My Weight Loss Blog

The last few months of the year is prime time for starting a new weight loss blog. I’ve decided to highlight the real ones I have found recently. I say real, because unfortunately there has been a rash of fake ones lately. I’m quite confident the blogs represented here are real people with real and interesting stories.

I’m going to do the following for each of the blogs, I hope you follow along and at a minimum do #3:

1. Write a little blurb about the blog here
2. Add the blog to my sidebar
3. Subscribe to the blog

281
The newest of the new blogs, which was started yesterday, 281 is written by Cincinnati, OH blogger Perfectlychic. Why 281 for the title of her blog? As she puts it, “So where does 281 come in? Well— 281 is where I got disgusted with my life in general. 281.5 to be exact.”

Here is what Perfectlychic would like to get out of her new weight loss blog:

This blog is going to be the story of my liberation– and the tribulations that come along the way. What is my ultimate goal? To be more satisified with the way I look. I would love to break into the 100’s– that would be my ultimate goal! It just seems so ominous— I will be updating with what I’m doing to lose weight–those three dreaded numbers– along with how (if) my life changes because of it.

Turtle Progress
Liz, or Ms. Turtle as she likes to be called, started Turtle Progress “in order to share the pitfalls and insights I experience along my journey to lose 80 pounds and gain some sanity.”

Here is how she introduced herself back in October when she started her blog:

Hi! I’m Liz. The bare facts are that I’m 31 years old and 5′3 tall, and I weigh about 200 pounds (exact weight to be determined at weigh-in this weekend). I haven’t always been fat, but I have already spent several years at my current size. Informal survey says: there’s a lot to be said for being at a lower weight!

Fitbethlin’s Journal
Bethlin doesn’t have as much to lose as most of us, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deal with all of the same struggles.

Here is how she is approaching her weight loss goals:

Of course, without the stress and time crunch of work, I’m also trying to lose those dratted 30 lbs. Again. I’m following the SparkPeople method this time. I’m in Stage 1, which is basically the “warm-up” before you get really reved up and in full “diet” mode.

Smoke Yourself Thin!
Julie has found blogging as another method for getting support. As she wrote in her first post in November, “I keep hearing all this stuff about support being important, and this will have to be my support.”

Here is how Julie describes her blog:

Actually, this has nothing to do with smoking, nor Troy McClure. I’m a single woman, late 30s, trying to lose 50 pounds and keep it off. So far I’m down 20, and it’s a slow road, filled with exercise but not too much food restriction. I’ve always been a fruit and veggie fan, and was vegetarian for a long time (but not now). I don’t diet, don’t obsess, don’t beat myself up if I eat something fattening occasionally. It’s okay, really. I’ve studied nutrition and biochemistry, but mostly what I’ve learned is from trial and error. And I do mean error!

Should any of you reading this wonder if you should start writing a weight loss blog, please read 4 Reasons You Should Be Writing a Weight Loss Blog. If you had been writing one but have abandoned it, take a look at 9 Tips For Kick-Starting Your Dormant Weight Loss Blog.

Are you writing a new weight loss blog? Have a good new one you are subscribed to? Let me know about it and I’ll look into adding it.

Good luck to all of you!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing. Thank you for visiting!

One of the things I know I have to do to be successful with losing weight this year is to put more time on the treadmill. But it’s so darn boring! Workout music helps, but if you are going to run for at least an hour like I want to start doing, then you need to kick things up a notch. To help me put in longer times on the treadmill I added a little table that I could put my laptop on so that I could use the laptop while on the treadmill. I’ve got some ideas to make it even better and once I get some pictures of it I’ll put up a post. I think it’s pretty cool so subscribe for free to my blog if you want to be notified as soon as I post it!

