Weight Loss Update -- New Low 206 lbs!

Background

When I stepped on the scale over Christmas holidays in 2007 I weighed 240 pounds. I decided that I wanted to get to a healthy weight. BMI charts indicate that 200 lbs. is the very top of 'Normal Weight' for my height. My goal is to reach 200 lbs. by New Years Eve, 2008.

206 Pounds!

On both Thursday and Friday last week the scale said '206' when I woke up. During the day I've gone up to about 209 or so with eating (yeah, I still do that) and drinking lots of water (it's been hot).

Squashing my Weight

I attribute the last few pounds I've lost to us having a garden. Not due to me weeding it -- I haven't stuck with my 3 x weekly goal at all -- but because the crook-necked squashes are out of control.

Every 3 or 4 days we can go pick four or five more foot long squashes that are ready to eat. Now, we have absolutely no intentions of becoming vegetarians, but we feel bad letting food go to waste. As a result, we leave the pork chops and burgers in the fridge and have been having squash everything.

In the last two of weeks we've had :

Squash and veggies with noodles (2x)
Squash with rice and beans (2x)
Veggie noodle soup, staring Squash (2x, plus lunches)
Tin foil dinners, staring Squash (ok, there was some meat in this one)
Veggie stir fry, staring squash (2x)

That's nine of our dinners in the last two weeks. Good news though, we've got four and a half more squashes on the counter! If we're lucky, we'll get to pick some more squash by Tuesday or Wednesday.

Our garden hasn't been making just squash of course, tomatoes are starting to come in, green beans are on their second bloom, cucumbers, peppers and corn have also started to make a showing.

Life Without a TV

When we got married we had a 12 inch Walmart TV, with a built in VCR. That was our TV for three and a half years.

We turned it on one day only to be greeted by the smell of a puff of smoke and to see the screen's final burst of radiant whiteness before giving out forever. Unbeknownst to us, our TV apparently looked suspiciously like a piggy bank, which caused our two year old to shove a handful of change in it. TV's don't like change very much.

It didn't phase us too much though. For most of our married life we've lived as poor college students with too little money or time to spend on a cable subscription. We aren't anti-TV exactly. Two of the apartments we rented included free TV and we enjoy watching shows together (like Hawaii Five-0, The Simpsons and The Office).

The Internet Is My TV

Yesterday I realized something depressing though. The Internet is my TV. I don't mean that we use it to watch TV shows (though we do that too -- that's not the depressing part). What I mean is that I still get to keep up with all the dumb scare news stories, all the most 'important' celebrity gossip and am exposed to (close to) the same amount of advertising as when I had TV growing up.

My main news sites in the past have been : news.google.com, nytimes.com, bbc.co.uk and reuters.com. My entertainment came from Slashdot, Digg, Engadget and Technorati. And there may have been the occasional indulgence in watching just plain stupid stuff over at YouTube.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of cool and worthwhile stuff on all those sites. But although I may not have a TV, I can't join in the moral superiority of the rest of the non-TV watching world.

The Internet, Advertising, and Me

I had though that I had tricked The Internet from attacking me with advertising. After all, I have Ad Block Plus installed and I use Firefox. I don't get pop ups, I can't remember the last time I was asked to punch the monkey, and I don't know the name of any 'single girls in my area' who want to meet me.

Advertising comes in many forms. For the last several years I have been actively seeking out stories, news and articles which pitch, promote and expo things I can buy!

Maybe it's worked too. We bought my wife a Mac and we own a Wii (and a new TV. Christmas present from my Dad).

Do you find yourself seeking out "news" and "updates" on things you would like to buy? Do you think that maybe you're purposefully and willingly exposing yourself advertising, re-enforcing your desire to get those things, under the guise of keeping up to date?

Where Does the Balance Lie?

Here's where I'm stuck. I studied computers and technology in school. I have a solid base in the fundamentals and am currently on top of what's the latest and greatest for a lot of different technology sectors. If I don't keep reading about the coolest latest technology, I will likely end up like so many greybeards in the tech industry -- they know the fundamentals and know what worked well back in their day, but are too far behind to implement new and better solutions.

If I take that view all the way, then I should keep on top of all the technology I can.

On the other hand, keeping up with it all can be draining. I haven't visited Slashdot, Digg or several other tech sites in more than a month. I get sore fore-arms really easily because I'm typing and programming for up to 10 hours a day.

If I do keep up with everything, I will get burned out. Besides getting burned out, I don't have as much time with my family or other hobbies as I'd like.

Dreams of Change

I'm incredibly blessed to have gotten a good education in a field that pays well. I have skills, experience and a network which allow me to get a new job pretty easily. I can make a good living for my family with technology related work. I usually love what I do too. I love to make things work and to fix broken code.

...but...sometimes I resent computers. I hate that I am a slave to system updates and upgrades. To new hardware advances. To security flaws. To power outages. To hacking attempts. To cool new programs that I just have to try out. Mostly though, I hate that I love working on them.

A part of me yearns to break free from them. Something in me wishes I could go weed the garden and plow a field and chase down runaway cows on a dirt bike. I'd have a wood shop in my shed with a lathe, a router, and a table saw. I'd be outside enjoying and working in reality instead of changing the magnetic orientation of particles on a metal disk fabricating a new artificial world online.

Reality and Me

What will I really end up doing? Probably I'll go get an MBA and become a manager somewhere. That'll get me off of the computer and away from the eternal upgrade process. It'll give me a bit of insurance against my RSI (Repetitive Stress Injury) which could one day turn into carpal tunnel syndrome. It'll also let me keep feeding and caring for my family; I don't even know how to drive a plow.

