The 2011 Raffers' Weight Loss Thread

[Sleel]

Yearly health check day before yesterday. Either the nurse didn’t do the measurement right the last time, or I’ve actually lost another 3 cm or so around my belly. Odd thing is: my overall body weight is virtually unchanged; within 500 g of last year’s reading. I was already at a good weight, moderately low body fat, and I haven’t been exercising as regularly as I’d like. I’d expected to have lost weight since last year, maybe a couple of kg of muscle due to less regular exercise, but it seems that I’ve just leaned out a bit and may have actually gained a slight amount of muscle. Weird.

The only change since last year is a very slight tweak to eating over the last 3 months or so. More in line with recommendations for paleo eating, I’ve cut down on my grain and bean consumption (though not cut them out entirely) and increased the amount of vegetables and tubers. Some nuts and other healthy fats to round out the fats from protein sources. Maybe un uptick on the fats, actually, due to starting fish-oil supplementation a bit over a month ago, which I’ve since stopped due to laziness (running out and not buying more yet.)

Well, whatever, I guess I’ll take it. Though, I can’t help thinking that I might have put on a couple of kg of muscle instead if I’d been able to keep my workout schedule as regular as I’d like. Way better than a fat gain, though, so I guess I should quit my bitching.

[Dudley]

On Weight Watchers. Lost 6.5 lbs in 3 weeks so far. Goal is a lose a whole lot more.

And when the hell did my metabolism slow down to a crawl? I used to be able to eat and drink whatever I wanted... until 35 came around. I packed on 30 lbs in the past 3 years.

WW is actually pretty nice. I am still eating the foods I like (real butter, whole milk, etc) but I'm (re-) learning portion control. If you're not paying attention and have others dictate your portions (eating out), you're going to get fat.

[Hockey Monkey]

Go Dudley! I'm in week 11, and I've lost 17.8 lbs so far on WW. The key is it's a livable program. I have a long way to go, but I think I'm going to eventually get there because I'm learning how to eat without depriving myself of anything I really really want. I simply plan for it, track it, and eat it.

[Hockey Monkey]

How are you doing on WW Dudley? I'm down 20.8 as of my weigh in on Sunday. I
m expecting another small loss this Sunday morning. So you have any questions about the program I can help you with?

[Bodhiman]

In related news....
Just got confirmation for my internship with Crossfit beginning July 18.
I'M SO HAM DAPPY!

[Panacea]

Congrats Bodhiman!

[MissJeanLouise]

Originally Posted by Bodhiman

In related news....
Just got confirmation for my internship with Crossfit beginning July 18.
I'M SO HAM DAPPY!

What can you tell me about CrossFit? There is a relatively new Crossfit location near me and I am very intrigued. On the other hand, it seems horrifically expensive and I can't quite imagine pulling the trigger on that unless it was going to change my life or something.

FTR, I am in fairly good shape cardio-wise, but not much use strength-wise. I would love to be super toned and muscular.

[mlerose]

Here is what I know about CrossFit (I have many friends who do it).

CrossFit is generally done in a bare-bones facility (called a box I think?), and there's a set workout of the day that you can do on your own or with a coach or a class. There's also additional coaching and training available. Workouts focus on stuff like you might have done in gym class, with the addition of weight lifting. And it's not easy weightlifting. A friend of mine who has been doing CrossFit for about 8 months now considers herself a powerlifter and has been competing in CrossFit events. She weighs ~99 lbs and in her most recent meet did a 180 lb squat to break her 105 lb weight class record. Most of the people I know who do CrossFit also seem to get involved with eating Paleo style, though I'm not sure why the two things go hand in hand. Maybe Bodhiman can shed some light on that.

[Sleel]

I’ve been doing CrossFit as my main workout for the last few years. One thing that mainsite (the official CrossFit page/board) has gotten away from a bit, now that they’re pushing the competitive sport angle, is the scalability and efficiency angle that they were promoting most back around 2005 or 2006 when I first heard about them. They used to make a lot out of how much they’d get in the way of results from minimal but intense training time. The volume of the workouts seems to be growing more with the competitive angle.

They make mention of scalability once in a while, but don’t give much advice about how to do it anymore. If you want some points on how to scale, check out the boards at Brand X Martial Arts corresponding to the WOD (Workout Of the Day) you’re interested in. Self-training is possible, and in fact is probably still the norm for the community. There weren’t many gyms—or “boxes” as they’re called—in the early days. Now, there’s a lot more, but they’re still less common than regular gyms.

