5.20.2009

Own Your Diet

First off, I'm mainly making this post to maintain my public accountability as previously discussed...keeping myself honest so to speak. I've maintained my BSG+ treadmill MWF and Wii Fit stuff Tues+Thurs since the last post. Huzzah. I'm down to 220 for those keeping score.

Since we're here though, I thought I'd share a pet peeve of mine - the use of the word diet. The grapefruit diet, the peach schnapps diet, etc. Here's the secret why they don't work: They're not your diet. Everyone is on a diet. Everyone. It's YOUR diet. Your diet might be potato chips and cheesecake...but it's your diet. What you eat, at least what you eat routinely is your diet. Bats have a diet of insects, you have a diet of ...whatever.

Point being, you can't change to Mr. Grapefruit's diet for 3 weeks, lose a few pounds, then go back to YOUR diet and expect to keep the weight off. When they say diet and exercise, they mean you need to change your diet, not go on a diet for awhile.

Until next time -

5.15.2009

Public Accountability

So...I started exercising. I'm telling you this because there's a little RSS feed that I added to my google homepage and my my.yahoo homepage called zen habits that is generally a good source for articles about how to get your shit together. In one such article, it was made mention that holding yourself publicly accountable to a change you've committed yourself to helps you keep the commitment. That part, at least, apparently stuck with me.

100 days ago tomorrow (the Wii Fit keeps track), I started using the Wii Fit my girlfriend bought me for Valentine's day. I haven't used it consistently...at least not until now. About 11 days ago I hopped on the thing and it told me something new. It said I was overweight, which it has been saying for awhile. It's been saying that for so long that I've lovingly referred to it as the Wii Fat - everytime I had jumped on it my weight had gone up. The new thing was the number of pounds. I had hit 227.

I'm not sure why 227 was such an alarming number for me, but it was enough for me to take the exercise notions I've been toying with and start giving it a shot. So, since Monday I've been doing the treadmill while watching an episode of BattleStar Galactica (I own several seasons on DVD) every other morning. My girlfriend wakes me up everyday at 6:00, and I found a good time for me to exercise is while she's getting ready for work between 6:30 and 7:30.

I've been alternating between the treadmill thing and playing with the Wii Fit for the hour she's getting ready...which is a good thing. I'm not positive I could do the treadmill thing every single day. So far so good with the every other day thing though. Hopefully I'll be making some more of these posts, continuing to hold myself publicly accountable, and continuing to work my way back down from the dreaded 227.