The Syndicate

The wife and I got each other way too much candy for each other's Christmas stockings the last two years and I'm pretty sure my metabolism slowed down. On New Year's Day I got on our scale for the first time in many months. I saw a number that I hadn't seen since college and freaked out.

Prior to packing on weight around the holidays, I had been trying to stick to a pretty regimented plan to avoid excess calories but I was only really monitoring breakfast and lunch. I know I won't be able to really drop more weight until I can exercise more but I'm trying to move on from simply eating less to eating better.

This past week, I started replacing half of my cereal with 6 oz of yogurt. I weigh myself on Saturdays, so we'll see if it helped any. I know that yogurt has more protein in it than most breakfast cereals but I compared the Yoplait I've been eating to other brands and found that it's packed with sugar and lighter on protein than most others. Any recommendations on a yogurt brand for me to try?

Also, what do some of you fit people eat to balance fiber and protein? I had been eating some fiber-dense cereals but they also had a fair number of carbs. I'm not what I consider truly overweight but based on my body type, I would consider myself skinny-fat.

Since the beginning of the year, I've managed to drop 10 pounds through tweaking my breakfast habits. It's kind of remarkable how much a small change can make. Now I just need the warm weather to stick around for good so I can get out and pull/push my daughters around our neighborhood more frequently.

Epignosis wrote:I want to buy what you're selling.

I could go for the cheddars component but I'll pass on the bacon. I love food truck food though. Lots of character. I may plan a visit to Canada just to hunt you guys down and buy some grub.

Ricochet wrote:I monitored my weight every day, for a couple of days, and it seems I'm stagnating, but during the day, it ebbs and flows, in a way that hints at sisyphic work. I'm currently gravitating around 86kg (I'm being told by Google that means 189.5 lbs), which, given my height, is technically still a bit overweight. If I have classes (going to school takes a 30-minute walk and another 30min back) or have busy activity in town and/or go to the gym, I shed 1/1.5kg easily (someone told me it's because I get dehydrated). But then during the evening, after drinking my liter of Pepsi and having dinner (which can sometimes be as simple as a salad or salmon), it's all back up.

Ditch the soda from your diet and you'll drop five pounds very quickly.

Nice work. That's similar to what I pulled off through dietary restrictions with no exercise save for the random dance party with the girls and chasing them around the house. How tall are you? My BMI still has me as overweight by a hair.

I only gained 0.4 pounds since Thanksgiving morning. I usually end up overeating at the holidays, so this negligible increase pleases me.

Now I just have to keep the pounds off as we work through all the Christmas cookies we made Black Friday.

I joined a wellness challenge at work for the month of February. Monday and Tuesday I used shoveling and blowing snow as my exercise. Yesterday I took the day off. Tonight I walked around my basement for half an hour. This was my playlist (odd and not my preferred choices, but YouTube did okay):

-Born to Run
-Hocus Pocus
-The Loco-Motion (Grand Funk version)
-Rock Me Amadeus
-The Safety Dance
-Rock the Casbah


If you have any exercise music suggestions, please share! I have a few songs and albums in mind already, but there are three more weeks of this to go!

dunya wrote: ↑Sat Feb 06, 2021 6:49 am oh hey cool, G! how do you feel a week in?

me and @dyachei also started a 30-day fitness challenge where we get in 15+ minutes of workout every day and hold each other accountable that way which is great! today is day 6!

i will share a workout playlist.

This is Day 6 for me as well, but it's also just the 4th day that I will be exercising. The wellness program gave us heart monitors to wear that, when coupled with an app, can show us how many calories we burned and when we were burning fat versus exercising our heart muscle.

Monday and Tuesday I 'cheated' and wore the monitor while shoveling and running the snowblower. We only have to get 150 minutes of recorded activity each week in order to be eligible for a gift card giveaway. I'm going to try to do 30 minutes a day from here on out, but I needed a day off on Wednesday and my knee was bothering me yesterday.

The bonus in all this is that, since it's too cold for me to desire walking outside, I do laps around the basement, which has already made me angry at how cluttered our basement is. I sense some clean-up work coming soon.

My end goal is probably to use this month as a way to get in the habit of exercising so I stick with it after the allure of the gift card raffle is gone.

Today's mix was a bit poppier and sexier than the last one:

-Uptown Funk
-Thrift Shop
-Shake It Off
-All About That Bass
-Timber
-I Gotta Feeling
-Poker Face
-Run Away With Me

35 minutes of walking and mixing it up with freeweights
362 calories burned

Feeling pretty good.

After the first two weeks of doing the wellness challenge, I stepped on the scale to see how much weight I lost. Nope! I gained a few pounds. Hopefully that’s just fat being replaced with muscle or else I’m going to start skipping meals. (Not really, but grrr!)

Aside from shoveling snow on Monday, I haven’t exercised all week. It was a nice three-week experiment, I guess.