Beautiful Life of Zig Zag Zoom

I am still plugging away at my weight loss. Walking has now become my favorite form of exercise and I try to do at least five miles a day at least five days a week. I am still using my FitBit and tracking my calories in and out and how many steps I do each day. I am trying to burn 3000 calories and eating 2000 calories a day. This should give me an average loss of two pounds of fat a week. So you are wondering, how well am I doing?

I have loss 33.5 five pounds since the beginning of January. It may be a little more but I did not weigh the first day I started. That is about 18 weeks which comes out to 1.86 pounds a weeks. This is a good safe weight loss and I am feeling good.

Here are the goods and not so goods. I was eating extremely clean when I first started. This is not easy and I have started to slip a little. I am not sure it is possible for me to always eat clean but I try to eat great as much as possible. I do eat pizza but only if I fit in my calories. I do eat McDonald’s once in a while but I eat a happy meal which now included a reduced size fry and apples. I do drink my sweet teas but I use a higher reduced mix of sweet to unsweetened tea. These do not seem to affect me as much as when I use to eat all crap. It makes it easier to keep up with a reduce eating plan without getting bored.

Reality is, most of us are fat due to the fact that we eat bad. It was easy short term to shut off all the bad. If I stayed that clean, I would have fell off the wagon. Instead, I eat good most of the time, I eat a really bad cheat meal once a week, and I eat smaller portions of things I want as long as they are with in my calorie range and I eat good the rest of the day. This has kept me and my wife on our eating plan. This combined with exercise has allowed Karen and I both to lose over 30 pounds and we are still losing each week.

No plan is perfect and you have to adjust it to fit your needs. Good luck to everyone on the same path and please share your own successes by leaving a comment.

Guest written by our friend Mason Abbott

I have been keeping track of my “bathing suit” diet this year on-line using myClear Internet connection. I found this great website that was suggested by Self Magazine that for a small fee would help you come up with a free weight program, help you track your weight, and also help you track your measurements and what you ate. This is exactly what I needed to be more motivated to get healthy. I have never been good at sticking to an exercise plan and Lord knows that if I see a cookie in the kitchen, I just can’t forget about it. Having this website e-mail you your daily work out plan is really helpful. It mixes up your weight and cardio routines so that you don’t get totally bored when you are working out. I have really enjoyed the different free weight routines because I really like to feel like I have long and lean muscle. The other thing that is good is that I can keep track of what I do and eat by recording it in a journal. It holds me more personally accountable and I get a better idea of my real exercise and eating habits. So far I am down five pounds!

Cutting calories is one of the main ways to lose calories. However, if you have a calorie deficit for too long, you start to play havoc with your metabolism. This can cause a slowdown in weight loss or worse, it could cause a plateau.

Your body is a well defined machine and has the ability to adjust to any situation. As your eating slows down, your body adjusts to the calorie deficit and slows down your metabolism. As this happens, you require less calories to maintain weight and the only way to lose weight is to eat less or burn more. I guess you are stuck right? Wrong, there is solution.

Your body is very smart but it can be tricked. Continuing for long periods of low calories causes problems but that can be adjusted. This is where a cheat meal comes into a mix. Once a week, you should go out and forget everything and have a meal of your favorite foods. This has twofold advantages. One, it tricks your body into thinking you have started eating more calories so it stops the metabolism slowdown. The second advantage is psychological. It allows you a little fun foods that you normally would not eat on a healthy diet. This gives you a little boost in the mood and keeps you focus on the rest of the week.

Cheating is not a way to go through life. However, when trying to lose weight, a once a week carefully planned cheat meal is a great way to win the battle and lose the weight.

Feel free to share your weight loss story and weight loss tips by leaving a comment below.

If you always have excuses not to have fun, life can be boring. You can see above that I try to enjoy life. The local Bob Evans had kid’s night and had a great face painter there. With the encouragement (or dare) of my wife and the waitress, I had my face painted to match my shirt. Who doesn’t love Oscar the grouch?