Leftovers for Breakfast : Completely Random Snippets

I didn't have enough coherent thoughts to make a post on a single subject today, so you get some follow ups on a couple of subjects!

It's time to pay off the Credit Card

The credit card is due next week so I transferred the money to pay it off from ING yesterday. We'll be paying off $1,492.26.

At ING we made $2.29 in interest this month in the sub-account that money came from. There's still almost $400 in the account, so the $2.29 isn't solely from the Credit Card float. The $2.29 doesn't account for interest earned between when I paid off the Credit Card last month and the end of last month. I call it close enough.

We also will be getting $14.92 cash back for this month's charges.

That's $17.21 we wouldn't have if we were going cash based!

The Garden is Still Growing

The first crook-necked squash was big enough to eat. We had it in stir-fry. There are a whole bunch of green tomatoes on the vine. There are several gum ball sized watermelons now, and some fifty-cent piece sized pumpkins.

We planted two types of cucumbers (English types and regular types). One of them has probably close to 100 blossoms in the row, but we're not sure which row is which type.

The Okra, Kohlrabi and newly plated lettuce have sprouted and are growing well.

Learning to Live on A Budget

As of the 11th we'd used up about 2/3 of our budget while being only 1/3 the way through the month. Some of the expenses we'll get back (from the babysitting flex spend account, for example) but some of it is just us learning to live within our budget.

At the start of next month you'll get to hear our reasons and excuses...and our plan to do better.

Freecycle Saves Us Money

Once upon a time we had a bread maker which I had bought a thrift store for $5. We made home made bread for three or four months, decided we were eating too much bread and sold the bread maker for $15.

After the Easy and Cheap Home Made Bread post on Get Rich Slowly yesterday, I decided I wanted to get a bread maker again. My wife agreed as long as we buy and use whole wheat flour instead of the white flour we currently have.

I sent an email out to our local Freecycle list to see if anyone had one they didn't want. Someone responded to my email and all I have to do is drive the 10.1 miles to pick it up. That'll cost less than $5 in gas to get there and back.

Jumping On the Garden Band Wagon

Gardens seem to be a popular trend among personal finance / self improvement bloggers. In my own defense, we've been into gardening since before it was popular. I grew up with a garden, and we've planted one several times since we got married.

Anyways, I thought I'd add a little here about mine. This picture is from a few weeks ago, and things have grown quite a lot since I took the picture, but it should give you an idea of what's happening.



We've got corn, lettuce (several kinds), cucumbers (3 kinds!), crook necked squash, watermellon, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, okra, bush beans, pumpkins and kohlrabi.

We got a bit of a late start this year because we had to get permission to till up the back yard from our landlords, and we didn't think to do that until the snow was gone.

The tomatoes and peppers came from starter packs from Lowes, everything else except the potatoes was from seeds. We had finished planting the seeds and had a little room left. I remembered we had some older potatoes in the fridge, so I sliced them and thre them in the ground, and three of the four chunks turned into plants.

The Kohlrabi and Okra were kind of mistakes. There were a couple of patches where beans, lettuce and carrots hadn't come up. I hated the thought of wasting the space, so we went back to Lowes to see what we could get that would grow quickly. The Okra and Kohlrabi both had "45-60 days" as their time till maturity, so we bought them. I've never eaten a Kohlrabi, and my wife has never had Okra. We added three more tomato plants, more cucumbers and lettuce at the same time.

I spend about 15-20 minutes watering the garden each night. It's kind of nice to just stand outside and not think about anything except the garden. I spend most of my day working on computers and worrying about computer bugs, so escaping to the real world is something of a reprieve.

My goal is to spend 30 minutes 2-3 times a week weeding the garden. It looks like I'm going to have to do that today and tomorrow, because I haven't gotten to it yet this week!

Weight Wait : Slow Progress, but Progress None the Less

Getting below 215 pounds has been a drudgefully slow experience like trudging through deep snow made ofmolasses. I would get down to 215, then bounce around between the 215 and 220 marks on the scale for a few days, then back down to 215. This has been going on basically for the last month.

It didn't help that we went to visit grandpa-inlaw or that my dad and siblings came into town (and treated us to dinner several times). It didn't help that the frozen lunches I had made to bring to lunch were meat-and-potatoes type meals. And it certainly didn't help that I was doing consulting instead of exercising in the evenings.

Hooray!

That's behind me now though! (I hope!). For the last four or five days I've now been bouncing between 214 and 217. My spreadsheet says that I need to lose 0.5297 pounds per week for the rest of the year to reach my goal. I would rather do better than that so that in November and December I'm not trying to lose weight over the holidays (just trying to maintain it).

Plan : Eat Less, Garden More

Being a highly environmentally conscious person (joke), I've been known to eat the remaining four pieces of sausage just so we don't use a ziplock and put them in the fridge. After I've already had breakfast. Including three pieces of sausage.

My new plan is the same as the old plan. Eat less, exercise more. Here are the specifics:

1) I'll leave half of my lunch in my scooter's trunk. If I really get hungry or stay late, I can go get it. If I don't use it for lunch it I can eat it for dinner.

2) I'll go weed the garden like I should be doing anyways. I should probably weed for 30 minutes two or three times a week to keep them under control. That's more exercise than I'm getting now and as long as I do it near dusk I enjoy being outside.

Weighing Less Is Nice

Weighing about 215 is a nice feeling. I have more energy, my clothes fit better, I probably even get better gas mileage on my scooter. The best thing for me so far though was that when some friends invited us to go to the pool last week I didn't feel embarrassed when I took off my shirt.