tonight through Saturday night, plus Sunday morning. And I won’t be working out on Friday night.
But, a reprieve is granted! My group leader for Weight Watchers is off next week and the following, which means I have at least one meeting, most likely two, where I don’t have an “official” weighing. In other words, I get a week to undo the damage I’m going to do this week. 
In other news, I discovered the scale at the gym is roughly accurate to the one I use for Weight Watchers, so I can at least get an idea of what I’ll see on Wednesdays when I weigh in and won’t get any unpleasant surprises.
Also, during last night’s workout, I put some running into the mix. Short bursts, ranging from 4 to 6 miles per hour. Enough to get the heart rate up there for a little bit, but not too long — I really want to keep it between 131 and 145 beats per minute to optimize what my body is burning. At that level, it’s pretty much equal parts (and high amounts) of glucose and fat. Any higher than that, and the burn rate goes *way* up, but it’s almost exclusively glucose, which isn’t want I’m really looking for at this point.
I’ll play with the workout a little more tomorrow night (already hit the gym this morning pre-meeting), then take the weekend off before returning in earnest on Monday.
Onwards!
More success! I was worried at first, given I had a week off from the gym, and I really didn’t make the best choices in food, especially this weekend. But getting back on the gym was a big help, and it paid off. 3 pounds in two weeks is a little off the pace from where I want to be, but I’m happy to see a loss, frankly.
Next week I’m going to attempt to modify my workout a little more to include the other machines, since the treadmill is getting a little too easy. I must admit, though, I just feel so good after leaving the gym. The days I work out I have such a change in my attitude, outlook, and energy level. Last night I hit the gym before going to pool league and I was just in such a fantastic mood upon arriving there — I’m going to make sure I remind myself of that feeling anytime I feel like skipping the gym.
Onward!
Not a terribly new photo, this one comes from my June trip to Newfoundland. Taken atop Signal Hill, this is the signpost showing the distances and directions to other major cities.Will have something new next week. Woo!
Haven’t posted a weight loss update in a bit, mainly because I don’t have anything to report. I was down with a cold Mon-Wed of last week, and haven’t seen the gym since the Thursday prior to that. I just didn’t have it in me when I was sick to go to the gym, and I’m just now feeling back to 90% or so. I plan to start in again tomorrow on that.
I don’t weigh myself, I only weigh in weekly at Weight Watchers. I didn’t go on Wednesday for a number of reasons — I was too bogged down at work, the meeting was a start-up meeting, which meant no actual meeting to speak of, and lastly because I hadn’t been to the gym at all and didn’t need to see any bad news at the scale. I’ll go on Wednesday and see how a week of no real physical activity affects me.
Alas, I don’t have a new photo to post, since I also didn’t really *do* anything or go anywhere this week. I’ll dig one out of the archives that I’m proud of and post it later.
No photo from the past week — I spent Saturday moving a pool table and spent Sunday being sick with a cold. Which is how I’m spending my day today as well — sigh.
This is from last Saturday’s visit to the Chicago Botanic Garden. I like how the duck’s just staring at me, and I really like the lighting in this shot.
I did it! Fifty pounds lost. 50.6, techincally. I worked hard this week — I even went to the gym on Monday despite it being a holiday, and the payoff was totally worth it. I’m going to try to not slack off, because if I can actually maintain a 5 pound weekly loss, that would be tremendous.
I don’t actually expect to maintain 5 lbs a week, but I don’t see a reason why I can’t keep up my regimen and enjoy improved weight loss. This week was a week of mostly healthy food choices, combined with ramping up my workouts. Ramping up the workouts is fundamental to acheiving success in any case, since if I find what I’m doing to be too easy, it’s time to make it more difficult.
Current workout is still solely treadmill for 45 minutes, but the starting speed is 3.0-3.2 mph, and ramping up speed to 3.5, but now I go at incline of 3.0. I’m not yet comfortable running on the treadmills — I know they’re big and industrial, but they just feel a little too wobbly when I break into a jog. Once I drop some more poundage I’ll give it another shot. Also, I hope to get into a routine where I can do some work on the machines for toning soon — my primary impediment at the moment is time, but that may open up a little soon.
Onwards!
This week’s photo comes from a Saturday trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden. I’d never been there before, and the weather was postively screaming for an activity like this. So we spent the day wandering the various gardens, snapping photos along the way. I ended up with many bug close-ups, which I don’t think Tisha would much like to look at. So instead, I chose to publish this one.This is the view you’re greeted with just as you cross the bridge to the islands housing the Japanese gardens. I don’t typically go in for the wide landscape photos, preferring the close-ups and candids of people, but this view just made me stop and smile.
My precious little way of looking at photography is that there’s this huge world out there, and with my camera I can steal little chunks of it from space-time and keep them indefinitely. I think the photo above represents an accurate theft of that place at that time, which is why it leapt out at me when scouring the shots from Saturday. Hope you like it.
When my new gallery is ready, I’ll throw up more shots from that journey there. In the meantime, I’ll keep trickling things to Flickr.
