Exercising

I took my usual approach to the Dr. Z’s suggested exercise requirements – I made an Excel spreadsheet.  With the Koko website I can information about the calories I have burned during every workout session.  Because the numbers I was seeing on the treadmill seemed awfully low to me, today I wore my POLAR heart rate monitor and watch.  This tracked my heart rate and estimated calories burned.  It was WAY higher than what the machines (Precor) indicated today.  So, for now, I’ll assume the real number is in the middle somewhere.  In any case, I am probably close to or exceeding what Dr. Z suggested.  I also know that many obese people starting out on this sort of diet are not coming anywhere near those numbers – so I feel like I am off to a pretty decent start.

Tonight I took 2 of my kids to the movies.  The minute I walked in the door of the theater and smelled the popcorn I knew I was going to be in trouble.  Popcorn (and especially movie theater popcorn) is easily on my list of top 5 favorite foods.  I bought the kids their usual popcorn, drinks, etc. and after we sat down, I pulled out my Optifast bar and ate that.  I thought the temptation would be much worse but the bar filled me up so much I really didn’t care about the popcorn.  I felt pretty darn good about that.

I could take no more of the inconsistent bathroom scale readings so last night I ordered a new one from Amazon.  Through the miracle of Amazon Prime, my new scale arrived this afternoon before 2pm.  Amazing!  This one seems to be extremely consistent (although a bit higher than then other one, which I don’t enjoy).  At least I can trust the numbers a bit more if they drift up or down.  I have been jumping on and off it all day and have been a little depressed by the lack of downward motion.  The weight flew off every day during the first week but I sense that things will be much slower now.  Gotta keep my head up!