Shello

Day 2 - Tuesday Another successful day. Only a mere shadow of a migraine in the morning that swiftly disappeared. I remained drained and tired most of the day so I took it easy again. Had the new lunch of overnight oats and my homemade Lunchable Lite. It's just barely enough food. In the middle I feel like I am not going to have enough and start thinking of what I should add next time but by the time I finish, I'm satisfied. And the 2 pieces of chocolate hit the spot nicely. I had to leave work early for class and had a busy afternoon leading up to it so I only had the planned freggies for an afternoon snack. It seemed like enough and held me over until a late dinner. My appetite was off in the afternoon so that might have been why it was enough. By 8:00 DDG and I hadn't had dinner yet and realized what time it was. We had the same chicken salads but a little smaller than usual. And then skipped the frozen yogurt bars for dessert leaving me with 500 calories left over.

Thank you. So far so good! Thanks Cheetah! LOL. That would be something entirely different... but now I am intrigued. You could top them with more cheese first...and jalapenos and who knows what else.

Great update! You are doing a great job balancing all the things!

I was out at a restaurant recently that had pot roast egg rolls on their menu. They were served with brown gravy. They were amazing. I did also look up and there are such things as gluten free egg roll wrappers. Just saying.

Day 1 - Monday Successful day 1. The new tweaked lunch was good. Overnight oats were a little dry. I'll have to work on my recipe a bit. I didn't have the correct chocolate substitute so I had 2 squares of something else and then a single mini Reese's. Coincidentally, according to Lose It app I was over my sugar goal by 19 grams and there are exactly 19 grams in a single mini Reese's. I have the right chocolate sub for today so we'll give that another try. My planned snack was a little light so I threw in a granola bar. Then the test goes awry because I got a migraine. I left work early because I didn't have any meds with me. I went home, took my meds and then immediately took a 2 hour nap. Woke up headache free but some lingering migraine hangover symptoms. I took a hot bath and then joined DDG for dinner. We just threw some chicken fingers in the air fryer and then cut them up and threw them in a salad. Finished the day with a Yasso frozen yogurt bar and 150 calories left over. I was just a little peckish still when I went to bed but it's hard to tell if I really ate too little or if I just needed a little extra fuel for the migraine. I didn't wake up hungry and lost another half pound of Week Zero Bloat so I'd say it worked out quite well. No fitnessing but none was planned. Calorie burn was low but I left the Fitbit on the charger for some time in the evening and I'd give myself a pass for a migraine day anyway so I'm considering the goal met.

I haven't seen those. I get these. Probably more expensive but we get the individual sized variety pack of baked chips in snack bags because I've learned I can't trust myself with an entire bag of chips.

I'm hoping it's just the nudge I need. Thank you. Welcome! Indeed. I'm sure if I taste tested them together I'd prefer the real thing but only eating Baked Cheetos I hardly notice the difference. Game Changer. I recently put an easter package together for Peach. I found Oreo Dirt Pie flavored Oreos. They have two layers of chocolate creme filling but then have 'gummy sprinkles' baked into the cookie to simulate the gummy worms in a dirt pie. I was skeptical but they were very tasty - mostly because you can't taste the gummy sprinkles.

I forgot to post when I was here before. Officially upgrading from stalking to following.

Simple! Following

Woohoo! Following of course!

Sounds like a lovely week 0 and you are refreshed and ready to go!

Following! Great to see such results from cutting wheat but I understand the emotional attachment to it. perhaps if it's more like a 90/10 thing instead of a never thing, the affects wouldn't build up so much? From someone who tracks freggies regularly I will only count veggies like this if it's a significant portion of the meal and reasonably constitutes a serving (usually 80g). I do count for chili and tacos but usually not in other circumstances.

page 3 already! I admit I am not caught up but I'm following and love your cooking goal!

I thought you could use a rainbow. Following!

