Scientist mode

As I said a couple posts ago, I was finally fed up with my weight gain and it was time to get serious about it. The thing that was worked for me the best (during my sub 190 weight) has been calorie tracking, using fitday.com.

I keep talking about how I plan on finding what my daily calorie intake should be given the amount of exercise I am doing, but then never follow up with that. Well I’ve setup a system that should make it simple for me to finally figure this out. Of course once I got this going, I added some other stuff as well.

Using my calendar program, I’ve created a new calendar for each of the following items.

•Goal Weight

•Actual Weight

•Calories

•Completed Workouts

•Injuries & Illness

•Hours of Sleep

Goal Weight: My goal is to lose at least a pound a week. It will likely be more than that to start and then become closer to a pound or less as my weight drops. I now have a number to hit every Sunday all the way into the beginning of April. I don’t know what the goal weight is yet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.

Actual Weight: Every day I’m on the scale. Sometimes I think this can be a bad thing. Right now is not one of those times. I’m heavy enough right now that I know the numbers will be dropping and it will be positive reinforcement.

Calories: I’m entering my calories, along with fat, carbs and protein grams. A simple copy and paste from the fitday website. Long term, this along with current weight is going to show me what my intake should be to maintain certain weights.

Completed Workouts: I list my workouts along with a note saying whether I felt that I was properly fueled to complete the workout.

Injuries & Illness: I seem to have enough aches and pains that I lose track of them. This will be interesting to look at if I’m able to track for an entire year. On a shorter term, I’m hoping it will help show me what workouts cause me the most grief so I can try and adjust my schedule to better recover from them.

Hours of Sleep: I have a feeling I think I get more sleep than I actually do. I’m sure this number plays a part in how good my workouts are.

I also think that when I don’t sleep enough, I want to eat more simple carbs to energize myself, or more calories in general.

Then there is the recovery aspect of sleep to keep injuries away not to mention illness.

I’m not sure I’ll be adding in the time that I sleep on the train, I’m not sure that’s quality sleep. I will make a note of when I do sleep on the train as I think it is one of the easiest indicators that I’m not getting enough sleep.

I’ve considered keeping track of the actual workout time but haven’t done that yet.

I’ve thought of tracking the expenses as well

Then of course I could get all of this info into an excel spreadsheet to keep track of totals for me. I doubt I’m going to do any of those things. I don’t think either of those are motivational long term.

The Calendar program on my computer definitely makes this easy. I can easily show/hide all of those categories however I want. I think I should be able to publish this so anyone can have access to it as well. (I won’t bore you with that). It is a project I’m working on at work tho’. At least there, the information being shared is important to more than the person making the calendar.

I’m a week into this plan by the way. I dropped 2.5 pounds the first week. It’s always nice to get ahead of the curve quickly. Now I need to bring the training back on line. I did make it to the pool twice and we biked for 90 minutes Sunday. I’m really looking forward to getting back in shape.