Funky Dung

start weight: 179.6 06/04 weight: 176.0 06/11 weight: 177.2 goal weight: 175.0 Final Grades: Weight loss: C Running: C Push-ups: D Dissertation: B On a technical note, does anyone know how to upload images? I get an error every time I try. If I lack sufficient permission, fine, but I'd rather be told "no" than get an unexplained error.

start weight: 179.6 05/28 weight: 175.0 06/03 weight: 176.0 goal weight: 175.0 I guess I couldn't maintain my goal weight for a week. Oh well. I'm disappointed, but the awesome paces I've been running lately make up for it. Workout summary coming soon (if I feel up to it).

start weight: 179.6 05/21 weight: 177.8 05/28 weight: 175.0 goal weight: 175.0 Technically, I've reached my goal. However, I won't really count it until I can maintain it for a week. Chart here. Weekly Workout Summary: miles walked: 10.8 (4 trips) miles run: 5.6 (1 workouts) push-ups done: 77 (2 sessions) sit-ups done: 51 (1 session)

start weight: 179.6 05/14 weight: 177.4 05/21 weight: 177.8 goal weight: 175.0 One good plateau deserves another. Chart here. Weekly Workout Summary: miles walked: 16.2 (6 trips) miles run: 10.79 (2 workouts) push-ups done: 63 (2 sessions) sit-ups done: 43 (1 session)

On Monday I was able to start wearing my 34" jeans again (instead of 36"). WOOT! Now, if I can just get down to 32"...

my May 6-week challenge thread

I forgot to mention that on Monday I started wearing my 34" jeans again (instead of 36").

start weight: 179.6 05/07 weight: 180.0 05/14 weight: 177.4 goal weight: 175.0 It looks like I might have gotten past the plateau, but I'm remaining cautious. My moving average weight dropped from 179.6 to 178.3. Chart here. Weekly Workout Summary: miles walked: 27 (10 trips) miles run: 7.36 (1 workout) push-ups done: 71 (3 sessions) sit-ups done: 40 (1 session)

I'm not much of a gamer these days, but the analogy makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

I also say "groovy" a lot. I'm glad I can be an inspiration. A lot of my workouts come from walking to and from work every day (2.7mi each way). If you didn't see those workouts, I'm sure I'd be a far less impressive specimen. Thanks. I need all the encouragement I can get to overcome this plateau.

Hi. Just stopping by to wish a fellow "funky" good luck.

start weight: 179.6 04/30 weight: 179.6 05/07 weight: 180.0 goal weight: 175.0 Hello, plateau, my old friend... While the slight gain is disappointing, its not unexpected. I had a long, miserable sinus infection that led to some spurious weigh loss. Now I have the hard task of losing weigh the hard and healthy way. Weekly Workout Summary: miles walked: 27 (10 trips) miles run: 24.65 (4 workouts) push-ups done: 14 (1 session) I started, but did not complete, one day's push-ups workout. I decided that I need to start at a lower ability level. Hopefully I'll be able to motivate myself to do push-ups three days this week. It's hard when I come home after a day of dissertation work to the exhaustion of parenthood.

I started my journey from 191.2 lbs (191.3 by 7-day decaying average) on January 30 (if memory serves). Today I weighed in at 180.2 lbs (179.8 by average). That's a loss of 11 lbs (11.5 by average)! I was only aiming for losing 6.5 lbs over that 13 week span. Just over the 6 weeks prior to this challenge I lost 8lbs. I promised myself I'd stick to my .5 lbs per week rate, though, so I consider losses like that nice bonuses and pounds "in the bank" to be "spent" when I plateau for a while (which is bound to happen). For this challenge I did pick a goal a little beyond 3 lbs, though. Why? I guess I just liked the look of 175 as a finishing weight. BTW, I'll be running a 10K race on Fathers Day. I would have made my time goal one of the goals for this challenge, but Fathers Day is after the challenge ends. Oh well. Perhaps the next challenge will overlap with another race I'm running.

This is just a test to see if my new signature shows up.

I'll try to make this intro spiffier if/when time permits. I thought about being a smartass and picking a species not typical in RPG games, such as a Sabacian from the Farscape universe, but like the Doctor, I'm strangely fond of humanity. Here are my stats: STR: 1 DEX: 3 CON: 2 STA: 2 WIS: 3 CHA: 4 [*]My charisma score is based on force of personality rather than looks. [*]Here are my goals: Fitness: Lose 4.4 pounds (from 179.4 to 175). I'm on a long-term journey to 150 at .5lb per week. I just rounded to a nice ending number. Fitness: Run 3-4 times a week. That's easier said than done with three kids under four and a dissertation to write. Fitness: Do pushups 3 times a week (using the Android Pushups app as guide). It's similar to the 100 Pushups Challenge, but I feel less pressured to move to the next (inappropriate) level with this app. Life: Stay on schedule for finishing my PhD on time. [*]I'll think about points for my goals later. I needed to get this set up in time first. [*]I considered being an adventurer, since my primary goal is weight loss. However, while I'm not a skilled runner, I'm not a n00b, either. I've run two marathons and countless other races of shorter distances. [*]I dropped by the forums a while ago, posted my intro, and vanished. For that I apologize. My kids and my dissertation keep me rather busy. [*]For fellow number-crunching geeks, my weight chart is here. [*]You can track my workouts here. [*]I'm trying out Fitocracy. Jury's out on how long I'll stick with it. [*]You can also find me at the DadLabs forum threads Fitness Forever and Strength in Numbers Fitness Challenge.