Just a lesson in seizing the moment and stopping to enjoy this beautiful life. If you always worry what others will think, you will never take the next step. That was a couple weeks ago at 15 pounds down, more to lose but getting closer to the goal.

When you have been overweight a long time, you often just do not know where to start. The key is to start where you are at. Never exercised before? Do not know how to eat healthy?

First thing is you need to eat healthy and do exercise for successful weight (fat) loss. Exercising is not scary, if you can walk, you can exercise. No matter how much you weigh or how inactive you have been, you can start where you are at. A walk down the driveway or just walking around the house can get you started. Try to start with ten minutes of walking and build up to 30-45 mins a day. Take it slow but not too slow.

Now that you have started with exercise, you need to look at your food. Try to eat as close to nature as possible. Lean meat, veggies, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, fruits, low fat dairy, and eggs. Remember, the more processed the food, the more you need to avoid it. When eating, you should always mix a lean protein with a healthy carbohydrate and a little fat. You should always a protein with every snack or meal.

You should eat every 3-4 hours throughout the day. You should also track your calories, all of them. This includes nibbles, condiments, and bite size snacks. Be sure to know how much you can eat and adjust as you lose weight. There are tons of calculators online that can figure out basal metabolic rate. This is the amount of calories you need each day to live. The calculator can take that number and multiply by your activity level to let you know what you should eat each day in order to maintain your weight. From that number you figure out how much to deduct depending on your goal. Remember you should aim for 1.5 to 2 pounds a week.

To lose one pound, you need a deficit of 3500 or 500 calories per day. The more exercise you do, the more calories you have to eat. Many diets talk about cutting calories super low, this is not only healthy, it can cause you not to lose weight at all. The reason is, it slows your metabolism and your body burns less. That is the main reason people lose weight only to gain it back. Make sure you eat enough to lose weight but not slow your metabolism.

This advice should get you started and more posts will follow. Need help or advice on fat loss, feel free to leave a question and I will do my best to answer it. Thanks for reading and remember it is a beautiful life full of zig zag zoom!

It is no big secret that many Americans are between overweight and obese. It is a scary trend that has caused many to look in the mirror and wonder how they got so fat. That is a good question and one worth looking at.

The first thing to consider is how much exercise and movement are you getting each day. For me, the answer was not much.  I walked a lot at work but not much beyond that. I use to exercise until life got in the way. I even got down in my ideal weight class a few times only to gain again when I slowed down. I made an excuse that I did not have time as I sit on the couch watching hours of television or playing games on the iPad or computer. I deserved my relaxing time right?

The second thing to consider is what you are putting into your body. For me and my wife, it was a lot of processed boxed foods along with many trips to McDonald’s and other eating out places. We had summers off and it was nothing to run to McDonald’s and eat a McDouble and a small fry and a for me a large Sweet Tea at 10:00PM. Just a quick late night snack, no big deal right?

Let’s take a look at that snack. The sandwich carries 390 calories , 19 grams of fat, and even a gram of trans fat. The fries carry 230 calories and  11 grams of fat. The sweet tea, carries 280 calories. I normally drank at least two but did get where I started mixing half and half sweet and unsweet. That one little snack cost me 900 calories and that was on top of the rest of my day. It was cheap, just $3.00 but cost me much more in the health factor.

Before you go jumping on the let’s ban McDonald’s wagon, they did not cause you to be fat. In defense of them, they now clearly mark their nutrition on the package for most stuff and the rest can be found on their website. They just sell the stuff, we buy it and eat it. It is our own fault not theirs. Besides, they are not the only problem when eating out.

Let’s examine TGI Fridays. My favorite thing there was buying the $12.99 meal deal which includes an appetizer, entree, and desert. I always had the pot-stickers for 780 calories and 42 grams of fat. For the entree, I had  Parmesan-Crusted Chicken for 860 calories and 54 grams of fat. For desert (I do love desert), I had Vanilla Bean Cheesecake for 980 calories and 61 grams of fat. The grand total 2620 calories and 157 grams of fat. Holy shit! Excuse my language but those numbers are scary and they did not even include the side dish of tortellini which was not listed on TGI Fridays website so I did not know the nutrition numbers.

