30 Pounds Done, For Good

STRENGTH TRAINING, HERE I COME

I haven’t found any running shoes yet but I did buy 5 lb weights so I can do my entire upper body strength training routine! Woohoo!  I had the other weights, but didn’t have a good lower weight to do shoulder exercises.  So now I can do it all!  Hopefully this will actually make me more apt to do it, considering I’ve only done an upper body workout once in the last two weeks.  Already I’ve let my strength training fall away!   But really I throw in pushups and tricep dips and squats and other body weight exercises into my day all the time, I just don’t count them as formal exercise or list them in my workouts.  I’m good about making sure my muscles get used, even if it’s just a few exercises here and there.  I’m kind of excited to get back into a real workout with weights so I can make sure I get all the muscles into the action!

Today is the first day of my week, so I plan on knocking out both upper and lower body strength.  An hour at most for a full body workout sounds pretty exciting to me. I can’t wait to go get it done!

30 POUNDS GONE

With yesterday’s weigh in I hit, well actually I flew past the 30 pounds lost mark.  And today I’m trying to think about what this actually means so that I can more fully appreciate what I’ve done for myself.

30 pounds gone means I’ve completely erased the damage I did to myself last year.  It means I’ve eliminated a bunch of health risks.  It means I’ve pushed myself closer to my end goals.  It means I’m healthier now.  It means I’m fitter.  It means I’m able to do more than I was when I was carrying around 30 extra pounds.  It means a lot of things.

It means I’ve lost 10 Crisco cans.

Um, what?

According to Barb, who responded to my “Hey I’ve lost 30 pounds” tweet, I’ve lost the equivalent of over 10 cans of Crisco, since big canisters weigh 3 pounds.  I found this reply hilariously entertaining.

But then I started thinking about how much 30 pounds really is.  I remember the last time I did chest press exercises with 15 pound weights in each hand.  Before I started I let both weights rest on my chest because they were to heavy to hold up in the air waiting to start.  I remember the pressure of those weights and how it felt like my body was weighed down and trapped.  Now I think about that feeling and realize it was on my body.  I was carrying around that burden every day, all day.  Though I was managing it well enough, I was never free from the extra pressure and pain that weight caused my body.

I tried to imagine carrying those 15 lb weights around with me everywhere I went.  I know I would quickly grow tired, have pain when I shouldn’t, and have a harder time doing things than I would if I didn’t have to carry them around. So I am not picking those weights up again.  I’m not regaining what I’ve lost.  My body doesn’t want it and I don’t want it either.

I’m 30 pounds down, for good.

1. How I Lost 25 Pounds In 20 Minutes
2. Ask Mary Anything: Measurements Edition
3. Loving Exercise Again
4. Healthy Me Challenge 2009
5. Hiking in Vermont!!

Tagged as: strength training, Weight Loss