MIssing Goals and FitBit Frustrations

The good news is that, as promised, I hit my walking goal yesterday. 5.46 miles to be specific, and I feel pretty good that I followed through. Particularly since, once again, I was tired enough that I considered not hitting that goal in favor of falling asleep.

The bad news is that I missed my calorie goal, eating 3,083 calories out of a budget of 2,400. I was going to type something like “I blame the largesse of my employers for this”, but really I blame myself. See, my department is super busy right now – that’s why I’m working three hours of overtime a day. Well, that and the fact that I could use the money. But, by way of showing appreciation, the department bought lunch. Pizza, to be precise. Tired and hungry and not paying attention, I ate four slices of a large pizza, which carried a hefty 1,200 calorie punch. Combine that with going to Firehouse Subs for dinner (with their 780 calorie medium “Club on a Sub”), and you see that I ate a touch more than I should have. My fault. I could have had something smaller, or only eaten two slices of pizza.

A small sliver of good news in all of that is the fact that I burned 4,444 calories. So, even though I went over, I didn’t eat more than I burned. It’s still a somewhat weak bit of good news, but I’ll take it.

Oh, and the FitBit issue? So, at my first lunch (how Hobbitlike, right?), I ate two slices of pizza. Then, three hours later, I ate two more. So I went into my FitBit app and updated the servings from two to four. An hour after that, I had to update the servings from two to four again. An hour after that, I had to update the servings from two to four again. Then when I met my wife and son for dinner I – stop me if you know where I’m going – had to update the servings from two to four again. And then, this morning as I was checking my calorie count from yesterday I had to – say it with me – update the servings from two to four again.

This is a distressingly common problem I’ve had with this app, ever since the most recent update. And it’s far more irritating than the whole getting forced to log on randomly issue. Logging on just slows me down a little. Failing to track my calories accurately makes it bloody damn hard to know where I’m at. Time to email customer service again*, and see what happens.

Eye-burning Fatigue

So, I didn’t make my walking goal last night. I’d fully intended* to, but I fell asleep.

I’m not certain what happened. Other than the obvious “you fell asleep because you were tired, duh” aspect of it. I think it’s related to the fact that it was pitch black outside by about 6 pm. Combine that with getting up at 3:30 am, and it’s easy to think that it is a lot later than it actually was. By the time we were getting my son ready for bed, I was stretched out on the couch trying to fall asleep. By the time he actually was in bed, I was forcing myself to stay awake long enough to flip the laundry. I think I actually fell asleep before nine.

If you know me, that’s early. By preference, I would stay up past midnight and then sleep to nine or ten in the morning.

So, anyway, needless to say I didn’t make my walking goal. I did manage 4.07 miles for the day, thanks to walking at work. But, I didn’t make goal. All because of falling asleep. And yes, I know that if I fell asleep like that I probably needed it. But still. Goals.

As far as the other goals are concerned, I did well. I ate 1,863 calories, which wasn’t too bad when you consider that part of that was two jelly doughnuts. We’re busy at work, and management bought the department doughnuts, and it just wouldn’t have been right to refuse their generosity. No, really. I only ate those doughnuts out of duty! Really! (And I have a bridge I want to sell you as well…) More importantly, I burned 4,075 calories – so that’s still an net loss, despite not having hit goal. Not too bad, I guess.

Still. Today, I’m going walking!

Wow

Just a quick hit, here. I just finished at my doctor’s office, and he was impressed with the work I’ve done so far. Checking the records, it was 2006 when I last weighed brow 350 pounds.

Eight years.

Kind of puts hints in perspective, doesn’t it?  Makes a really nice reminder that I’m making progress.

Oh, I also got my flu vaccine while I was there. If you haven’t yet, I strongly encourage you to do so. Let’s get the herd immunity built up!

MIscellaneous Monday Musings

346.8 pounds. Wow.

For various and sundry reasons, I changed my official weigh-in day to Monday. I won’t bore you with the reasons. But… wow. I’m just about eight pounds from my next milestone (339), and it still isn’t feeling real. Don’t get me wrong: I’m excited! It’s just… wow.

Today should be interesting for another reason. I’m off to see my doctor after work, as a three-month follow-up on my “maybe diabetes” diagnosis. My last appointment was August 12, and I weighed right around 385 pounds at that time. Which means that I’ve lost 38 lbs since then. I’m expecting to catch my doctor off guard in a highly pleased sort of way. I’m also hoping I can stop checking my blood sugar – I’m getting really tired of my twice-daily ceremonial bloodletting – but that may very well be a pipe dream.

