FatBloggers.net A little push to lose the tush.

First of all, I want to thank all of you for being a part of this blog that is doing so much good in our world. I think I can say without contradiction that many of us owe a great deal of our success to the FatBloggers. I am truly looking forward to a GREAT 2008!

Now, I don’t know how much campaigning anyone did. I heard that Lady Rose rented an apartment in Ottumwa, Iowa to be closer to the voters. Before I reveal the results, I want you to know that you are all tops in my book…

We had a total of 45 votes in our little poll, 6 from FatBloggers and 39 from guests to our humble corner of the internets.

Los (who hasn’t even posted yet) and Rick - 1%
Yours Truly - 9%
John C - 18%
Lady Rose - 31%

And your FatBlogger of the year and the winner of an official FatBlogger T-Shirt and a prestigious placement in the FatBlogger Hall of Fame ….

Tony with 38% of the vote!

Folks, I am really looking forward to 2008! I hope you are too. We have a couple new members that will keep the site exciting, informative and of course, entertaining.

Now… Bring Tony the finest Wines and Cheeses in the Land!

to Tony and John T. and also congratulations on the goals!!!!  It’s good motivation for me today.  I’ve fallen off of the wagon in a big way the past few weeks, due to a list of excuses as long as your arm.  A lot of stress, depression, etc.  I fed it all.

I was back in the gym today, and walked for 45 minutes and worked up a pretty good sweat.  So far today, I have eaten according to the “Body For Life” plan.

I have to remember that each victory is one step closer to the goal, and each failure is only that.  One failure.  It doesn’t need to continue.

 Back on the horse…….

It was all Christmas all the time at our house this weekend.

We had a visit with Santa, got our Christmas tree, decorated the house and woke up to a winter wonderland on Sunday morning. It was the kind of magical weekend that memories are made of. Naturally I was in a nostalgic mood.

I love Christmas. This month leading up to the holidays is my favorite time of year. I love the music, the lights, the hustle and bustle, the shopping, the crowded malls, the hunt for the perfect gift. I love it all. But mostly I love the time spent with my family and the memories of all those Christmas’ past.

Give me a second to wipe the tear from my eye.

So like I said I was in a nostalgic kind of mood this weekend. My lovely wife and I have been talking a lot about how this will be the girls real first Christmas… at least the first one they will understand. Which got me thinking about the first Christmas I remembered.

As I was thinking about it, I was overwhelmed with memories of my Dad with a mustache. When I was growing up my dad was a dead ringer for Tom Selleck, only like 30 times less cheesy. Even though my Dad hasn’t had a mustache for more than 20-years, all of my Childhood memories feature my dad wearing the “Selleck”. Those first impressions of our parents are hard to change… and I wouldn’t want to.

This gave me another thing to be thankful for this holiday season. My girls Christmas memories will not feature a father with a tummy like a bowl full of jelly. If I can continue to make this healthy lifestyle work (and I will) my girls will never know the fat guy that I was for most of my life. To them I will just be Dad, good, old silly dad.

That is about the greatest gift I could ask for this holiday season.

Now I’m getting misty again.

Tony
12/3: 223.4 lbs.
Goal: 220 lbs.
3.4 lbs. to go

hello everyone!

i know what some of you are thinking right now; “who is this guy named joshua, and where did he come from?” long story short, i had the honor of being asked to come and contribute to this great little corner of the internet.

i have been blogging for roughly nine years now. my most recent endeavor has been on a site called love is the movement, which has gone through a name change, but has been active for about three years now. i only recently (august) came up with the idea to marry the blog with the weight loss journey.

you can check out the blog here. and you can check out the direct link to all the weight loss stuff here.

on to the important stuff. i am twenty-six years old, married, no kids (unless you count a dog and two cats), live in an apartment in northwest ohio, and decided i wanted to start losing weight when i hit 410 on the doctor’s scale. that was in august. since then i have lost fifty seven pounds, and am currently sitting at 353. i have a number of short-term and long-term goals set, those will all be revealed future posts, but for now i’ll tell you that my end goal is to get to 210, a total overall loss of 200 pounds.

it’s going to be a lot of hard work, but i’m glad i’m on this journey with a great group of people, and now even more. it’s great to be here, and i hope someone, somewhere will not only not mind that i do not use capitalization, but may even be able to connect with my weight loss story.

more to come, but until then,

…peace, love, and crunchberries..

Not just anybody.
Won’t somebody help me, help me!

Isn’t that just one of the greatest songs to get stuck in your head? OK, maybe not. But it was a nice way to start my post.

Maybe I was getting cocky? Maybe, this whole ‘lifestyle change’ thing has to weather through ALL the seasons (holidays) of the year? All I know now is that I am not having fun at this right now. I am having a hard time saying ‘no’ and a hard time getting to the gym on a regular basis (2x since Nov. 1). I even tried on new clothes at Sears yesterday in an effort to bust out of the doldrums.

I really liked moving through the first 8 months of 2007. I know that I have around 120 lbs still to go to make my goal. So breaking down right now would be like setting out for Chicago, breaking down around Rawlins, Wyoming and deciding to live there. If you have never been to Rawlins, it is a stinky (really) little town in the middle of nowhere. If it weren’t for I-80, I can’t imagine why the town exists other than to break up the monotony between Laramie and Idaho.

I don’t want to live in Rawlins. I don’t want to be a fat tub o’ goo. I want to get to Chicago and go to a Cubs game!

Help me FatBloggers, you’re my only hope!

So it looks like last weeks 5 pound loss was a fluke. A fluke brought on by a fluke worm!