I want to tell you about the hour I put on the treadmill today, but first I thought I’d share a story about Bob, a guy I lived and worked with when I was 19. Bob was a little weird and some of it rubbed off on me. He got me into Kahlil Gibran, for goodness sakes. At one point he was reading a lot about extreme yoga that involved ritual washing of the intestines, although I don’t think he ever actually went through with it. He did spend a lot of time in the bathroom but I don’t think he was soaking…

Anyway, we worked in a restaurant doing a variety of jobs and one day we were both busboys with him doing the floor and me washing dishes. By then we were both good at our jobs and the work was easy and boring. So we would find different strange things to do to keep us interested and challenged. On this particular day I was keeping up easily on dishes and had a lot of empty stainless steel counter-top to work with. For no reason that I can recall I thoroughly soaked a paper towel and then spread it out to dry. Bob asked me what I thought would happen when it dried out and I said I thought it would result in a stiff piece of paper towel.

“Have you ever done it before?” he asked. After I said that I had not he remarked, “If you haven’t done it before, how do you know for sure what the result will be? What if nobody in the world had done some strange thing, could you know for sure that it wouldn’t spontaneously combust, for example?”

How do you answer that? Well I didn’t have a good answer so we spent the better part of the day doing all sorts of strange things we figured nobody had ever done before, just to see if something unexpected happened, similar to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which basically says that “nothing is real unless it is observed.” (Google is my friend!)

So what caused me to think about Bob today?

Because I did something I don’t think had every been done before on my treadmill, and a strange result did indeed ensue.

The good news is that I put in over an hour on the treadmill, walking at a leisurely 3.2 m.p.h pace, but sweating nonetheless. The bad news is that shortly after hitting the hour mark my treadmill, which had surely never been running for over an hour at a time, spontaneously combusted.

OK, maybe not. But it did power-down. And I can’t get it powered-up. Which is a bummer because I had big plans for putting more time in on this thing and I can’t afford a new treadmill right now.

That hour may have been my last for awhile.

P.S. - From what I can tell, there has never before been a blog post made referencing Kahlil Gibran, Quantum Physics, spontaneous combustion and exercising. I wonder what will happen when I click Publish?

Another year has almost come on gone and spurred on by Blogapalooza I have put together a list of my favorite posts from each month of 2008 - in chronological order starting in month number 1, January:

photo credit: Leo Reynolds

photo credit: pfala

photo credit: Rootytootoot

photo credit: Rootytootoot

photo credit: Leo Reynolds

photo credit: Leo Reynolds

photo credit: morberg

photo credit: godogo

photo credit: dharmabumx

photo credit: Leo Reynolds

photo credit: phatcontroller

photo credit: DangerPup

2008 was a tough year for me in many respects but nevertheless it is fun to look back it at through these posts. Happy early New Year and good luck to all of us in 2009!

Do you get motivated reading about the success of others? I know I do, which is why I’ll be interviewing some great weight loss successes and sharing their stories here.

Today’s interview is with Tony Posnanski who blogs at The Anti-Jared:

Weight Loss Questions

Tony, can you tell us a little about yourself?

My name is Tony Posnanski, and I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, and currently live in Orlando. I have been a Chef for the last six years of my life, and have been in restaurants for the last 12. I have a wonderful supportive wife, a pup, and two cats.I have struggled with weight my whole life, but this time is much more different than ever. I have eaten well, and very determined to keep my weight off forever!

According to the header of your blog you have lost 196.8 lbs. That’s truly amazing! What was the impetus to get started on your weight loss journey?

I have lost 197 pounds so far. I was feeling numbness in my arms while I would “try” to sleep, so I went to the doctor. He told me I had about three months to live the way I was living. He told me to get gastric bypass because doing it on my own would be too hard. I told him I had to do it on my own, and he said because I was in restaurants, my chances would be very slim. Wow, the only thing that was slim in my life! He did suggest Weight Watchers, so I joined, and the rest is history.

