Month two, april here we come

Today is Friday and Fridays are always my weigh-in days.  I was dreading this one because it's the last Friday of the month and it was critical that I learn whether or not I made goal.  My goals for the week is about two pounds.  I have a goal set for eight to ten pounds a month.  Eight is good, ten is excellent.  Anything beyond that is miraculous.


I've been dividing up my routine between strength and cardio, swapping out the days I do one or the other five days a week.  It usually comes to three days of cardio and two days of strength throughout the week.  Basically, it works out like this.  Since when it comes to strength training (lifting weights) you have to give your muscles at least a day of rest before going in lifting again.  My routine was originally going to be cardio every day, weights every other day.  But I felt like the days that I was doing both cardio and weights, I was wiping myself out.  I'd wind up too tired and sore and unable to go some days.  I found myself skipping days and going only three times a week.  Maybe even two.  That wasn't working out for me.


So I decided to break it up where I would do just cardio one day and just strength the other day.  I would look at one day as "This is cardio day" or, "this is strength day."  I was still coming and working out everyday, but I was giving myself a break from both all the same.


To make sure I was on the right path, I talked to one of the staff at Planet Fitness about this suggestion and she was all for it, telling me that it sounded perfect.  So that's how I've been doing it.  And while I certainly like how it works out for it and it's not been failing me as far as weight loss, on the days I do strength, I always wind up leaving feeling as though I was just in and out and not feeling as though I worked hard enough, even though I lifted as much as I could without breaking form, doing my ten reps and three sets, hitting the different equipment and working all parts of my body, and though I was there for pretty much the same amount of time as during my cardio workouts, I still felt like I was in and out in no time.  I've contemplated going back to daily cardio, where on the days I hit the weights I will cut my cardio in half and make up for it in strength.  Besides, it'll be a new month and new months always mean getting a new routine.


I also did the math and figured that if I use the elliptical trainer for 30 minutes and the treadmill at 3.0 for 40 minutes I can burn a little over 1,000 calories a day, keeping within a 1,200 calorie diet.  I don't think it'll take me much longer to reach that level as I'm currently at 20 minutes on the elliptical and already 40 minutes on the treadmill at 2.9 MPH.


I've been dividing my time on the elliptical.  Since you can stop on the elliptical anytime and resume where you were without having to warm back up to your last workout level, I give myself a short break every five minutes.  I stop long enough to drink some water, gather my bearings and catch a second wind rather than going for 20 straight minutes and wanting to end before I get in the full time.  This has worked out for me.  Plus in those five minutes I'm getting my heart rate up there on the higher end for only a short time.  I read somewhere that getting your heart rate up in the high end of your maximum even for 30 seconds will do more good for you than going at a slower, steadier rate for a much longer time.  And that might be true.


Also, I had talked to Seth, one of the staff members at the gym I go to and he suggested eating small meals more often instead of three big meals.  On top of that suggestion, I also got a tip about going protein heavy.  Not to the point of causing an imbalance on nutrition.  So I added all those tips together.  The workout bursts, the small meals that were protein heavy.  Things like fish, nuts, chicken and turkey breast.  Along those lines.  And if I ate something bigger than a snack, like dinner, I would just eat until I no longer felt hungry.  Another piece of advice from Seth, not to fill up my stomach.  Which made sense because, as yet, I had it explained to me once that eating a lot at once was like throwing large pieces of wood on the fire.  Too much and you smother out the flame.  But little bits and pieces of tinder and wood will keep the flame hot and bright.


To take the metaphor further, you could even think of the food eaten as types of fuel.  Like carbs would be your gasoline or lighter fluid soaked bits of charcoal which your metabolism ignites over immediately, but burns out very quickly, leaving fairly whole bits of wood left behind which might be the rest of your food which is soon stored away in your body as fat.  So think of protein that you eat as the tinder that gets the flame going long enough to begin heating up and catching the body fat that begins to burn.


So the question left to answer.  What sort of results did I get after applying all these different suggestions into one whole plan?  Not only did I make goal for the month, I made it by 14 pounds.


In total:  I've now lost 23 pounds.

This may not be day-one, but it's my start

My name is Vaughn.  My friends call me Vaughny.  I'm 35 years old.  And I have a dream.  That dream is to be,  for the first time since I was an eight year old girl to be at my ideal weight.  It sounds simple enough, but I have a lot of work to go.

I wish I could say that this was day one of my goal, where I will discuss the first steps.  But truthfully, I've been at this already for two months, using facebook and telling my close friends of the progress that I've made and the difference that working out 5 days a week and choosing better meal options for myself has afforded me.  So instead of making declarations about the future, I'll just write about the beginning of this all and my current situation.

While it may sound like it had all begun with a drunken New Year's resolution to lose more weight, I didn't actually make that resolution for the New Year on January 31, 2011.  My resolution was to get out more and meet people and to travel.  Nothing at all about weight loss.  I didn't want to be another cliche where I might throw myself into the idea but wake up one morning where I've lost all of my steam and threw in the towel.  Weight Loss resolutions just never pan out.  You know it, I know it.  No use it even making one, ammarite?

It actually began when a Planet Fitness was set up in our city close to one of the places that I go to often.  Not only had they set up a facility, but they were billboarded all over town, saturating the airwaves with their commericals and attractive sign-up deal.  So you might be thinking, "Oh, you saw one of those and decided it was high time you got off your fat ass and did something for yourself?"

Nope, not that either.  Like everything else gym-related, I totally ignored it because I don't have my own checking account or credit card and didn't want to have my account drafted monthly like all those gyms like to do.