I just looked up what a fluke worm is …eewwwwww!

So it wasn’t a fluke worm. That was just a clever play on words, but my giant loss last week was definitely the result of my stomach bug and lots of dehydration. My weight jumped back up on Sunday and has been bouncing around all week.

I knew this was going to happen so I am not disappointed. I am still way ahead of schedule to reach my goal. And just having 220 in sight is exciting. I don’t know if I’ll reach my goal by Thanksgiving, but if I were a betting man, I’d bet you a few bucks I’ll make it by the second week in December.

And now for the weigh-in!

223.4 Lbs. That’s what it said on the scale this morning. A gain of 2.6… although I perfer to look at it as a loss of 2.2 from my weigh-in two weeks ago. I’m just that kind of “glass half full” kind of guy. Especially when the glass is half full of a 7 and 7 on the rocks.

Either way, I am extremely happy with the weigh-in. 2.2 is a great loss over the past two weeks, considering I didn’t really watch what I was eating last week.

Marathon not a sprint…marathon not a sprint….

Tony
11/9: 223.4 lbs.
Goal: 220 lbs.
3.4 lbs. to go

Over the last few months I have developed two new habits. These have nothing to do with eating or exercise but they are directly related to the psychology of losing weight.

The first habit started shortly after I started wearing my wedding ring again. Five or six times a day I slide my wedding ring off my finger, just to feel how loose it is. It has gotten to the point were I do it subconsciously while I am talking to people or when I am sitting at my desk writing. I’ll be deep in thought and suddenly realize that my ring is off and twirling around in my other hand.

Having my wedding ring fit again was one of the first major symbolic victories of this journey. Sliding it on and off reassures me of how far I have come.

The other habit has a lot more to do with vanity. I find myself constantly running my had down my stomach to feel how flat it is. It’s another habit that has become subconscious. I do it all the time when I am standing in line or waiting for someone. Hopefully it looks like I am just straightening my shirt and not fondling my bely button.

Has this been the case for anyone else? What are some of the subconscious habits or ticks you have developed as the weight disappears?

Tony
11/6: 220.6 lbs.
Goal: 220 lbs.
.6 lbs. to go

Drug addicts shouldn’t hang out in Opium Dens.

Alcoholics shouldn’t hang out in bars.

Food addicts shouldn’t hang out in gas stations…or leave the house after 10pm….or pretend to be actors.

I had a brief taste of my pre-fatherhood lifestyle last night and it triggered some not so long buried bad habits.

My college roommate was in town filming a movie so I went to hangout on the set as a background actor. Much less glorious then it sounds. This is a no budget production.

I left the house at 10:15pm. Mistake number 1.

On the way I stopped at a Holiday gas station to get a big bottle of water. Mistake number 2.

As I walked passed the frozen treats cooler I couldn’t resist my old friend Mr. Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich. For some reason picking up an Ice Cream sandwich made me decide I also needed some Ho Ho’s.

When I got to the set, a movie theater in South Minneapolis, I was handed a large bucket of popcorn and told to stand around talking in the background for 2 hours. Mistake number 3.

Naturally, I started eating the popcorn. If I hadn’t accidentally dropped the bucket on the floor I am sure I would have finished the whole thing.

I left the “set” around 1:30am with a craving for Wendy’s French Fries, one of my late night staples back when I was doing a lot of theater. Mistake number 4.

Here is the really pathetic thing. I drove around for a half hour, twice going out of my way to find a Wendy’s drive through that was open.

When I couldn’t find an open drive through I got frustrated and returned to the same Holiday gas station, where I purchased a Peanut Butter Crispy Bar and, just for good measure, a package of Hostess Zingers. Mistake number 5!

Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Sandwich 500 Calories / 24 Grams of Fat
Hostess Ho Ho’s 400 Calories / 15 Grams of Fat
Half A Bucket of Movie Theater Popcorn 225 Calories / 11 Grams of Fat
Peanut Butter Crispy Bar 290 Calories / 12 Grams of Fat
Hostess Zingers 440 Calories / 11 Grams of Fat

For a grand total of :
1855 Calories
73 Grams of Fat

Bad! Bad! Bad! I know…but here is the amazing thing. I don’t feel guilty and I don’t feel depressed.

I feel like crap with all that junk sitting in my stomach, but instead of wallowing in self-pity that could send me into a spiral of junk food binging, here is what I thought when I woke up this morning…

“Wow that was stupid! Well it’s out of my system now. I really want to go for a run!”

This is nothing short of a miracle to me. A bender like this would usually send me off the deep end for the next month, but my first instinct is to exercise instead of eat more! This is a big break through.

I am not trying to put a positive spin on last nights pig out. It was a horrible thing to do to my body and a sure sign that my food addiction is alive and well. But…. and this is a big butt, I still feel like I am in control. This slip is not getting the best of me and that has me feeling pretty good this morning. Minus the bloated belly and extreme stomachache.

Tony
10/22: 225.4 lbs.
Goal: 220 lbs.
5.4 lbs. to go

Thanks everybody for your patience over the last day or so.  I believe we have our glitches worked out.  If you’re a regular poster and/or commenter and you run into some problems, please drop me a line at rickscheibner -AT- gmail dot com.

This blog may have a hiccup or two in the next 12-24 hours, so please be patient while we get all of the details worked out.  We won’t be going anywhere, just changing servers and taking care of a few details.  We won’t be off the grid for long.  In the meantime, please enjoy the soothing Muzak we’ve installed for your listening pleasure.