Public Declaration

Ok, I’ve been tagged by my buddy Brip Blap to publicly declare a goal and hopefully by making it public I will be able to stick to it. So even though he conveniently didn’t make a declaration himself :), here’s mine…

Lose 10 pounds!

This isn’t a difficult goal since I’ve done it before however I’d like to be able to lose the weight (and possibly more) and keep it off.

Some history

In July of last year I hit a personal best weight of 201 pounds (I’d guess my ideal weight is 165 pounds) so I started watching what I eat/drink and managed to get down to about 182 by April of this year. Unfortunately over the last six months my weight has crept back up to 192 which is not good. So the goal is to get back to 182 and stay there.

How will I do it?

If it worked once then it will work again…these are some of the things for me to focus on:

Beer – I love beer. In my perfect dream world I would spend every night on the couch watching bad movies and my favourite sports teams (Leafs & Bills) and drink beer. The problems with beer are that it’s not an overly healthy food, when I drink it I tend to stay up too late and get hungry and eat everything in sight, and lastly if I have too many then I’ll be tired/hungover the next day and will be more inclined to eat crap foods instead of healthy foods.

Action Item #1: Drink less beer.

Diet – I’m pretty partial to eating healthy foods such as salads however I do like to eat a lot of unhealthy foods in unhealthy quantities. I also eat a lot of carbs for which I’ll blame my wife who is addicted to them 🙂

Action Item #2: Concentrate on eating better – less fat, less carbs, less quantity.

Exercise – I do stay pretty active but clearly more needs to be done. For the last six months I have been riding my bike to work everyday (20 minute ride), I play hockey once a week and I usually go roller blading for about 40 minutes once or twice a week. This may sound good but in my younger days I used to be an exercise fanatic. While I don’t think I can ever get to the fitness levels I had 10 years ago, I can do a lot better. I will also have to make up for the fact that I won’t be able to ride my bike and roller blade much longer due to the weather.

I hate to blame my lack of fitness on age because at my age (39) there are guys playing pro hockey and climbing mountains so clearly I’m not “too old”. My theory as to why it is harder to exercise as we get older is because of lifestyle. When I was younger and didn’t have a family and not many obligations, I had plenty of time and opportunities to exercise. For example in a one week period I might have had 15 opportunities to exercise – so even if I only took advantage of six of those opportunities, that was still quite a bit of exercise. Now I might only have five opportunities to get exercise a week so if I only take advantage of two of those times, then that’s not very much exercise.

Action item #3 – Increase exercise by going jogging once a week. This might have to increase once my bike riding & roller blading stops.

So that’s my public declaration – I’m not going to tag anyone else since I think Brip Blap already tagged half the internet 🙂 but I’ll leave it up to anyone reading to carry it on if they wish.