I havent gotten very far, but so far it makes a lot of sense. Yesterday, I stopped by Boulder Running Company to pick up a Garmin 010-00658-30 Forerunner 405CX GPS Sport Watch with Heart Rate Monitor (Blue). By now, I hope you have noticed that I am using Amazon affiliate links. I am doing this mostly because I think its funny. Why do I think its funny? I dunno, but it makes me giggle.

Being a lover of contrary behavior, I stopped at McDonalds on the way home. After all, I had just bought a super-duper heart rate monitor with the intent of working out more often. To add to the silliness, I broke out the End to Overeating book on my iPhone Kindle app (apparently you cant buy an iPhone through Amazon, so no link for you!).

I mean seriously, can you imagine? I just spent $350 on a heart rate monitor, was eating at McDonalds while reading a book about weight loss? Im high-lar-e-ous.

Anyway, a couple of pages in there is a short discussion about how food logs dont work, especially for overeaters, because they lie. That requiring dieters to photograph their food with a time and date stamp seemed to work better.

I thought to myself, as I ate my second apple pie, “thats interesting.”

Today, I struck out trying to find an easy way to make it happen. First, I decided I wanted to use Posterous. Why? Well, because I havent figured out a great way to use it yet, and I am a big fan of Garry and Sachin‘s.

All day I tried different things. I played with PicPosterous, the iPhone app, but it didnt do exactly what I wanted. (It needs the ability for me to write a short description of the photo).

I tried flickr and tumblr, but they werent exactly what I wanted.

Then I found this out about Posterous. If you send an email to the service name, it will only autopost to that service. For example, if I send a photo to flickr+twitter [at] posterous [dot] com it will only be posted to flickr and twitter (and posterous).

Which lead to to this solution.

I will email photos of what I am eating to twitter [at] posterous [dot] com. Since my twitter goes to my facebook, thats covered. It keeps food photos out of my flickr and tumblr, which is perfect. I will send one email per day, even though it will be multiple photos. You can comment on my food selection on my posterous blog.

Then I will use those photos at the end of the day to update my food diary in DailyBurn.

Finally, I will take a picture of my weekly weigh-in as well.

What do you think? Good idea?

I took a look at the first post I ever wrote the other day. Entitled Battle of the Belly – Day 1, it proclaimed my desire to lose weight. Then I looked at my second post, Where Have You Been? Or The Continuation of Fatness where I continue to discuss weight loss.

When was it posted? 42 days after the first one. Ouch.

Then over the next 3-4 months, I continued to post about losing weight. Mostly when things were good. Then silence on the fatty side. What happened?

I quit losing weight. I stopped fighting. I failed.

And, instead of standing up and talking about it, I shut the hell up.

For a person that talks a lot about failure, its surprises me a bit that I failed to share in my failure.

Why does all this matter? Well, lemme tell ya!

Im back at the weight loss stuff. I learned over the course of the past year or so that being bipolar made weight loss difficult and weight gain easy. Apparently, most people who are bipolar tend to be addicted to food, drugs or sex. I choose unwisely and ended up being addicted to food and drugs. (If I had only known the choices!)

While its not easy to break an addiction to drugs, its really a binary decision. You either do drugs, or you dont.

I cant stop eating. Well, cant stop for long.

Recently, I found that I am insulin resistant. Due to that, I have started taking a drug called Metformin which is supposed to help my body become less insulin resistant. (BTW, a horrible side effect is it jacks up my stomach. Sometimes really, really badly. Add that to the standard Jewish disposition of having horrible stomach/GI/etc issues, its really, really not fun.)

Over the course of the past few weeks, I am losing weight naturally. Which means, if I want to get serious about losing weight, now is the time.

What’s my plan?

First and foremost, I am using Daily Burn. Daily Burn was a Techstars company last year, and has been doing phenomenally with some great investors. Along with an iPhone app, they allow you to track all your caloric intake (nutrition), workouts and the effect the nutritional choices and workouts have on your body (my belly). What I like about Daily Burn is the addition of social features, which are paramount to success (no one is in this alone, even if you are alone.)

The only benefit of Daily Burn is the ability for me to post most everything I am doing publicly. Here is my Daily Burn Locker Room. Its public. Enjoy. Occasionally it will tweet out achievements and other fitness related information.

I will use Nike+ for when I walk my dogs, or spend time on the treadmill. Again, I will post it on my blog (in a handy dandy widget).  I am going to take pictures of myself now and again, and post them to a flickr set on my account.  And, finally, I will record videos here and there, and post them to LearnToDuckTV.