I will mention that months before, around summer, I was considering joining a gym and had my eyes peeled for one that was affordable and quality.  There were a few I was considering at the time, but it's like anything else you mean to do.  Chasing waterfalls and telling yourself you'll get around to it eventually.  To be honest, I don't hate going to gyms.  I like it, and had been a member of  a small women's gym before I had to move to Fayetteville, North Carolina and leaving it, where it had gotten shut down some time afterwards.  I had no issue working out, but I've never been into working out at home.  I had machines I used, and tried working out to exercise shows before and trying to take walks, none of which kept me motivated and I didn't stick with in the end.  There's something more energizing for me to go to a place for a specific purpose.  Using machines and having a comfortable atmosphere.  But most gyms were too damned intimidating.  And I needed one that wouldn't be too far from home.

At the time I didn't have my own car.  So getting down to the gym once I found one would be another issue.  That was when I began looking towards my friends who worked out, asking around and inquiring which gyms they went to.  All of which I checked out.  One was a place called Your Gym that my friend Zack and his dad used.  It was located in the middle of Downtown Concord, which made it accessible and easy to drive to.  I went by one day to have a look at it and I thought I had found my way to a prison rec room full of scary-looking meat head and weights, weights, weights.  No music, no TVs, no cardio equipment in the least.  There were no machines at all in fact.  Everything was free weights and weight benches.  I didn't say much of anything beyond what I had to and could not imagine myself going to some scary-looking dive like this on a regular basis.  I didn't stay long, slinking out as quietly as I went in.

Cost: $28 a month.

The next gym I checked out was a women's gym named creatively enough, Concord Women's Gym, that was nearest to Carolina Mall, which was a great location as my mother works as the optician at JC Penney optical, so I saw myself hitching a ride with her every morning on her way to work and maybe walking up to the mall to hang out until her shift was over.  It was nice looking if not a bit small, but it had a less intimidating atmosphere.  Everything was cardio equipment though which I didn't know at the time was a total imbalance.  They certainly meant that it wasn't to be mistaken for anything other than a women's gym with it's color scheme of white and pink and light blue.  It was like being in a nursery filled up with treadmills.

Cost:  $24 a month with contract.

The next one I was told about was a place called the Sport's Center.  This was a very pretentious place, boasting not one but two olympic sized pools, lots of fitness classes and weights and cardio alike.  Everyone that I saw working out there looked as though they also spent time at country clubs and had names like Bryce and Margo.  At no time during the visit did I see one fat person, until I had mistaken my own reflection in the mirror.  I was tempted by the nice-looking equipment and the idea that there were swimming pools, but something was off about the entire thing and I walked around with this feeling that I was in way over my head.  Everyone there was in really good shape and could run circles around me.  The classes seemed very advanced and there were machines that I felt like required months of training just to be able to mount and use them.  All I could picture was the stares I would get as I lasted all of five seconds on even the laziest machine there.  Being laughed at as I attempted to mount one of those convoluted things.  It was also way off and the only person I knew who used this place I wasn't friends enough with to hope for a ride to daily so it was tricky trying to get down there often enough.

Cost: $55 a month with contract.

After that, I just sort of backed off from the idea of joining a gym.  The whole thing was just scary to me, like trying to climb a huge mountain without any knowhow or equipment.  So I just put it off, concentrating on other things going on in my life.

I finally got my own car but it had needed some work and had been sitting under our second car port for months or a year.  The battery was dead so cranking wasn't an option to get it to a mechanic.  My brother had also been looking for a job and was living with his then-girlfriend, now-wife before he landed one working at Valvoline.  So my brother became a mechanic, so I had that advantage to get me going, but I still needed money.

I began saving money with my grandmother, 100 dollars a month until I had saved about five hundred or so.  And I started to work on the car.  To make a long story short, with the help of my brother and the money saved, I had my own car by November.  Lock, stock, and legally mine.

It was around october that the advertisements for Planet Fitness came up, and I had noticed that gym spring up around Wal-Mart that I frequent anyway.  The ten-dollar a month price tag and no contract got my mother's attention and she began making proclamations of checking it out.  As it turned out, my cousin's boyfriend decided to join first. He had been going now and then and said he liked it there, which further intrigued the rest of us.

The year ended and it was January.  The billboards were all over town, flyer were sent in through the mail, and ads were running on TV.  It was the end of the month though before we finally got down there to check the place out.

My first impression.  This place was peaceful.  I got a friendly vibe the second I walked in.  I saw lots of machines, cardio and strength alike.  We were greeted by this tall red head with Seth on his name tag.  He was built and looked like a soldier with his hair cut the way it was and his gorilla walk, but there was nothing intimidating about him.  He was friendly and respectful and already I knew I was going to feel comfortable around him.

The place was huge but quiet.  There was music on the PA but it was only loud enough to notice but didn't drown out conversation.  I looked around while we were given the tour and saw that there were different types of people working out.  I saw athletes, overweight people, body builders, seniors and even special needs persons all in the same building.  All using the different machines.  This wasn't just for perfect people.

It has this color scheme of purple and yellow.  All of their equipment is colored in this scheme and everywhere you look, you see Judgment Free zone slapped on the walls and hanging from signs on the ceiling.  Leave egos at the door.  This was the gym I had been looking for months ago and never thought I would find with just the right atmosphere, equipment, and location all as if I could pick these things out for myself.

Since I don't have my own checking account, we signed up using my mom's checking account, which is kind of funny since she's only been a few times since joining and it was her idea in the first place.  I thought I would have been the one that would only go once or twice.  But it seems that everything fell into place as not having my own car at the right time wouldn't have allowed me to go as often.

I've been going to planet fitness now since February and have so far lost 19 pounds.  But it's not just exercise but diet as well, using this ap I downloaded to help keep up with how much I'm taking in.  But for me it was like I just woke up one day a totally different person and I refuse to be anything else again.

My goal is to lose 200 pounds.  Only 180 more to go.