I had to retire two pairs of jeans today. They’re the jeans I was wearing when I got started with all of this, and for a while they were just loose. Now they’re comically loose, held up only by my belt and fitting like clown pants. Kind of a nice feeling, that.

Looking at the weekend, here’s how things turned out. Friday I hit my walking goal by covering a total of 5.35 miles. That same day, I ate 2,130 calories and burned 4,539 calories. Saturday I covered 3.03 miles (and weekends have no specific walking goal), ate 2,128 calories, and burned 3,865. Sunday I covered a total of 4.02 miles. How I managed that, I don’t know. I felt like I spent most of Sunday sitting. I burned 4,145 calories, and I have no idea how many calories I ate. We had a potluck lunch at church, and while I didn’t go crazy with the food I also have no idea how to even *begin* estimating the calorie content of some of that food.

Anyway, wish me luck at the doctor!

FitBit Follow-Up Follow-Up

I spoke too soon. Uninstalling and reinstalling the app didn’t help. I still like the product, but the app is annoying me.

FitBit Follow-Up

Back in Gear Review: FitBit, Part Two (the app), I made the following statement about annoying new habits of the app:

“…the latest version of the app randomly makes me sign in when I open it – three times in a row, the first day after I installed the update, and 1 to 3 times a day since then.”

Since then, I’ve emailed FitBit’s technical support group three times. The first two times, I was merely assured that they were sorry for the inconvenience and that their engineers were working on the issue. Standard customer service boilerplate – I know, because I spent three years writing that sort of thing for my firm. You get to recognize it pretty quick. The third time I emailed them, however, they also suggested that I delete the app from my phone and reinstall it. It sounded to me like the app equivalent of “hard reset your computer”, but I figured I had nothing to lose.

I finally got around to doing it last night. And so far – knock wood – it’s worked. I had to log in when I first reinstalled it, but I haven’t had to mess with it since then. I have no idea why it worked, either. But I’ll take it.

Checking in, I ate 2,078 calories yesterday and burned 4,371. I also walked… wait for it… 5.33 miles! Yep, that’s right. I made goal yesterday, after slacking for two days. Sadly, it’s also how I discovered that my FitBit doesn’t seem to want to register walking distances on a treadmill. Fortunatly, the FitBit app has an option to manually log exercise, so I’ll just have to bust out my iPod pedometer (iPodometer?) and track it that way. Because it is getting chilly and damp of an evening around here, and that’s a bad combination for walking.

Working for a Living

This sounds like an excuse, but having a job got in the way of exercising yesterday.

Normally, my job doesn’t get in the way. But, normally, I have a pretty set schedule. Take a break at this time, take lunch at this time, take another break at this time. It lets me plan my exercising easily. But yesterday, I was doing that floorwalking thing. And more specifically, for reasons that I won’t go into here, I wasn’t floorwalking after lunch. I was back on the phones, answering questions that representatives had and talking to a lone frustrated client. Nothing about it kept me from exercising, but it threw me off my stride enough that I didn’t get out and do what I should.

Man, it’s only been two days and already I’m tired of this particular thing. It’s repetitive, and it’s easily controlled. Moe importantly, it’s something I *have* to control. If I don’t, then I’ll start backsliding. And I don’t want that, not after all the work I’ve put in to getting to where I am. So, today, back on the walking schedule.

To give myself a little credit, though, I did still do my workout cards.  Despite not wanting to, because I was tired (which is a lame excuse).  Two different types of pushups, which I did against a wall because I do weigh 350 pounds and because I figure that some exercise is better than getting in a pushup position and collapsing.  Squats.  Two different types of crunches.  I’m now thinking that one of my next goals will simply be “get to the point where the crunches don’t hurt”, because my gelatinous abs ached for twenty minutes after that.

How did I do yesterday, though? Let’s see… walked 3.86 miles, consumed 2,093 calories, and burned 4,014 calories. Although, in fairness, that calorie consumption figure is much more of an estimate than normal. My FitBit app went a little berserk for me yesterday, and tried to double and triple count a few items. I think I got it fixed, but the calorie consumption could actually have been as high as 2,540 calores. Which still isn’t bad, but isn’t meeting goal.

Epic Failure

All right, the title for this post might be exaggerated just a little. But, yesterday really wasn’t a very successful day for me. I ate 3,510 calories, burned 3,724 calories, and walked only 3.1 miles. So, yeah. When the only redeeming feature of the day – from an exercise and weight loss perspective, anyway – is that you managed to burn more calories than you ate (thank you, BMR!), it isn’t a successful day at all.

