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Don't Sit Where You Eat

Overexposure to your kitchen can make it difficult to stick to your calorie budget. A lot of my snacking is not because I'm necessarily hungry but food is just there, staring at me, taunting me. If every thought you have is interrupted by a visual reminder of your food source, chances are you'll find yourself snacking a lot more than you should.

I try to alleviate the temptation by keeping myself away from my food sources after I've eaten. On days that I work from home, I try to keep my laptop either in my office or in the den. You'd be surprised how much you forget about food without a visual reminder. I have a bag of Twizzlers in my closet that I haven't touched from before I started the cheapo plan. I keep forgetting that I have them - something I never used to do.

Today, I happened to be cleaning out the fridge at the weekend house, so keeping my work outside the kitchen area wasn't an option. And, wouldn't you know it, someone left one of those raw dough, canned cinnamon roll things that were already a month past the "best by" date, and the label specifically said not to freeze. Well, far be it from Mr. Cheapo to ever let some tasty cinnamon rolls find their way into the landfill. So, I figured that I would bake them while I worked before "best by" window turned into the "inedible window", have one or two and then stretch out the rest over the next few days.


The fridge was filthy and took a couple of hours of cleaning out the grime from all the cracks and crevasses everywhere, consolidating stuff, throwing out other stuff and organizing everything back in. I didn't go crazy with the labeling because the turnover rate is just too high for the fridge and so many odd things find their way in there (like canned cinnamon rolls) that categorizing everything by shelf would be kind of impossible. If I can keep it kind of clean and relatively uncluttered, I'll call that a win.


Of course, next thing I know my plan of extending those cinnamon rolls out over the next couple of days got curtailed by, er, a couple of days. Yeah, I housed 5 cinnamon rolls at 330 calories each for a 1650 calorie hit. Yikes. Oh well, they were delicious, the fridge is spotless, I basically didn't eat anything else the rest of the day and the calorie slate wipes clean tomorrow morning.

Pull-Ups and Weight Loss Update:

I finally got around to testing out my max pull-ups: 13 - not bad for an almost 40 year old guy.

My weight has officially plateaued at around 158. My Cinnamon Roll Day of Decadence notwithstanding, I've been holding down my budget to about 2200 calories a day. If I eat any less than that, my body seems to get kind of cranky, but I'm pretty happy with my weight now.

I figure I'm going to try to start incorporating some lifting into my routine. I was searching around the other day and trying to figure out a good plan to start that wouldn't leave me crippled by the end of the week.

Then, for the hell of it, I thought I'd see what kind of workout special forces guys do and found this:

THE U.S. Navy Seal Workout!

Week 1:
  • Running, Treadmill Running, Treadmill Running
    2 miles, 8:30 pace, Mon/Wed/Fri
  • Pushups Pushups Push-up
    4 sets of 15 push-ups Mon/Wed/Fri
  • Sit-Up Sit-Up Sit-Up
    4 sets of 20 sit-ups Mon/Wed/Fri
  • Pullups Pullups Pull-up
    3 sets of 3 pull-ups Mon/Wed/Fri
  • Swim Swim
    Swim continuously for 15 min. 4-5 days/week
It actually looks pretty manageable, at least at first. I'm under no illusions that this will be as difficult as actual BUD/S training. For one, I don't have access to a pool, and gym memberships are strictly forbidden on the cheapo plan. So, I'll have to skip that part. It's only going to cost me about 20 minutes, three times a week at first, and I know that I can hack all the other exercises out of the gate. I figure I'll give it a try, and see how far I can get.

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