Starting picture

Here are my pictures when I first started my weight loss program on April 7, 2007. I finally found them. Looking at them now, is kind of hard. Its hard for me to even put these up here, because I tried to hide the weight by wearing baggier clothes. As you can see, when I tucked my shirt in my pants, it didn't hide very much. I had the dunlap disease...My stomach done lapped over my pants..

Like I said, it's hard to put these up here, but I wanted to show the before and after. I will get a recent picture up here, about 45 pounds later.

Keeping Track

The way I keep up with my program, is that I keep track of everything I eat and all my exercise. I log everything..that way I can really know where I am. I weigh myself every Tuesday, in the morning, before I've eaten anything..and before I've put any clothes on....My true weight..oh yeah..and after I've gone to the bathroom... So anyway, I use a digital scale that
measures down to 1/10 of a pound. So I can know my true weight. I've also measured it against a medical scale...So I know its right..

In addition to weighing myself..I keep track of all my food, weight and exercise on a website called: http://www.thedailyplate.com
This has a huge database of foods that you can use when inputting your information. You can also add food to it, so you always know what you've eaten during the day.

I use it to keep track of my exercise, weight, sodium, cholesterol, vitamins and calories eaten. I decided to go on a 1500-2000 calorie diet. Based on information that I put in this website: Calculating Your Daily Caloric Need.
It tells you how many calories you burn normally and gives you an idea of how many calories you can eat and lose, maintain or gain weight.

I put everything into the dailyplate database, that way I can eat anything I like (as long as I stay within my daily caloric intake) . So I adjust what I eat later, based on what I've already eaten so far (calorie wise). That way I'm not starving myself, or trying to fight the battle of not eating certain foods. I can eat anything I like... in moderation..because I don't want to use up all my calories on breakfast...and then not eat anything else during the day...Since I am at my computer all day, I just enter the foods I've eaten when I sit down at my PC. My wife often makes jokes about me writing down all the nutritional information from food containers and asking what she put in this and what she put in that...So I can enter it into the database later...Some people may think that it is tedious entering that data or keeping track of it, but I don't try to do a whole days worth in one sitting...and most of the information is already in the database...but its easier to make better choices when you know what you've already eaten..I know I can't have that huge piece of cake if I can only eat 150 calories for the rest of the evening...I may just cut off a small piece or better yet..save it for tomorrow for lunch and make adjustments later...but I can still have the cake.

So the theme for today is Keep Track of What You Eat!
D

10 Pant Sizes smaller...

I have got to get my new pics up here. As of today, I have lost 45 pounds. When I last weighed myself I was 249 pounds. I actually wore a pair of my pants that were 10 sizes smaller than what I could where when I started this weight loss journey. New pics coming soon..

Weight Loss Tracker - First Entry

I started this blog really late in the process. I have already lost 43 pounds. I wanted to put this blog up to document my weight loss experience. This is mainly for those with whom I want to share my progress with. The picture to the left is me on February 9, 2007.
I will be quite open here. I was about 295 pounds here. I will put the picture I took of myself when I first decided to start to lose weight up later.

I had previously lost weight before, quite easily actually. When I was in high school I played football as an offensive lineman Starting Left Tackle for Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (the Poly Engineers; when we were dominant in the area..we went 9-1 that year..1986..Go Engineers!) Anyway, I was listed as 318 pounds in the books. After I graduated from high school, I didn't play football anymore but I kept the weight..for 2 more years after high school..into my sophomore year in college. Thats when I decided enough was enough and my uncle agreed to pay the cost for me to do NutiSystem (it was $600 at the time..wow thats a lot of money for a weight loss program) Anyway, he paid for it and I am the kind of person, that if I have a routine and clear actions on what I need to do to succeed, and I believe I can succeed..lookout. So needless to say, I stuck with the program exactly like the nutritionist said. We had a weekly weigh-in..and to be quite honest..that is probably the one factor that helped me stick to it the best. I am extremely competitive and I like to win. So I didn't want to weigh in each week and have my weight not go down. I wasn't so much in competition with everyone else..but I didn't want to be seen (ala the weigh-in) as having gone off the diet. So I stuck to it exactly. So within that year, I lost about 100 pounds. So that set the precedent for my belief that anytime I really wanted to..I could lose weight. I kept most of the weight off for about 7 years. Then gradually it crept back up to about 240 lbs in 1996 when I got married. After that, I didn't pay attention to what I ate..and I had less exercise than I did while walking across the college campus and participating in Intramural sports. So while I was in college and graduate school.. I was quite active. After I started working ..not so active. Which wasn't good, since I ate anything I wanted and didn't pay attention to it.

I had participated in a weight loss competition at work and lost 20 lbs in about 2 months, but that gradually crept back up again. So there I was on February 9, 2007, meeting with some friends and classmates from my elementary school 6th grade class and I looked at the picture above and realized I need to do something...But like my complacent self , I didn't do anything yet. It required a little competition to set me back on track. Some friends of mine and I decided that we were going to have a little competition..The winner would get a video game paid for by the other two...That is all I needed to hear..Competition..The chance to win...plus a free video game...I knew it would be mine. So needless to say that is when I started this current journey. March 27, 2007 is when I actively started to lose weight.

In my next blog, I'll talk about what I did to lose the weight.
Here is a more recent picture of me on June 22, 2007. I lost about 31 pounds at that point.