D.Alan’s BodyBlog

Last night was my monthly measurement night and for about the third or fourth straight month in a row, there are no significant changes.  My chest is down a quarter inch this time, but everything else is the same as last month.  I am not surprised at the chest measurement as there is still fat there and on my midsection to lose, and the BF% pinches keep coming down, albeit very slowly.  The BF pinch total is down another mm or so over last week.  Again, slowly but surely.  My pinch total for some time now has been less than my stomach pinch alone was the first time I did a BF pinch.

So, I guess I am officially on a plateau.  I have made steady progress for most of the time I have been at this, starting in late October 2007, until the last few months.  Time to change things up, I suppose, but it’s tough to come up with other things to do when one has only a set of dumbbells.  I can’t do anything involving cables or barbells since I don’t have any of that stuff.  I have slowly upped the weight on some of things that I do, but I try to do it when I can handle the weight w/o sacrificing form, so weight-upping has come very slowly.  Any of you CPTs out there looking for a challenge, PM me and I’ll let you know what I have been doing and maybe you can come up with a new routine that’ll get me making some progress again.

It’s not to say that I haven’t improved in the time I have been at this.  One of the things I have upped the reps on is close-hand pushups for hitting the tris.  When I first started into this seriously it was all I could do to get three sets of 10 reps in, and I even found I note in my exercise log from those early days that "close hand pushups are HARD!"  I can now do three sets of 20 of those, and can probably bump those up a couple more reps each again.  At first it was all I could do to lift 20 lb DBs for alternating bicep curls, now on a good night I can do 10 reps of 25 lbs on the last set!  I’ve previously mentioned being now able to do a sitting leg lift thing where when sitting on the floor you put your hands on either side of you and lift your butt and legs off the floor in a pike or "L" position… I never could have even thought of doing that before I started lifting seriously.  It’s not like all my hard work hasn’t resulted in any improvements.

We’ve been having some summer-like weather here the last few days and I have been outside in the sleeveless shirts… not quite ready to shed the shirt entirely yet!  Still not ripped enough, and probably won’t be this summer as I had hoped all through the winter.  Also my arms don’t look all that great out in the bright sun, despite all my work.  That was a little depressing.  But it’s great to have the good weather around and get outside and do some yard work or whatever.  It also means it’s bicycle season again so I can get some add’l exercise riding the bike on errands and such.

However, I still need to drop some BF and build some muscle so I need to keep liftin’.

I started out the week feeling a little sorry for myself, having been away for a few days and not being about to lift and eating badly, though on my return home my weight wasn’t too far out of whack.  Spent the rest of the week getting back into the routines and eating better and felt a little better, but was still feeling like I am still too chubby, not buff enough, etc.

I took a couple of pix Wednesday evening and a day or two later got comparing them with my earlier photos.  Wow, have I come a long way.  I made up a year’s comparison between April of last year and April of this year which shows the progress I have made.  I posted that and have gotten some nice comments on it.  What really boosted the ego, though, was looking at my earliest photos.  I started doing some basic, I guess you’d call it, lifting back in 2005.  It was nothing serious, though at the time I thought it was.  What I ended up doing was toning up a bit, but the diet was still terrible and I didn’t weigh myself at any point (didn’t have a scale) and I never lost any fat.  I did take monthly photos of my non-progress.  Looking at them now is almost painful to see how big I had gotten and how I was making no gains in the lifting, or what alleged to be lifting, that I was doing.  What’s even sadder is that at the time I thought I was doing well!!  At least I finally found out the right way to go about it.

Anyway, looking at those photos of me then compared to me today really helped to pick me up and give me the oomph to keep at this.  I have made a lot of progress, and it is still continuing.  So, I’ll keep liftin’.

Wow, a couple of weeks that I haven’t posted a blog.  It’s been pretty busy around here, not the least of which was getting ready to go away for a few days over the Easter weekend.

I went and visited friends from college, with whom I spend every Easter.  They are very good friends and when their kids were little they thought the Easter Bunny wouldn’t come to their house if "Uncle DA" wasn’t there.  Great friends, lousy eaters.

I blogged about my visit last year with these folks and nothing has changed.  The wife and hubby are endomorphs with atrocious eating habits.  Wife is terribly opinionated in that everything she does is the "right" way whether it’s child rearing, household management or nutrition and meal planning; no discussion, she’s always right.  An example meal from this weekend?  Hamburgers and popcorn.  Another example meal?  Try no meal because wifey was "still full from the big lunch we had," so therefore no one else was expected to want food.  And there I was, being very used to eating every three hours, having a dinner meal that includes not only some protein but some veggies as well (I guess popcorn is a vegetable, right?).  And forget any working out, just wasn’t gonna happen.

Surprisingly enough, I came through the four-day stint up only about a pound.  I was at 166 Thursday morning before I left and was at 167 this afternoon.  Not bad for living on hamburgers and popcorn and bowls of ice cream, and meal times that were sometimes up to six hours apart.  Sheesh.

And speaking of the weight, I need to do some investigating with some scales.  I have been weighing myself all along with a scale I bought back when I started into the lifting and diet minding, dutifully recording and agonizing over my weight for the last 78 weeks.  The other day I was doing some cleaning in the house and was in my dad’s bathroom and spotted his scale in there, having to move it as I was vacuuming, and for grins I got on his scale.  It read significantly higher than mine!  It was zeroed properly.  What the…?  I took it upstairs and put it next to mine and I tried them both dressed in only my skivvies, which is the way I weigh myself.  His scale was reading ten pounds more than mine.  I pulled out some of my dumbbells and tried them on each scale and they read the same.  Even stranger.  I am wondering if one or both of the scales is non-linear and reads incorrectly with more weight applied.  Now I need to find a third scale for the deciding factor.  Geez.  That will be a major pain if my scale is the one that is wrong, that will mean ALL of my weight data since I started into this is likely no good.

But, no sense in losing sleep over it.  I have gone through something similar with the body fat pinch calipers.  Bottom line: I have lost weight and dropped body fat.  I just don’t have exact numbers on either!!  Oh, and the body fat pinch I took tonight is down yet another 1.5 mm from the previous pinch 10 days ago, so the downward march continues.

Now that I am back home, I am glad to be able to keep liftin’.