Forty Pounds Down!

Forty pounds down! I had to get another haircut to break the plateau, but it feels like I'm moving in the right direction again - just 15 more to go! It took me 2.0 months to loses the eighth 5 pounds. I’m competing in the Biggest Loser challenge again at work right now. We just finished Week 4. It's an 8-week contest. So far I've lost 2.6% of my body weight. That ranks me at 21 in a field of 56. My goal was to loose 12% of my body weight, so I should be at 6% at this point. I don't think I can catch up to my goal. I don't know if I could win even if I do catch up to my personal goal. The first prize is $800. Second prize is $400, and third prize is $200.

I'm still carrying my super-cool bento-style lunch box to work. Today it is full of salad. Another strategy I’m trying right now is to each a mid morning snack and a mid afternoon snack. My calorie budget has slipped below 1200 calories per day to 1184 calories per day. It's not hard to meet that budget on the days I go to taekwondo class. 45 minutes of taekwondo burns 615 calories. Finding something else to do on the other days that burn that many calories is really hard. I like to use the WiiFit, but thirty minutes of yoga only burns 70 calories, 30 minutes of aerobics or calisthenics burns 149 calories. I also like to ride my bike. It's getting harder now that it's getting darker earlier, but 30 minutes less than 10 miles per hour only burns 128 calories.

I've given up on the pushup program for now. The program just isn't working for me. I would the pushups, as many as I could, but I didn't feel like I was getting stronger. I wish we did pushups everyday in taekwondo class, but we don't actually do them very often.

I've also pretty much given up geocaching in favor of waymarking. It's less like a treasure hunt and more like a scavenger hunt. Instead of looking for hidden boxes at specific coordinates, you look for interesting places to fit into specific categories. There are more than 900 categories; for example, McDonald's restaurants, Oregon historical markers and gazebos. I've been trying to find as many as I can in Scappoose. There's not so much hiking involved, but lots more photography.

The calorie counter that I have on my iPhone is invaluable. It really makes a difference on the days I actually input my food and exercise. I wish I were better about it. I did a really good job entering everything the last time I did Biggest Loser, but I'm much more sporadic right now - need to do better.