Challenge 2 is in the bag! New measurements were added to the list and all measurements taken except I haven't retested the VO2 max yet. Areas to improve: measurements did not go well, increasing an inch and a quarter overall, including hips and waist. Maybe I'm not measuring consistently? No other measures declined so yay me! Areas that Improved Just in the last week or so of the challenge I noticed a lot of improvement in knee pain going both up and down stairs. I almost feel like I could run up stairs... but I don't for fear I will trip. 😜 I was able to hold primal squat for 1:18. Stance was weird so that may have made it artificially easy. I'm not sure if there's a 'right' stance or not. Average cardio minutes per week jumped to over 100 minutes. Goal is 150. I just need to keep it up. BMI dropped to 39.6, which gets me out of the Obese III category, which is high risk. I am now Moderate risk at level II. Improvement or 100% in all daily and fitness goals!

Starting weight 261.2 I did manage to lose a little more after the end of the last 10 week weigh in but then gained a bunch of it back on my travels. I seemed to have recovered nicely already as I'm 0.2 down from last Monday's weigh in. I've made a few small but impactful (hopefully) changes for this challenge that I hope will translate to the scale.

Such fond memories of my legacy family. It's such a pain to track but this challenge does make me nostalgic and now I kinda want to play. Following for your Sim character development. And congrats!!

I did keep pushing for the last couple days before my trip and lost another 1.6 pounds during the first half of zero week, then gained almost a pound of that back over the last half of zero week while I was out of town. Considering all the terrible choices I made on the trip I'm pretty pleased and ready to start the next challenge!

Welcome to my challenge. As always, I've set up a Roadmap for what I want to accomplish in 2024. Mine is posted here in my battle log. Every challenge is aimed at accomplishing some part of the roadmap or furthering my adventure towards this year's goals. For the most part I've been doing the things that usually work. I am moving in the right direction but VEERRRYYYY slowly. I am seeing some non scale victories that I'm tracking in my battle log but the scale has been stuck on a plateau since January. Obviously there are plenty of slip ups, exceptions, and excuses, but overall I feel like I should be moving in the right direction a little faster. So I took a look at a few tweaks I could make to clean up some of my routines. I don't want to make any big changes or change too quickly so overall this challenge is just more of the same. Diet The data I have from logging calories does not support the plateau. There are a number of culprits that could be contributing to this. There could be some bites or swigs here and there that aren't logged; a few M&Ms not logged or estimates could be off. Perhaps my calorie budget needs to be lower? Or maybe it's the quality of the food. Too much sodium? Inflammatory responses? The facts of the matter are that I am just not going to log any more precisely than I am now. I already feel a little neurotic when I weigh my batch cooked foods and I mostly log everything, even estimating the M&Ms. So that's not going to change. I also could reduce my calorie target but I'd prefer to just aim to have extra left over every day so that the budgeted calories are there when I need them. I don't want to feel bad for using them all but I aim to not use them all all of the time. That leaves quality. Things that I came up with that could help: reduce sugar increase protein include some anti-inflammatory foods or eliminate some inflammatory foods. Luckily, I'm a creature of habit and I eat the exact same lunch and snack every single work day. This is a constant that if I get it right then it sets up those days for success. So here are the tweaks that I'm making this challenge to see how it affects the scale. Overall these small changes free up 80 calories a day and have drastic impacts to carbs, fat, and sugar intake. Replace the baked cheetos at lunch with overnight oats. This increases protein and fiber for about the same calories Move the berries, grapes, and carrots that I used to eat with lunch to my afternoon snack, replacing the banana that I usually didn't want to eat anyway. This decreases calories a little, decreases carbs, and berries have inti-inflammatory properties. And I am including a little bit of banana in the overnight oats already. Replacing the Reese's mini PB cups with squares of dark chocolate. This one might be tough but it's the habit I used to have. This reduces calories, carbs and sugar, and fat by tons. It does sacrifice some protein but I don't think Reese's are the ideal source of protein. Besides, I'm making up for it with the overnight oats. Fitnessing My fitnessing took a dive about 3 or 4 years ago and I've been babystepping myself back since my last respawn. It's time to make another change and increase the intensity. I plan to stick to the same frequency for now but look for ways to increase the intensity and get my heart rate up to cardio zone 2. I'm currently planning 1 cardio per week, 1 strength per week, and then a 3rd bonus session of one or the other. Here are my current ideas to work in some more higher intensity cardio into my current routine. There's not a lot of ideas so feel free to throw some at me! Rucking is back! I can bring a ruck on our walks. Bonus - on long walks DDG and I can take turns so it will help him too Hop on an elliptical for 5-10 minutes after a strength session to add more minutes in Increase our pace on walks, especially shorter duration ones to increase heart rate. Focus on Active minutes on Fitbit. The goal is 150 per week. In 2023 I average 14 minutes per day. So far this year I'm averaging 12. Any increase is good. I'm still tracking my daily goals from my Roadmap as well. Start the day with water Fast 15 hours Eat at least 1 freggy per day (preferably 3) Log food daily using Lose It Stay under calorie budget, includes a couple high calories days per week.