Looking at these numbers made me wonder if I could eat out again. The truth, yes I can. The first thing you need to do is visit the website of the place you are going before you go. There will be more in a future post on eating out in fast food places and other eating establishments.

How many of you eat meals like I did? How many times a week do you do it? How much processed foods do you eat? How many sodas do you drink? Add them all up and the numbers will scare you or at least they should.

I was over 50 pounds overweight and looked in the mirror and asked “How did you get so fat?” I have my answer and I am working on correcting it. I could whine and cry and say it is McDonald’s fault. I could say TGI Fridays made me fat, it is their fault. Neither them or anyone else forced the food in my mouth. No one made me stop exercising. I did not get fat because of others, it was all my own doing and it is up to me to fix it.

Are you willing to look in the mirror and ask the same thing? Are you willing to get up and start moving? Are you willing to do what it takes and commit to it? There is no one else to blame, no magic pill, no instant fix, it is all up to and about you. Get up get moving, eat better and get healthy. If you are on the road of recovery, please share your experience and advice in the comment box.

With this post written, it is a cardio day so I am off to do my 90 minutes of cardio. Good luck on the path to good health.

First off, there are tons of reviews for the FitBit on the Internet. What makes my review any different? This review is from my personal use. It was not influenced by any outside source or any personal or financial gain.

I ordered my Fitbit Ultra from Amazon and received it on February 13, 2012. It cost me $93 but that was on sale most times it runes $99.95 everywhere. I have worn it everyday for every part of the days with the exception of showers (it is not waterproof). I even wear it during sleep time because it tracks you sleep and how often you wake up.

First let’s start with the main feature. It tracks your calories burned depending on how many steps (walking and running) you take and how active you are. It does track stairs and hills to see how many floors you take. To do this, you need to enter your weight, height and any other measurements you choice to enter in the website. I have found that the burn is not perfect but so close that it gives you a good overview of how you are doing for the day. It is a great motivator to get you moving.

Some activities it does not count correctly but you can add in the website are weight lifting, swimming, elliptical, house cleaning when not moving much, and a few others. When you do enter those activities, it corrects the calories for that time to reflect the activity you are doing. I find that I do not have to add much yet but may have to when I start swimming in the summer (again not waterproof).

The second cool feature is you can add everything you eat in the website software and it will show how much you eat and how much you should eat. One confusion and I say negative in this feature is that when you are more active early in the day, your allowed calories increase to reflect the chance that you are going to be that active all day. If you go by that, it would be easy to overeat. If you do not understand calories in and calories out, this could be a problem.

You can set a goal of maintaining, losing 1.5 or losing 2 pounds. When you do that, the website figures how much you can eat starting at doing nothing much all day. As stated above, it increases as you activity increases. I like this feature but again as stated above, I need to figure my own calories required per day to loose the weight I want to make sure I do not overeat.

The FitBit itself is very small and like a pedometer, it tracks the steps you take. Unlike a pedometer, it counts stairs and hills, and it figures your burn rate. This information is synced wireless to a little USB charger connected to your computer. The FitBit Ultra also has a display that you can check anytime even if you are nowhere near your computer. It also stores all your information for seven days just in case you are away for a few days.

You may or may not have seen the FitBit, it looks like a small clip and it attaches easily to a waistband or for females a bra. The package also comes with a belt clip that the FitBit slides into. There is also a wristband to wear while sleeping. This is very comfortable and does not affect sleep. Since the FitBit is so small and light, you do not even notice you are wearing it. The picture above is the FitBit attached to my sweat pants.

