Fat Guy Skinny Wallet

Hey guys, when I wrote to you last time during my weigh in I told you that I gained 13.4 pounds in the month of April. I also told you that I had a plan to try to overcome some of the physical things that I’d been dealing with lately. So even though I still don’t have any drive or motivation, I know that my success is going to be based on how well I execute this plan in spite of the lack of motivation.

There are 3 major areas that have been affected by our recent health problems, and I plan to address all 3 with small changes:

Sleep

I have not been able to sleep for more than a few hours straight each night over the past two months. There are a lot of things going on, and pretty much all of them have been physical. I’ve had pain in my shoulder off and on that has kept me awake, and even when I fall asleep, sometimes the pain wakes me up. Other times, it’s not pain but it’s my arms and sometimes my legs falling asleep and the discomfort waking me up.

In order to combat this I plan to take Ambien, which my doctor prescribed, each night where I have enough time to allow it to work (at least 8 hours before I need to wake up) and get out of my system by the morning. I will also continue to take melatonin on some nights (not when I take the Ambien, of course) to see if that works as well, since it is a more natural substance.

I also plan to buy a new pillow and to try to do even more natural methods to try to help me sleep.

Exercise

The major problem with my exercise has been the fact that waking up so late does not give me the time that I need in the morning to do my workout. So because of this I’m only able to get in my 3 weightlifting sessions each week and nothing else.

I am actually doing my weightlifting in the evenings when I come home from work. Since I love lifting weights, it has been very easy for me – the desire to get stronger has been enough to overcome my current physical and mental limitations. But I don’t have the same love for running or the cardio that I’ve been doing, so the push to do it in the evening and destroy my schedule isn’t there.

Also, when I workout in the morning my evening schedules are extremely busy as it is, so adding workouts to the evening just throws off everything that I have planned.

What I plan to do here is to try to go back to some of the basic workouts that I did when I first started losing weight – high-intensity interval training is something that I can do in a short period of time that will provide lots of benefits and hopefully will give me a spark to continue.

I’m also hoping that my sleep is regulated so I can go back to my normal schedule, waking up early and being able to do cardio five times a week.

Food

The biggest problem with food is that I don’t have time to prepare healthy meals made from whole foods; and because of my wife’s health, she doesn’t always have the ability. This has caused us to eat out for many meals over the last six weeks or so,  because we simply didn’t have time to buy various groceries to make meals from scratch.

In order to rectify this problem we bought a bunch of groceries recently, where much of the work and preparation has been done for us. We actually went to the grocery store already (as well as getting a delivery from Peapod) and I’m going to link to a couple of videos that we made about trip.

As you can see we purchased TV dinners that are relatively healthy, we purchased lunch meat, bread, brown rice that we can steam in a microwave, and many other things that only take a few minutes to prepare and are a relatively healthy. Because of this we no longer have to eat out when my wife isn’t physically able to cook and I have time constraints.

It should also carry over to where I can take healthy snacks that don’t need a lot of preparation.

I know that eating this way isn’t ideal since these foods are somewhat processed, and probably have chemicals in them to help them be preserved on the shelf. However, it is much better than eating 12-1500 calorie takeout meals when we don’t have the time or energy to prepare things at home.

Also consider the fact that buying groceries is a whole lot cheaper than buying meals from different restaurants each night. Remember we are in a fight to pay off debt, so we can’t afford to have our combined grocery and dining out budget increase.

So hopefully making these changes will allow me to get back on track and if I just execute this plan, I should be able to lose the weight that I put on last month, and get back on the right track with being healthier. Even though what we are doing isn’t ideal or optimal, I believe that it gives us the best chance, given our present situation, to be healthy physically, mentally and financially.

Changing My Calories

You may remember that a little while ago I wrote about the fact that I planned on increasing my calories. I based the number of calories that I was going to take per day on the fact that I would do weight training three days a week and cardio five days a week. Unfortunately, since I have only been able to get in my weight training three days a week, and I have not been able to do any cardio (except for the ones that I get in), I have probably been taking in way too many calories for amount of activity that I have been doing lately.

So I have gone back to the calorie calculator and figure out how many calories I should burn per day if I’m only doing weight training three days a week and no other extra activity. If I find myself consistently doing cardio then I will readjust the amount of calories that I am taking in. However, if I continue to miss my cardio I will already be taking in the correct amount of calories for my current activity level.

I believe that by changing the types of food that I’m eating, eating more foods that I can track easily (even if they are prepared), and altering the amount of calories that I’m taking in per day, I can begin to reverse my weight gain and  can move back in the right direction again.

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