Cool! I'm intrigued by your new plans. I don't think new forums go up until around Thursday of zero week nowadays.

Good to hear from you and that you're headed back in the right direction and feeling better.

I'm in again too! Here is my battle log where I am focusing on non scale victories because I was getting bummed about not having scale victories. But I keep showing up because obviously weighing less will help with all the other things too. I'm sure I need to be doing something differently as what I am doing is not really working. Well, it's working but sooooo slowly that any slip up just sends me back to start. I'll figure that out in my next challenge. For this 12 weeks I'm setting my goal for 10 pounds. I do have a vacation to Hawaii near the end. Thanks Snary for putting this together and keeping it going.

I used to prefer hancock fabrics but they went out of business too. Around my neck of the woods that only leaves Michael's.

Final week summary Not a super successful week but not bad either. DST really kicked my @ss. My fasting schedule got a little broken between DST and food at work. There is a red calorie day but that's just the accounting error as there were plenty extra the day before and the day after. I got all my usual workouts in but no bonus workouts. The challenge is officially over but I'm going to hang out here for zero week until the new threads are up. I head out of town Thursday anyway to visit Peach so that will be my 'week' zero. I'll keep pushing until I leave before closing up shop here.

Saturday 3/16 No empanadas for lunch. The neighbors weren't feeling well so weren't cooking. Instead I made some toasted breakfast sandwiches. I lightly toasted english muffins in the oven and then cracked an egg right onto on half of each and added some swiss cheese to the other half. Once the egg was cooked and cheese was melty, I topped with some bacon. They were the best breakfast sandwiches I'd ever made. We paired with some fruit. We spent the rest of the day painting. After getting the ceiling done the night before we focused on all the trim (also previously painted purple) and had to do 2 coats. There was a soccer game DDG wanted to attend and I normally go with him but I felt rushed with the painting so I just passed and finished the trim while he was gone. I took a nice long beak and devoured a bunch of snacks. I had another green velvet cupcake and then remembered I'd bought mini banana walnut bread at a farmers market so I had several slices of that. After a long rest I figured I'd cut in all the edges for the wall paint to make Sunday easier and surprised DDG when get got home after the game and picking up groceries and other errands. We had leftover mashed potatoes from the week so once all the work was done I whipped up some country gravy and threw some chicken fingers in the air fryer and I made some homemade KFC bowls. I logged everything ahead of time to get the portions right but there wasn't enough extra mashed potatoes to leave so we just divided up all that was left. Then of course we needed more gravy to cover everything. The portions definitely got out of hand and I went over calories by 164. But I hadn't used the extra calories from the day before so it's really just an accounting error. Sunday 3/17 🍀 Brunch was super easy banana oat pancakes with walnuts and chocolate chips and then some sausage links that needed eating. Then we got right to work and painted the walls. Thank goodness I had all the edges done. We got a coat done and then took a break and had some snacks - we shared a green velvet cupcake and I had some baked chips. I also put some sesame chicken in the crock pot for later. Then we did the 2nd coat and took another break while it dried and we could put the room back together. All in all it was an exhausting weekend. My hamstrings got a great workout from all the bending over to get paint on the roller and my quads got a workout from all the times I had to go up and down the ladder. I also worked in some primal squatting. We were beat by the time we finished and we still have a lot of stuff to put back together and/or get ready for carpet installation. But boy did it feel good to curl up on the couch. We were both too tired to make and eat a salad with dinner so we had sesame chicken over steamed rice. It was disappointing but I always find crock pot versions to be that way. We finished it off with yasso ice cream bars and I still had plenty of calories left over. All other goals met.