The Cheap Man's Weight Loss Plan

I'm back in the swing of things with the Cheapo regimen. I stepped on the scale this morning and clocked in at 160.0. I touched into the 159's a couple of times this week, but I'm pretty happy with where I am. I've been hitting my 2500 calorie targets every day, and my weight has normalized again after creeping up 2-3 pounds after back to back family weekends earlier this month. I'm sort of back on track with the SEAL training too. I've basically been running a couple of miles a day on my training days and doing 2 sets of 8 pull-ups, 5 sets of 25 sit ups, and 5 sets of 25 push-ups. My push-up strength has almost all returned after my travel and my stretch of family time. So, I think another week or so of doing these reps, and I'll start jumping back on the SEAL program schedule. I'm pretty sure some of my weight losses have been offset by muscle gain since it's almost mathematically impossible for me to be gaining fat with my daily calorie input/ou...

My car finally died on me. It was a nice looking Subaru Forester - only a 2009 but had 191,000 miles on it when she passed away this past week. She carried me on her final trip back from WV when the engine literally croaked driving up the hill to my house. She stalled out a couple of times and was done. My mechanic checked it out and the engine was officially blown. I got a really great cheapo deal on it back in 2014 - $11,000 with 136k miles - loaded with leather, NAV, huge sunroof, etc. It ended up needing several thousand dollars of work, making the car total cost probably about $15,000. There were other signs that it was getting to be time - a little bit of transmission tugging on steep hills, some stiffness in the power steering while getting it warmed up. So, it was nearing the end. I just sold it to a guy who I think was going to swap the engine and resell it, so I let it go for $1000. All in all, that amounts to about $3750/yr. which I think would rival the depreciation ...

Things have been super busy between travel and family events, so apologies to my millions of dedicated readers for hitting refresh 50 times a day only to find no new content. I'll try not to let it happen again. I recently went to Columbia with my wife on a 12 day trip. Unfortunately, that kind of sidetracked my SEAL training. Most of the trip was at high elevation and not very conducive to running at all, let alone 8.5 minute mile paces. I figured I'd give myself the time off from working out anyway. One cool thing about Columbia is that they've got a bunch of really cool exotic fruits. We did a fruit market walking tour in Medellin, and tried something like 20-25 different fruits: The trip overall was pretty cheapo friendly. Lots of available fruit, very favorable exchange rate and lots of walking. One of the hotels where we stayed toward the end of the trip had a scale, so I was pleasantly surprised to see my weight hadn't budged from 158 (aft...