What happened?

Poor planning, really. I ended up eating out for all three meals, with dinner being a bacon cheeseburger at Red Robin – that was 917 calories for the burger, and another 371 for the french fries. Pro tip: nothing wrong with eating a massive burger when you’re watching your calories. But budget for it.  Incidentally, notice that phrasing.  I “ended up” eating out.  Not “I planned for”, but “I ended up”.  That’s a bad thing.  Much like eating a massive burger, there’s nothing wrong with eating out.  But it should be something you choose.  It shouldn’t be something you just end up doing.

On top of the lack of planning, my day turned out to be much more sedentary than I’d planned for. Remember that floorwalking thing I talked about yesterday? Yeah, well, it turned out that the plan for yesterday was to sit with different reps and answer questions. Not exactly an active day, really. And I didn’t quite catch on to the fact that the plan had changed until 1 PM, so I lost several opportunities to walk. I mean, I could have maybe recovered. But I didn’t.

Not a whole lot to add to this, not really. I think that the important lesson here is “always have a plan”. Which may be a lesson I’ve learned before, really. But I’ll probably need to keep learning it until I actually learn it.

Man, That Was A Lot Of Walking

I received an important lesson in humility yesterday. See, I’ve been making a lot of progress recently. And I think I’m justifiably proud of how far I’ve come in a comparatively short time. But I’ve also started thinking I’m in better shape than I really am, and it’s been letting me think I can cut a few corners.

Yesterday demonstrated just how wrong I was.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned that I’m working twelve-hour days last week and this week. If I haven’t, I just have. The whole reason for these long days is the money. And the fact that my department has brought on twenty newly hired employees, many of whom have no experience at all in the industry. So I’ve been working with the training class, and the thing I’m specifically doing this week is what we call “floorwalking”. If you’ve never heard this phrase, it’s exactly what it sounds like. You walk around, checking on the new representatives and answering questions as they come up. This floorwalking got me standing for nearly five hours straight.

Let me tell you, that is a lot of standing. And walking. And despite having a goal of 5.3 miles per day, I generally get that done in half mile bursts, with maybe a mile at the end of the day to get the last bit of distance in. I certainly don’t stand up and walk for five hours during my regular day. So, by the end of the day yesterday, my feet and legs were sore.

They feel all right now, so it’s nice to see some progress. And oddly, despite having my nose rubbed in the fact that I’m not in the kind of shape I thought I was, I feel pretty good about it. Because I managed to keep standing and keep moving for those five hours. Four months ago, I’m pretty sure I would never have been able to do it. All in all, I’m not as far along as I wanted to believe, but I’m certainly not as bad off as I was afraid I’d be. Which counts as a win in my book.

All of this also leads naturally into my check-in. Just how far did I actually walk? 5.45 miles, which just goes to show that you can stand and walk for five hours and still not get much more distance in than if you just walked in bursts. I consumed 2,440, and burned 4,610 calories.

Psychological Victories

I hit 350 pounds as of Saturday!

Now, here’s something interesting that I noticed. 350 isn’t one of my benchmarks. It’s 69 pounds lost, so it’s not my next target (339 pounds) or my half-way mark (319 pounds). But it feels huge, far more impressive than when I hit my last benchmark (359 pounds). At first, I thought it was just because I’m a sucker for round numbers. But I don’t think that’s the case.

See, eight years or so ago, I weighed 350 pounds. And that weight sort of maintained itself for a while. I remember using that fact to justify not trying to lose weight. “Sure, I’m overweight,” I’d say. “But I’ve been this weight for years, and I’m not getting any worse. So I must be doing something right.” An odd sort of self-deception, really, but aren’t they all?

So now, I’m back to that weight. And even though it’s nothing special, it feels special. Because, except for remembering what I was like right out of high school – when I weighed around 200 pounds and bicycled everywhere – this is the lightest I ever remember weighing. From here on out, it’s all uncharted waters. And I’m really looking forward to it.

Yay me!

Checking in, now, Friday was pretty good. I ate 1,970 calories, burned 4,520 calories, and walked 5.41 miles. Saturday and Sunday were somewhat less impressive, as I barely squeaked in under my calorie goal both days. My nephew had his birthday party on Saturday (and I’ve mentioned that birthday cake is my kryptonite), and Sunday we went and ate pizza and hung out with friends from church. Still, I burned 4,542 calores and walked 1.59 miles on Saturday and then burned 3,738 calories and walked 2.51 miles on Sunday. Not too shabby, for a man with no particular exercise goal on weekends.