Skip to main content

Goal Status: Achieved


I finally, officially hit my target loss of 40 pounds today. I've been kind of bouncing around in the 158-point-something to 160 range over the Christmas and New Year's holidays - proof that if you can sort of contain the damage over unavoidable high-calorie events, you can hit your target weight. It just might take a little longer.

I realistically have 5-10 more pounds that I could lose, though I've noticed that if I mention that to people they start looking concerned as if I'm starting to develop an eating disorder, which I'm not sure that being a cheap-ass really qualifies as. If I run my stats through the US Navy body fat calculator, it says my body fat percentage is 19% and "Acceptable" - still not quite "fit".

I'd like to finally have a six-pack for the first time in my life, but I'm in a comfortable weight range now. My goal was to be able to say I've lost 40 pounds by my 40th birthday, so I can officially check that off the list.

At some point soon, I may add in some light, quick weight training like pull-ups, push-ups and sit-ups. I've threatened my wife that my next goal might be turning myself into something resembling Hugh Jackman in Wolverine:


That's a side-by-side of him at 31 vs 44 - pretty crazy. I don't know that it's really attainable unless I turn fitness into a full-time hobby (not happening), start eating expensive food (yeah, no) and hiring one of the top personal trainers in the world (lulz).

Still, I recall watching him in an interview saying it was mostly all nutrition, but I think he was eating about 6000 calories a day of boiled chicken, which seems rather insane and not especially cheapo. He was also spending about 3 hours a day in the gym, which just isn't feasible or motivating enough for me.

In any case, I'll be curious to see how many pull-ups I can do now that I'm 40 pounds lighter. I think I used to be able to crank out at least 10-12 on my chin-up bar even at my heaviest. In high school, where I weighed about what I am now, I believe I could do in the high teens or maybe even 20. So, maybe my next goal will be to be able to do more pull-ups than I could as an 18 year old.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Chopping Down Costs & Fat

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my...

Low Tech, The New High Tech

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller. Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that th...

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...