The business model is “open source,” which is, “make most of the information free, but charge for training, user support, licensing the brand, and higher-level information.” The loose/libertarian approach to controlling their brand means that trainer quality is reportedly variable. That said, coaching is very helpful. I’ve done everything on my own, since fitness training in general is wildly unpopular in Japan. I know that I’m less capable than I would be if I had someone to critique my technique on some of the more technical points. I have a gymnastics and sport background, and I’ve done some teaching for martial arts and coaching for basic gymnastics, but you can only self-coach so far. Everyone benefits from having an outside observer.

The basic concept of CrossFit is that of being a generalist; you should be good at a little bit of everything. The reason for that is that there are many synchronicities in exercise. Some training methods we still don’t understand the reasons they work, but they do work. Things like training sprinting (basically anaerobic) translating to increased performance in longer-distance (aerobic) running. Athletes who are too specific in their training are prone to injury or limited performance in anything outside their specialty; VO2-max, for example, is highly sport-specific. Sometimes doing something non sport-specific actually increases performance within a sport. I don’t know if you remember the cross-training boom in the early 90s, but that was based on a lot of the same concepts and information.

So, they talk a lot about GPP (General Physical Preparedness) and do varied forms of training. One day might be heavy weightlifting, the next day running, another day a combination of calisthenics, lifting, and short-distance high-intensity aerobic activity. Another key phrase is, “increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains,” which translates as, “being able to do more, whether you’re talking about a short or long time, high intensity or lower levels, lifting heavy weight, or just moving your body.”

There’s a PDF from way back (2002) that lays out the CrossFit terms of fitness. “Fitness” was surprisingly ill-defined by even fitness professionals at the time, and while CrossFit central can be annoyingly fuzzy and unprofessional in some respects, they definitely deserve credit for bringing a bit more rigor and inclusiveness to the field of fitness over the last several years. You find a lot more people advocating multiple proficiencies over single-sport training for fitness than you did even as recently as a couple of years ago. They used to be really big on citing current research, which more often than not was just catching up to what coaches had noticed was getting results.

The Paleo and Zone diets are both advocated. In my opinion, Paleo is much more supported by extant facts and research than Zone. A lot of people are doing a combination of the two: Paleo for food quality and choices, Zone for proportions and portion control. Considering that nutrition is pretty darn important for body composition, more important than training even, I’d say that the results you see from either or both are self-evident. I’m not strict Paleo, but I’ve been eating more and more along those lines. I consider Zone a bit too nitpicky now, so I don’t personally follow it. The science of Zone, at least in Sears’s books, is a bit sketchy too, though there is quite a bit of related research that supports the general concept.

There was a falling out a couple of years back over some unprofessional behavior exhibited by some headquarters representatives toward Robb Wolf, who used to give nutrition seminars, and has since written a book on Paleo. His mentor, Loren Cordain was the guy who popularized the Paleo diet with his book on it back around 2000, though the concepts of the diet go back to at least the mid 80s or earlier. The CrossFit community still obviously considers the nutrition advice to be useful, but HQ pushes Zone above all. Sad that politics is interfering to some extent with information flow.

Scaling is key. When I started out with CrossFit, it utterly and totally kicked my ass, even though I scaled it well. It was, if I remember right, a prescribed 4x: 400 m run, 12 pull ups, 21 1-pood kettlebell swings. I did the run as prescribed, half the pull ups, and scaled the weight to an 8 kg dumbbell. I was able to finish, which is why I think the scaling was okay. The whole “feeling like you’re going to die” thing while doing the workout is normal for CrossFit metcons (short for “metabolic conditioning,” which is the term they use in lieu of aerobics since they span the aerobic/anaerobic pathways and often also include significant weight resistance exercises).

Depending on your fitness level, you definitely have to scale both weights and intensity, but the idea is to preserve the stimulus. If you can’t do pull ups, you can do assisted pull ups, jumping pull ups, or even pull downs on the cable machine. Just try to work the same movement at whatever level you can handle. Ramp the intensity to what you can just barely handle. That means that 400 m run isn’t going to be a sprint, but a jog, or it might be a 300 m or 200 m for now.

Since I can’t get enough free time to work out anywhere near as regularly as I’d like (my current job requires me to be here a minimum of 46–48 hours a week, 6 days a week) I still have to scale workouts. I do a lot more of them as prescribed (as Rxed) but working out only 2–3 days a week in a good week holds me back from really going balls-out even on the stuff I can handle without cutting reps/weight/time.

[MissJeanLouise]

Dang it, when I was dropping my kids off at camp this morning, I saw the CrossFit people out doing CrossFitty stuff. I wanted to be one of them.

