Day Three

Weight: 240

Food:
Breakfast: Egg in the hole, 12 oz milk
1st snack: Apple
2nd snack
Lunch: Baked potato with salt and pepper, raw carrot.
3rd snack: Miller Beer (its really hot and I’ve been working outside)
4th snack: Apple
Dinner: Three beef ribs (not much meat on those puppies), salad with tomato and blue cheese dressing, a little spaghetti my son made for lunch – he added sugar to the canned sauce and it may be, is, the worst I have ever eaten, zucchini-tomato-onion bake with parmesan and Italian cheese mix. Sounds like a lot but except for the salad, only a couple of bites of each.
5th snack: small cookie
6th snack: 16 oz homebrew wheat beer

Exercise:
Walked 2 miles, hilly terrain. I live at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, very hilly here. The 1 ½ mile circuit I like to walk has a 690 ‘ change in elevation, so, that is 690’ up and 690’ back down

Activities:
Still very hot out, worked outside making catfish fishing jugs.

Thoughts and/or education:
The first 15 to 20 minutes of sustained activity, exercise, yard work, what ever, we burn the sugar in our blood. Then we start converting our body fat to sugar because we have used up all of the available sugar in our system. If one has been sedentary for long periods of time, weeks, months, years, then our body has gotten out of the practice of converting fat to sugar. This one of the reasons we tire so easily when we ask our body to start doing sustained activity. Yet, sustained activity is one of the keys to achieving our weight and BMI goals.

My wife got Hodgkin’s disease about two years after we were married. In the late 70’s, one was not expected to survive the disease but she did. The course of chemotherapy and the disease process took away all of her stamina, which had been considerable. She set a goal of being able to walk downtown from our house and back, about a mile each way. Every day, she would walk a little father, stopping many times to rest, until after a couple of months, she was able to make the entire trip without stopping.

A gentleman I used with whom I used to work, let himself get over 260 lbs, this was about a 100 lb gain over his target weight. One day he decided to get back in shape and started running three times a week. His goal was to be able to run 6 miles at each outing. He said it took him almost a year but he finally was able to run the 6 miles without stopping. His normal run was twice around a section. For you non-country folks, a section being 640 acres and is usually measured, in farming country, by a rectangle one mile long and ½ mile wide.

Our first objective is to develop a program of sustained activity. Walking is the easiest. It takes no extra equipment, is low impact, and one can do it almost anywhere, see my first post for exceptions, lol. I love to play racquet ball but have no one and no place to play right now or that would be part of my sustained activity program. Makes no difference what one does but it does make a difference how one does it. Start slowly, don’t take on too much. Remember, I am looking at a year to get there.

Tomorrow, setting goals, objectives, and milestones.