Finally, I will ask everyone who knows me to keep me on track. If you think I am slippin’ just ask, or kick in my…butt–doubt you could miss it.

And, of course, periodically, I will write a post about where I am at.

As my mom used to say to me when I pretended I wasnt listening to her, “This time I am not fucking around.”

I want to lose about 100 lbs. Ive given myself about a year to do it.

And…here we go.

Probably why it has taken me a couple of days to post this. Not sure why the gain, other than I didnt really exercise, and I ate like crap. Very up and down. But it taught me something, I get burned out quickly when I am on the weight loss war path for too long.

Here are my stats so far:

And the chart that is beginning to flatten out a bit…

So this next four weeks I am going to try something different. Week 1, I am going to do the Sacred Heart diet. It was prescribed by a doctor, so it cant be all bad, right? Anyway, the idea is to do that diet for a week, then track all my food intake in weight watchers for two weeks, then try to diet myself without recording anything. Then rinse and repeat. We will see how it works.

and more importantly, I played in my first lacrosse game in over four years on Friday! I played with the Hooligans, who play in the Rocky Mountain Lacrosse League. Its just summer league so its pretty mellow. I hoped to play just a couple of minutes, but we were down long-stick defenders, and so I ended up playing for about a half. I was so sore on Saturday…

I didnt play badly. Rather it was uneventful. No one scored on me, and I didnt do anything overly spectacular. I did pick up a ground ball, and catch a pass, and finally make a throw, so overall, for four years of rust, I was pretty proud of myself. Hopefully, it will continue to inspire me to lose the weight. So how did the weight loss go?

1.2 lbs? Jeez, I would have thought it was more. But, I have to continue to remind myself that its progress, not perfection. So my total weight loss is: which certainly is not bad…and I continue to inch towards the 10% weight loss goal:

So, I will continue to plug away. One of the challenges I will have to overcome this week is getting over the general muscle soreness from last week, and pushing myself to do another 4-5 workouts this week. Plus a lacrosse game on Friday, which I am very excited about, and hoping to put forth a better effort than I did this past week. We shall see…

Fear. Basically, since I started this blog, I told a handful of folks about it, and it purpose. To journal my battle of the belly on a consistent basis.

Well, once I wrote that last post, I sort of stopped really working out and watching my weight as well as I should. So there was the fear of posting no progress, posting weight gain, posting failure. So, instead I just stopped posting.

But, how is that helpful? What happens instead is a fall back into old habits, and a continuation of fatness. So, fuck it. I am going to post on a daily or weekly basis in the hopes that I can really begin to understand what the statement “its about progress, not perfection” really means.

Yesterday, Monday, June 11, 2007, I weighed myself scared as hell that in six weeks I had lost nothing or actually gained some weight. Instead I was surprised to see that I weighed in at 299.6! Under 300 lbs for the first time in at least a year or so. Not bad.

So where is my total weight loss? Well, when I started recording the weight, I was around 325-ish (even though 331 was my high), I will use that as the starting point.

That success got me excited again. I put my podfitness mix on my ipod, and the nike+ deal in my shoe and went to the gym. My goal this week is to do cardio every day this week. Today is going to be the hard day since I have a million meetings. So the question is what is truly more important to me, my work or my health? I will let you know tomorrow…

Today, May 1, 2007 my weight is: 303.4 lbs.

Holy Jesus! In all honesty, I didnt decide today to start losing weight. In fact, I have been working on it forever, off and on. At one point I was 331 lbs, which is a retarded amount. But, for the purposes of what I am trying to do here, we will pretend I started yesterday. Yesterday, I started to really increase my cardio work. I found this website, PodFitness, which allows one to choose from 75 trainers and 20 or so different activities, and then place the trainer’s workout over a mix of music selected by the user. While it is run through iTunes, music bought through iTunes cannot be used. Which frankly, having bought like 20,000 songs from iTunes, pisses me off. So, I found eMusic. For a monthly subscription, you can download mp3s mostly from independent labels. Even so, there is a ton of good music. The third piece of my workout puzzle, is the Nike+iPod product, which records the workout and allows me to upload it to their website. Did this Geekified workout plan help? Well, yesterday, I spend 40 minutes on a treadmill for the first time in months, pushed myself pretty hard (even jogging for a couple of minutes), and completed 2.25 miles, which is about double of anything I had done previously. When that was done, I did 30 minutes of weights. Overall, I give myself an A for my workout yesterday. In terms of eating, I did pretty well. Spread out my eating every couple of hours, drank a ton of water, and even BBQ’d for myself when I got home, rather than getting food delivered. Overall, I give myself a B for my food intake yesterday. And, like that, it begins.