Keep reading →

photo credit: TheBusyBrain

Posts like this probably aren’t going to get me invited to any Quaker Oats Weekends, but I do have fond memories of eating cereal for breakfast when I was a kid. Mostly it was non-sugar cereal like Corn Flakes, Cheerios or Grape Nuts to which I would sprinkle a little sugar on top with my milk - 2%, which I can’t imagine drinking today. I had a friend at whose house I used to sleep over a lot and they had this exotic milk called “Skim” that I thought was really cool. Plus they got to eat sugar cereal like Fruit Loops, which was a nice treat.

At some point my parents started buying Golden Grahams, which my dad used to call “Golden Grays” which I never quite understood until only a few years ago when he explained that what he was calling it was “Golden Graze” in tribute to the huge bowls of it I would consume. Thanks Dad!

With that as way of background, however, I try to stay away from cereal much these days. I often fail, like this morning, which reminded me of why I shouldn’t be eating cereal and was the impetus for this article, the 4 Reasons I Shouldn’t Eat Cereal for Breakfast:

1. We Don’t Stock Good Cereal. OK, so this one could clearly be remedied, but that fact is that the cereal we buy is for our kids, and we buy cereal like Sugar Frosted Flakes, Trix, Fruity Pebbles and Lucky Charms. Recently I had some coupon deal where I got a bunch of money off for buying 10 boxes of cereal so I expanded our horizons a little bit. One of the cereals I bought was for me, because it sounded healthy - Honey Bunches of Oats. But as you will read below, even though this cereal is labeled as “Heart Healthy” it isn’t so good either. If I am going to go with cereal it’s going to mean stocking up on some non-sugary stuff and having the discipline not to add any sugar.
2. Cereal is Expensive. The primary reason for cereal being expensive is the rising cost of wheat flour, corn meal and oats caused by a shift in crops to corn for use in Ethanol fuel. Fewer farmers are growing cereal grains, which drives up scarcity and cost. The interesting thing, though, is how the cereal makers have responded. For the most part we have not seen huge increases in the price of cereal (although $5/box is now the norm) but rather, we are seeing a decrease in the size of the cereal boxes. For the same price. Of course this isn’t a phenomenon restricted solely to cereal - have you checked your peanut butter, lately? We are currently mitigating this by buying huge double-boxes at Sam’s Club or stocking up on coupons for name brands, which certainly helps. Still, cereal is not a cheap breakfast option and it’s seemingly getting more and more expensive to consume (don’t forget rising milk prices!) - even if the price looks the same.
3. Recommended Portion Sizes are Inhuman. I don’t measure the food I eat, I just don’t have that discipline - but every once in awhile I will look at some food item and analyze the portion sizes to see if it meets reality. Like the clearly single-use 16oz drinks that are labeled as having 2 servings so that it looks like you are only drinking 180 calories when in reality you are drinking 360 (who drinks half a bottle?). My Honey Bunches of Oats from this morning is a good example. According to it’s nutritional facts, this 14.5oz box (used to be 16oz, see above!) contains 14 servings, each containing 120 calories if you don’t include the milk. “Hey, that’s not too bad!” you may be thinking, but hold on. Recommended portion size? 3/4 of a cup. Take your cereal bowl and carefully measure 3/4 of a cup of cereal into it (not heaping!) and tell me the truth - is that how much you pour for yourself? Not me - that wouldn’t feed a hamster. I measured it out and when I have a normal (for me) bowl of cereal I actually am having 4 servings. And when I’m feeling like being really bad I use a bigger bowl that holds 6 servings. Suddenly that meal isn’t looking so good for calories or cost.
4. Cereal Does Not Fill Me Up. Cereal is quick and convenient, but not withstanding the above, it comes with a cost. And for me that cost is being hungry again at 9:30 in the morning! Cereal simply doesn’t do it for me. I need that protein in the morning if I am going to stay satisfied until lunch or at least until a late morning snack. I know people say oatmeal “sticks to your ribs” but it doesn’t stick to mine - even with oatmeal I simply get too hungry, too soon. Which then leads to eating other things I shouldn’t be eating. And this is even if I have my 6 servings belly-buster bowl.

Sorry Jerry!

So that’s why I need to be staying away from cereal. How about you?