señor taco’s travels

Anyone that knows me knows I like cool t-shirts and that I have a pretty
decent collection of them. Well, while perusing href="http://preshrunk.info/">Preshrunk I see that Brandon Barr
had a good idea to tie weight loss to t-shirts, href="http://texturl.net/?p=497">the t-shirt diet.

That’s right. I need some cool new t-shirts, but I don’t think I’ll look
too good in them without dropping a few pounds. So I’ve bookmarked some
favorites that Preshrunk has pointed me to. Every time I drop five pounds
and keep it off for two weeks, I get to buy a t-shirt. If I gain the fiver
back, the shirt goes in the charity pile.

Brandon seems to have less to lose than I do and I can already feel my 2XL
shirts getting more roomy. I’ll wait until I am down to XL or smaller before
I order as I think I have plenty of shirts for now, but I like his idea of
using it as motivation. Of course the sucky thing is I’ll have to attempt to
re-acquire some of the better shirts that I have now. Such is life.

A little while back my friend KP
IM’d me and the conversation went a bit like this:

kp: dude. your face…
me: what?
kp: it skinny
me: where?
kp: look at the diff between nov and
dec. even back then it looks like you were in better shape in dec
than nov

Of course he’s referring to href="http://danimal.org/MeMyFaceAndI/">here. Now, I’m inclined
to disagree with him. I’ve lost a good bit of weight, but I’m not
skinny yet. The same sort of thing happened at a party about a week
and a half ago. A couple of people kept telling me I was skinny and I
had to kindly disagree.

If you look at my current weight I’m still far above my ideal body
weight, but just today my href="http://danimal.org/health/weight-view.png">trend weight passed
under 250 pounds (if only by about a third of a pound). Overall
I’ve lost about
55 pounds with about 50 or so of that since last July.

I still have a good bit to work off and with the rate of loss slowing
lately (although part of that was due to holidays, me slacking a bit,
and eating more while href="http://danimal.org/SenorTacoSnowboarding/">snowboarding
because I expend a lot of energy). I’m still keeping up on the gym
(albeit with some bigger breaks due to soreness from said snow
adventures) and the diet and I will continue to try and get skinny.

However, until that time I’m not skinny and people will be kindly
rebuffed for saying so.

Today was a really good workout day for some reason. I’ve been doing the
exercise bike for a while now and so far I’m down to 260 lbs. (from starting
at 300+ before I changed my diet and about 294 when I started exercising).

I wasn’t feeling really good today though, tired, lethargic, whathaveyou, but
I went over to the gym anyway. It turns out I had my best day on the bike so
far. A stellar (for me at least) 16.7 MPH over the whole 30 minute ride. I
use a program that has peaks of resistance and I crank it up pretty high. I’m
actually pretty happy with that, but I know I won’t be doing that every day
for a while (I generally average about 15 MPH).

I was just feeling good and I ended up doing my first little bit on the
elliptical machine too. That felt weird, it is definitely going to take some
getting used to on the motion, but I’m going to stick with it.

So, for the last 6.5 weeks or so I’ve been running myself on a modified diet.
Add to that 4.5 weeks of being at the gym almost every day. So far that’s
gotten me 20 pounds reduced in weight. I still have quite a ways to go and I
know it won’t be nearly as fast from here out, but I’m happy so far.

Being at the gym has been good. I’ve definitely got more energy in the
afternoon (since I go at lunch time) and I am sleeping a bit better. This
last weekend a friend from New York was out visiting. In addition to him I
was with a bunch of friends that I hadn’t seen in a few weeks. All of them
commented that they could see a difference so that made me feel better.

The only thing I hate so far is that I haven’t yet figured out a weights
schedule to tone up yet, but I still have a ways to go on the weight loss so
doing more cardio is fine. I also need to figure out some play lists for the
iPod. While some artists and albums are hunky dory for working out to a
little mixing it up couldn’t hurt. Maybe one of these evenings I’ll start
with one and then it can grow from there.