The FitBit Ultra is a great tool in weight loss. It keeps you motivated to do more. My wife and I both have one and we find ourselves up and moving while watching TV to get those extra steps into our day. We compete with ourselves and with friends to get fit. The free website awards you badges at different levels of steps, floors, and activity level. You can set your own goals to achieve better than you have ever done. If you use all the features, this will help keep you on track to your weight loss goal.

Do you need the FitBit Ultra to lose weight? No, there are free websites to track food intake, look up activities calorie burned,and any number of tools to track steps. However, I have found no tool so user friendly, easy to wear, and motivating. So far, I have loss an average of 1.5 pounds a week and I can look at my FitBit to see if I need to up my activity each day. In my opinion, the $100 price tag is a small price to pay to have all this from one simple little clip.

Is it perfect, 100% accurate? No technology can make that claim. However, in comparing it to other tools, it is much better and accurate enough to give you a good overall view of your fitness day.

If you have a FitBit, please share your opinion, or feel free to ask any questions in the comment box below. For all those trying to get healthy, good luck and keep on moving!

I have researched many articles, books, websites, magazines, and more on weight loss. The concluding result. Weight loss takes hard work, dedication, and  is a lengthy process. Many of you have or are now struggling with weight issues. You have tried diet after diet only to fail and gain it all back. The truth is, no one diet plan works for everyone and most do not work at all.

First goal of any weight loss should be to maintain lean body mass (aka muscle) and get rid of the fat. By doing this, you get healthier not just smaller. With this in mind, rapid weight loss does not work. It took several years to put on the weight, it takes a long time to take it off. How long? It depends on how much you have to lose. You should lose between 1.5 and 2 pounds a week to lose fat. Any faster and you start to lose lean body mass too. If you have 100 pounds to lose, that equals out to 50 -67 weeks to lose the fat. Wow, that is a long time right?

Think of it this way, how much more fun years will you have if you lose that weight? One or even two years is nothing in the scheme of what you will regain if you lose the weight. If you are over a hundred pounds over weight, you can lose a little faster, maybe 3 to 4 pounds a week for a while. However, if you are like me, you also want to look good naked. Nothing worse than losing 100 pounds and still scared for anyone to see your body. Men, you know you want to go shirtless and women, you know you want to wear the sexy little outfit. That is why the goal is to lose slowly over time.

Good luck and let me know how you are doing.

I tried weight loss diets before and lost weight but it all came back. I have decided to really try to change my life style. The beginning of the year, I joined the YMCA and Karen and I have decided to eat at home a majority of the time. Real health comes from long term and not quick fixes.

I have stuck now for a little over a month with going to the gym 5-6 days a week. The YMCA has a mileage system that tracks how many miles you perform. For cardio, it goes by the machine and for weight lighting you get 1.5 miles per hour of strength training. I have been averaging about 25- 30 miles a week for over a month. I feel great and though I am extremely busy, I look forward to going to the gym everyday.

As far as diet, we are just trying to eat 90% healthy and cutting out the fried and overly processed foods. I have upped my protein which includes my fresh eggs every morning for breakfast. We have one anything goes meal a week and otherwise, we try to eat as healthy as possible.

I have lost about 10.5 pounds since January 3rd but I have gained a bit of muscle mass so I rely very little on the scale number. I have about 35 or so pounds to go but if i keep gaining muscles, that number may change.

Anyone else trying to get healthy? What are you doing?

I did my weekly weigh in today and I am down another pound. This is good considering I am still restricted from exercise due to my back injury. The back is getting better and I am hoping to soon be able to return to exercise. Of course, Karen is ready for me to return to my normal chores. She is getting tired of taking care of the chickens.

I am still struggling with getting in my vegetables and fruits each day. Life is so busy that it is hard to fit them in. I am starting to drink the V-8 fruit and vegetable juice to try and help. Most diets say you should not drink most of your calories. However, the juice has to help some for vitamins and such.

I am still waiting to hear from others who are trying to lose weight. Am I the only fat man out there? Leave some comments about your own struggle to lose weight!

New weight 198.5 lbs