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Back in the Saddle

It's been 4 years since I updated this blog, so I feel like I finally owe my legions of readers who refresh this site every day in hopes of seeing some kind of update with their long-awaited payoff. In that time, the good ship Cheapo sprung many leaks and ran aground several times but through it all remained somewhat in tact. One of the key lessons I learned along this journey is that making a series of life changes, even if you fall off the wagon with a lot of them, the ones that you stick with will  at least hold some of your progress together.  For me, it was the routine of eating my balanced power breakfast every morning. No matter how many sedentary, unlogged gastronomical disaster days I would have, sticking to my power breakfast routine every morning meant that there was at least one meal that would help somewhat contain the damage of even the worst days. Another lesson that I learned is patience and persistence are at least at odds with if not enemies of perfection. If we
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Recent posts

A Second Look at Exercise

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances. My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here. It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily
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Go Hungry or Don't Go to Bed

I've made some headway since setting up my new dashboard, down 2-3 pounds since then. I'm safely and consistently under 170 now, but my weight loss has again started to stall. At least this now comes as no surprise since it is consistent with what my new widget dashboard has indicated. I had off on Friday and with President's Day on Monday, I've been off my bike for 4 straight days. Today makes day 5 since the weather this morning was especially bitter. Tomorrow looks like snow, so it may be next week before I'm riding my bike into work again. I also didn't really rack up the steps this past weekend, eclipsing 10k every day but not much more. I also went out to restaurants twice, though at least making the healthiest selections I could find and only drinking diet cokes (free refills down here in the south, so at least it's kinda cheapo-friendly). All in all, I guess I should be thankful that I didn't gain any weight, but it's still frustrating to
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Cheapo Tool Rankings

Along the cheapo journey, you'll try out different tools and tricks to keep you on track. You'll learn quickly that some of them prove to be crucial and while some of them are just nice to haves. You'll also discover that some things you think are somewhat or pretty important are actually crucial. Unfortunately, it's only until you try to do without them and things start falling apart when you realize just how critical they are to your success. My dashboard example from the other day is evidence of that. I've already started seeing a weight improvement, bringing my weight back under the dreaded 170 mark the last 2 days. I'm confident now that I'm back on track because there's no mathematical way I can gain weight as long as I'm running calorie deficits every day. Like a sticky note on my screen whenever I unlock my phone, I now have a single dashboard showing me my input/output at a glance. I underestimated the importance of this when I left Fitbit
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Hacking Your Plan

Man, this is tough. It's funny how quickly your body readjusts to higher calorie consumption and how it freaks out when you try to run deficits again. My hunger pangs at night are fierce just like old times. They kind of masked themselves for a while behind high step counts and a calorie logging vacation as my weight started drifting away, but try and get back in the swing of things and your body gets PISSED. My calorie intake was elevated over the weekend - about 2900 per day. However, I racked up over 70,000 steps from Friday-Sunday, that includes a 5 mile run, and STILL couldn't budge the needle. So, I'm going to have to make some adjustments. I haven't been getting much help from the weather this week with cold temps and icy and rainy weather keeping me off my bike and limiting my dog walking. I'm going to have to start getting creative. One really annoying thing is that Google Fit seemed to remove the nutrition card from their dashboard for some reason. I
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PANIC BUTTON TIME!

You've been cruising along, living the cheapo life, counting all the money you've saved up over the last year and laughing at the chumps who signed up for gym memberships that have already become nothing more than a monthly insult on their credit card statements. You've been cutting a few corners here, missing some weigh-ins there, kind of keeping a mental track of your calories but still somewhat sticking to your plan. Your schedule has been turned upside down due to life events, and you've lost some of the additional slack in your clothes. You know your weight is slightly elevated. Your previous "oh crap" weight has become your new normal. However, you're still within spitting distance of your target weight and figure that you can return to glory with a couple of good weeks of cheapo discipline. You figure that once all the upheaval in your life gets sorted out, you'll be back where you want to be. Then, you step on the scale one morning and.
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The Cheapest Time of the Year

The stretch between Halloween and New Year's is one of the best but also the toughest times of the year for the cheapo. Between Christmas parties, Christmas party leftovers and people dumping off candy and sweets in the kitchen areas at work, it's extremely difficult to keep off pounds when you're constantly bombarded with free food. I cannot recall the last time I spent any money on food at work that weren't snacks that I keep in my desk to stretch out over time. I've been saving a lot of money, but it's only because I've been walking through a free calorie minefield every day. Throughout most of the year, approaching your food spending budget with the mindset of a homeless person will translate into easy and dramatic weight loss, but the cheapo diet isn't meant to withstand this kind of free food bonanza. Not only is all this free food keeping me from buying lunch at work, it's cutting down on my grocery bills! Sure, there's some fruit the
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