Thanks. Pushups are just a start. I'm hoping to do more, but right now I don't know much else (which is a big part of why I'm here).

Well, for nerdy comparison, you can find a 7-day moving average version of my weight chart here.

Thanks. My weigh-ins aren't quite every day anymore, but I find that gathering numerous data points compensates for the high variance in each measurement. (Yup. I'm a nerd.)

"Hold on to your butts..." Man, I love that line from Jurassic Park. What can't Samuel L. Jackson make cool? Oh yeah, the prequels. Damn. Anyhoo... Why am I here? I'm here because I'm a stressed out grad student and father of 3, and I'm just a couple months shy of 35, overweight, frustrated, somewhat desperate, and in need of a cheering section. Let me explain. No, there is to much. Let me sum up. I'm 5'8" and I've been actively trying to lose weight (to varying levels of commitment and degrees of success) since I peaked at 205lbs in early 2003. I was as low as 170 in 2008, but no matter how hard I've tried, my weight keeps coming back to the 185-190 range. I'm sick and tired of it. I want to be 150 lbs by the time I finish my PhD in August 2013. How did I get this way? Well, it's a long story... Let's start at the begging of my adult life. I'd spent the first 18 years of my life as a stick and I started college in 1995 with just 140 lbs on my 5'8" frame. I was probably underweight, since I had negligible muscles mass to speak of. By the start of my sophomore year I was 166. I lost track of my weight after that, but I know I hit my worst at 205 at the age of 25. It was horrible. I felt like a skinny guy stuck in a 50lb fat suit. I still kinda do. At that point I started getting serious about losing weight. I drastically cut down my consumption of fast food and started jogging. I can't call it running, because it wasn't very fast and I was winded after less than a mile. All went well for a while. Heck, I lost 10lbs in December 2003 alone! Then I stalled. I oscillated between 178 and 185 until October 2004. That's when I got married. I don't know what went wrong, but I was 190 by February 2005. That year I decided to take my running to the next level and joined a group. They were very helpful, and I ran my first 5K and 10K races that fall. By late 2006 I was down to 169. Just typing that blows my mind. It seems so unreal. I want that back so badly! It hit a roadblock that winter. I had a long chest cold that turned out to be related to asthma. I've been taking various medications for asthma ever since. I should mention here that I'd been having symptoms of exercise-induced asthma, which were limiting my ability to level up my running performance. At the start of 2007 I weighed a disappointing 178. I fought back, though, and I was hovering around 170 by March. I gradually put on weight again, getting up to 175, but I was back at 169 by June. Then I don't know what the hell happened. My weight yo-yoed as I put on 14lbs over the course of a year. In June 2008 I was a depressing 183. Again I fought back, though. I ran like hell and got down to 169 in September. Life was good. I was fit again, and I was at what turned out to be my peak running performance. Can you guess what happened next? Yup, another stumbling block. This time was like when I got married, though, and was another blessed event. I became a father for the first time. Blessing though that was, the added stress and lack of sleep took a toll on my health and fitness. I was starting to gain weight again, and it bothered me. That's when I decided to train for my first marathon. I'd already run several half marathons by then. Epic fail. Marathon training didn't help me lose weight, and I shouldn't have expected it to. In May 2009 I carried my 182lbs over 26.2 miles in a little over 5hrs. I was actually pretty happy with that, but I hoped to do better the following year. I put on another 5 lbs and celebrated my 5th wedding anniversary and the birth of my first child in October 2009 at 187lbs. That's 18lbs heavier than I was when #1 was born. Ugh. I repeat: UGH!!! My weight held fairly steady from then until the running of my second marathon in May 2010. I was very disappointed with my time that year. I'd trained much more carefully and thoroughly than the first year, and yet I finished in an awful ~5:50 - and it was a brutally painful experience to boot. I guess I decided to redouble my training efforts, because I was down to 182 by the end of June. That didn't last, though. The last couple of years have been characterized by lots of yo-yo-ing. 188 in September 2010. 181 in February 2011. About 183 when my third child was born at the end of February 2011. 189 at the start of June 2011; 181 at the middle; 184 at the end. 186 in November 2011. Things got really bad by the end of November 2011. It would take too long to go into the details, but suffice to say that I've been in grad school too damn long, and I had a crisis at that time that nearly ended my academic career. At the start of 2012 I was a miserable 192 lbs. So, I started tweaking my diet and attempted to run more. I've been able to run less and less and time has progressed, thanks to grad school, fatherhood, and my asthma. My breathing difficulties have gotten worse over the 5 or so years since I was diagnosed. It got to the point that I could only rarely motivate myself to run. Knowing that I'd have at least one, and probably several, asthma attacks made it next to impossible to justify the added complication of running in my life. Instead, I downloaded a pushups app for my phone and started working on my strength. Since that I started to see a slight downward trend in February, so I set a long-term goal for myself. I want to be 150 lbs when I graduate with my PhD in August 2013. Based on my weight at the time, that's 41 lbs in 82 weeks. I think a half a pound a week is quite modest and reasonable, don't you? Well, that's where you fine folks fit in. I need support, and lots of it. I've started exploring paleo/primal eating, and my wife and I are making very gradual, hesitant, and somewhat fearful changes to what and how we eat. I gotta admit. I'm pretty terrified of giving up my carbs. I don't know if I have the willpower. I'm also going to find time for strength training. I have neither the time nor the money for a gym, CrossFit or otherwise. So, I've decided to do yoga and 5BX in addition to my pushups and running. I need encouragement for that, too. I can make excuses like nobody's business. So... Anyone game for being my drill sergeant? my weight chart