Darren’s BodyBlog

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=1003854

Check out the progress thread here:

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=1003412

I also added some flexed measurements. In a thread in my honor created by Namtrag! Wow, cool, thanks man!

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=1003762

All I can say is WOW. Even with the holidays, even with the diet cheating. It helped that I rode my bike again on Wednesday though. I did around 15 miles in less than an hour. ~850 calories burned according to both Fitday and my Polar monitor. And did legs that day. Ouch. I did cardio again yesterday for 40 minutes as well. I am back on the Fitday logging. 2007 is going to be the best year yet!

I felt so blah yesterday that I had to skip the workout. I was just too darn tired! I felt better today, particularly after leaving work early. Now I am off until Jan 2!

 Anyway, I went and did legs and some biceps/forearms. Felt pretty good. Better at least!

I have decided to postpone my food journaling in Fitday until after Christmas. It is difficult/impossible to get an accurate measure of things with all of the homemade holiday food around. Not that I am giving up or anything, I am just going to limit my intake of the holiday treats. I surely will have a cookie or two… just not a bunch of them. :)

I am still holding ~199, and I definately do not want to go over 200. I am officially canceling my 195-by-New-Year’s goal. That would mean losing more than 2 lb/wk this week and next. I think that would decrease my strength too much. I have too many things to do while I am off work (12/22 - 1/1), plus I will be working out a lot. I really just want to hold my weight under 200 and keep building muscle. I am even going to buy some 36 pants to have on hand.

I felt really tired yesterday afternoon. I was on a long telecon and I just could not focus. Actually I had to really concentrate to get my thoughts out when I did talk. I think I slurred a little. Maybe that is a warning sign that I need to back off things a bit.

Well I keep hearing ‘you have lost weight’ from people, so my cutting is really working. Even with the holidays! One more week to survive. I am still holding to that goal of 195 by New Year’s! I am 198.4 this morning. I noticed that my 38 pants are a little loose… It would be freakin’ awesome to have to go buy some 36s in January! I’m not counting on that just yet though.

Dang it is hard to stick with cutting over the holidays sometimes. I was doing great until the boss’ party Friday night. I kinda went nuts on the bad stuff. I figured one night wouldn’t kill me. And it didn’t… but it wasn’t a grea weekend either. 201 on Monday morning. Then the tray of baklava showed up in front of me at work. DOH! I did a lot of damage. Fortunately I went into damage control mode after that. Tues morning showed 199.6 again. Only one slipup today… my coworkers bought some chex mix covered with peanut butter, chocolate, and white sugar. I politely refused but they dropped a small plate in front of me anyway. I caved. Upped the cardio this afternoon to counteract… hopefully not too much damage done overall. I am staying under 200 through this holiday season dammit! I am setting myself a new goal of 195 on Jan 1!

Well I saw 199.0 on the scale this morning at 23% bodyfat. I am really finally back to where I was 3 years ago weight wise. My body composition is different though. I was doing a lot of cycling then and not much lifting. My profile picture is from a ride I did around that time. I will get around to posting a new one soon. Since I have been lifting a lot more recently, I think I look better than I did at 199 before. If I can really get back into cycling now, that would really help me tone up and drop some more bodyfat.

The scale said 200.0 this morning! I have not been under 200 since December 2003 when I got down to 199. Before that, I hadn’t seen that number since college. I lost 199 quickly before… I put on some sympathy weight when we found out my wife was pregnant. Then the whole baby care/lack of sleep thing really impacted me. But hey, I hope to see 199 tomorrow. And this time it is going to stick until I decide to put on enough muscle to make it go away again!

This morning I am officially starting a fat loss phase. I weighed in at 203, down 2 pounds. The pleasant surprise was that the scale showed 23% bodyfat, down from 25%. It probably is not very accurate, I think I am going to order some calipers. But hey, I will take it! Extra motivation to get going. I did see more results though, I got into my 38 jeans today. I have been in them off and on in the past, but I am making it stick this time. They are a little snug, but they are on! They will just fit better in the days to come.

 I started logging my food this morning on fitday.com here: http://www.fitday.com/WebFit/PublicJournals.html?Owner=dartol

Last night I sarted working on setting up my new workout program. I am using the ‘Fat Loss’ workout template by Clayton South in his article about designing a workout programs here: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/south10.htm
I already have an Access based workout database that calculates my 1RM for each exercise. I set it up to output Clayton’s fat loss weight values. I’ll post the exercises I have picked later.

Well I did score a deal on Black Friday! I went to the Sports Authority around 12:30 to look at their shoes. They were on 25% off sale for the morning, I didn’t know they ended at 11. Well, I managed to score a pair of Nike Free 7.0 trainer shoes for 25% off! They were originally $85. I missed the crowds and get the deal, how cool is that? They are funky looking, but they feel awesome, like gloves on your feet almost. They are very fliexible. They let your feet flex like going barefoot. That is supposed to strengthen your feet. We’ll see how they work out.