I just like the idea of someone else kicking my ass, yanno?

[Falcon]

I have now lost 14 lbs. I am only 0.2 lbs away from being "normal" weight, per the BMI calculation. And that's using an adjusted weight on my scale to match what I will weigh when I go to my doctor for a checkup. His scale weighs 4 lbs heavier than mine. Yay!

That's my low weight, though. My next goal is to lose enough that as my weight fluctuates, the high doesn't go above normal weight. So let's say another 5 lbs.

Although my weight loss is gradual (about 2lbs/month on average), the changes I've made are sustainable. As I've cleaned up my diet, I've become less interested in making cookies on the weekends. I attribute this to eating some fruit every day. It satisfies my need for something sweet, while providing fiber and nutrients. It's not that I never make cookies and scarf down the (half batch) in a weekend. It's just that I've become less and less interested in doing so, so it's a rare treat rather than an almost weekly thing.

The main changes I've made were:

1. Figured out how to manage an underlying health problem so I don't start to pass out when I exercise. So now I'm more active. Not at the gym--I got sick of that. But I walk a mile most days, and on weekends, I often walk around for a couple of hours doing nature photography. Once the snow flies, I'll go back to yoga and my exercise bike.

2. Started eating steel cut oats for breakfast during the week. They're filling, so I'm not so hungry during the day, and the fiber is doing wonderful things for my insides. I have some fruit on my oats, too...a small handful of blueberries, strawberries, or banana.

3. Cut my lunch in half. Calorie tracking (done only the first two weeks to get a sense of where I was at), showed I was eating more than I really needed. I was going by the size of my "lunch size" Tupperware container. Turns out I only need half of that, provided I bring a piece of fruit for a snack later in the afternoon. Switching to fruit as an afternoon snack also keeps me from popping out of the office for cookies or candy. When I feel tempted, I remember that I'm happy that I'm losing weight. If I really need something different than a fruit snack, I buy one of those packaged guacamoles that's just avocado and jalepeno and eat some of that with crackers.

4. Really didn't change my dinners. I already do my own cooking and was eating pretty well. I do think that I've been more careful to include more veggies, though. I've become very fond of roasting broccoli, cauliflower and mushrooms, for example. And I've moved away from pasta and rice--even though I was using brown rice and whole grain pasta. It's not that I never have these things. Just not as my main staples.

5. Tried to keep my goals small and achievable. Sometimes I fantasize that I'm as slim as I was at 25. That would require a total weight loss of 45 lbs, though, and now that I'm in my 40s, I'm not sure that's realistic. So I try to pick smaller goals in increments of 5-10 lbs and think about those instead. I'm excited to reach those smaller goals, and that keeps me feeling good about what I'm doing each step of the way.

Heck, I get excited seeing even a pound come off. I'm easily amused!

And really, the main goal was to be normal weight again, and to be able to engage more in physical activities (which I enjoy doing). I've succeeded at that, so anything further is icing on the cake! Errrr, peanut butter on the apple!

[Wolf Larsen]

210.2 this morning. I need to get it in gear to make my goal of being below 200 at the end of the year.

I went on a six mile bike ride last nigh. Significant altitude change, so more work than it sounds.

I just got "The New Rules Of Lifting For Abs" and after I read it I will be changing my resistance training schedule.

I went back and looked at the first weight entry I did on Jan 1 and it was 215 and a bit. So down five pounds in 6 month. Not fabulous, but better than up.

[Hockey Monkey]

I weighed in this morning and got my 25lb star! Woohoo! I'm only 0.3lb away from 10% lost. I have a long long way to go yet, but I'm really liking WW a lot. Hubby and I are going for walks together every Sunday morning, I'm eating much healthier but still having a treat now and again. I don't feel like I'm depriving myself of anything which is where I would lose interest every other time I tried to lose weight.

The walking is getting easier for me and I'm going to try adding in some strength training to build some calorie burning muscle, and get my core stronger so I can walk farther.

[Falcon]

HM, my mom really likes Weight Watchers too. She lost her excess weight a few years ago with them and has kept most of it it off. One of the things that prompted me to get serious about weight loss is that she visited me last fall, and I took a picture of the two of us standing together. I kept looking at that and realizing that the "couple of extra pounds" I was carrying were really noticeable, and if she could trim down, so could I.

Yay to you for dropping 25!

Wolf, down is definitely better than up. Keep going for it!

[MissJeanLouise]

Very impressive, HM! My mom recently started Weight Watchers and is really liking it. She'd been an Atkins devotee for a long time, but the problem for her was that she would always gain it all back and then some when she went off. This is more of a lifestyle that she can maintain.

