Goal #1: Get Fit

This morning my physical therapist asked if I lost weight and indeed I have. It’s always nice when someone notices.

As some of you may already know, I had 3 goals to accomplish this year. You can call them new year resolutions if you’d like. I mentioned I would talk more about my 1st goal, which is to get fit. In order to work towards that abstract goal, I needed to set some measurable targets. I had come up with 2:

  • Get into the normal range for my BMI. At my height of 5’5″, that meant a weight of 150lbs to reach a BMI of 25.
  • Grow a 6-pack of abs (or 4, or 2, just not 1 giant round tummy)

I started out this year with a maximum weight of 168lbs, which puts my BMI at 28 (inside the overweight range). I remained around 163-165lbs for quite awhile until the middle of February when everything in my world got turned upside down. If you followed me on twitter, you would’ve seen my tweet about hitting 149.4lbs this morning, putting my BMI at 24.9 and into the normal range. Milestone 1 reached!

Not quite sure how long it’ll take to reach milestone 2. My stomach is already starting to get flat, and depending on how I flex my body, I can start seeing muscles in my abdominal area. Hopefully not too long. Did I mention that medium sized t-shirts fit me again? It also appears I need to wear a belt now, or else my pants start falling.

Exercise

As for my exercise regiment, I would say most of the weight-loss was due to running on the elliptical. I run 2 miles on it everyday which comes out to about ~45 minutes, which is perfect for a TV episode or 2 anime episodes. If a Netflix movie comes in, I watch that instead. Update: One thing I forgot to mention is that my elliptical claims I burn ~850 calories at the end of each session. Not entirely sure how accurate that is.

I’ve also been doing weight training every other day. I would do it everyday, but Xyon tells me my muscles need to rest for like 40 hours between rigorous exercises. My workout includes sit-ups, crunches, push-ups, pull-ups, curls, and a series of other weight lifting exercises I do not know the names of. I’m not exactly sure what doing sit-ups on an exercise ball is called, but I’ve gone up to 2 sets of 50. Recently I added a 10lb weight to that since losing weight has made doing those a lot easier.

Of course once in awhile I do miss a day of exercising, but I try my best not to. If I had to guess, I would say I miss about 1 day every 2 weeks.

Diet

I haven’t really changed what I eat (food is just too awesome to give up), but I have changed my eating habit, which I think came out from laziness. For lunch on most days, I usually have cereal, Special K to be exact. I discovered Special K sometime near the end of last year and loved it, though recently it’s gotten a bit boring. I’ve gone through 6 or 7 Costco twin packs since the beginning of this year. I guess I can attribute it to the fact that I’m too lazy to walk down to the cafeteria for food. It’s a good thing work provides milk, bowls, and spoons. 🙂

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve been eating smaller portions, but not on purpose. Sticking any more food into my stomach would hurt. Maybe my stomach shrank?

4 Replies to “Goal #1: Get Fit”

  1. Thought you might like to know that the main factor in acquisition of a “six pack” is *extremely* low body fat percentage, I believe generally in the 5–10% range.

  2. glad to see you’re turning into a workout freak! =)

    i’ve never used an elliptical, but judging by running and biking estimates i would guess 45 minutes of vigorous cardio should burn about 400-500 calories. 850 is a stretch unless you got that thing set to max and are booking it! lol.

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