Something great happened to me this week. I got my running mojo back! I've been struggling with the desire to run but not being able to sustain it. I don't know what changed this week, but I have run 5 out of the last 7 days, 4 miles each time. Today is supposed to be a day off running, and I'm really struggling with that.

[janerossx]

When you don't feel like working out, put on your exercise clothes and tell yourself you will only exercise for three to five minutes.

----------------
fat camp for adults

[Hockey Monkey]

I was 31 down as of my Sunday morning weigh in. I'm wearing a size smaller tops now and am getting back into pants I haven't worn in 3 years. I need to have 2 links taken out of the watch I've worn for 4 years at it's current band size.

[KidVermicious]

So, last year I couldn't ride the 4 mile loop I liked near my house in one go, cuz the last hill killed me and I had to walk half of it. They've got that all torn up with construction now, so I rode the harder loop, 6 miles and twice the total elevation gain, and I killed it. Didn't stop once (except when I dropped my water bottle). Another week of that and I should be good to make the commute to work in a reasonable time.

I'm at 290, down from 325 when I started in January. I plateaued the past few months, but I'm guessing 30 miles a day on the bike should put paid to that bullshit toot sweet.

[Falcon]

That's awesome, KidV! Congratulations!

[Falcon]

I've lost 17 lbs now, and am normal weight per BMI, even by my doctor's scale. I seem to have hit a plateau in the past month, though. Going to Glacier in July wore me out, and I'm not getting as much exercise. Plus, with the days getting shorter, I'm hungrier and eating more.

Not sure if I'll be able to lose more over the winter, so my hope is I can at least maintain what I've lost. Since I'm not getting out for long walks on the weekends now, I've started riding my exercise bike again. Just did 25 minutes this evening.

[Hockey Monkey]

Weighed in yesterday morning and was at 219! I'm down 39.6 lbs since March. I had to downsize my wedding set.

[Panacea]

Yay, HM! That is awesome. Yay to y'all too, KV and Falcon!

Today they had a Health Fair at the gym with free testing. My Cholesterol was < 150, Blood Pressure was 130/70, Blood Sugar was 92, and Body Fat was 27.1%.

[CaveMike]

I'd like to get in on this thread. What do I need to do? I assume there is some sort of awkward initiation?

[Chacoguy]

Originally Posted by CaveMike

I'd like to get in on this thread. What do I need to do? I assume there is some sort of awkward initiation?

Bathe Him and bring him to me.

also, fetch the goat, and the restraints.


Oh! and the roofies.



Ye just hold still, yung feller.

[Sleel]

Yes. You strip down naked while we surround you and draw permanent marker on all your faults. It’s like a sorority party, with less cattiness and even fewer semi-nude pillow fights.

Then Chacoguy gets his turn. (Psst, you forgot the amorous squid.)

[CaveMike]

Well at least you're not making me run...

[Dragonlady]

Won't make you, but you'll wish you had!

[Hockey Monkey]

All you gotta do is drop in occasionally and update how and or what you are doing, like thus:

Hey everybody! Still going strong with WW and survived my birthday week. I'm down 44lbs overall. I'm hoping to make it through the holiday season with continued weight loss, but if I am able to maintain, I'll be fine with that too. We are doing a light (not much cooking) Thanksgiving and I've pledged not to bake this season. No cookies. No candy. No pies. The homemade cookies are my true weakness. If they are there, I will eat them. Right as they come off the pan. So none of that.

I'm doing a Potluck Thanksgiving and everyone has to bring the recipe for their dish to share. It's really for me to be able to count the points. My hubby and I will be making the turkey and dressing and that's it.

[Wolf Larsen]

I bought new work pants today and had to go down a size!

[Hockey Monkey]

After this week's weigh in, I'm down to 211.8 for a total of 46.8 lbs gone! Hubby ran the Outer Banks Half Marathon yesterday in 2 hours 58 minutes and finished 913 out of 2757. I'm so proud of him!

[Hockey Monkey]

208.4 this morning for a loss to date of 50.2lbs! I'm not sure what to do with myself right now. I'm halfway to goal. I bought new jeans this weekend. Gloria Vanderbilt jeans! A year ago I would have called you crazy if you had told me I'd ever wear GV jeans again.

[Scuba Ben]

Still at a BMI around 31.5, which is down from a week ago at 31.67.

My goal is 10 pounds from yesterday, in 3 months. With my weight floating UP the last several weeks, this is not as easy as it looks.