And the current day

So now that we've roughly established my long and not-so-loving relationship with fatness, let's a little more precisely discuss what things look like these days.

As of this morning, I'm about a month into my recommitted approach, and I weighed 167.2 lbs (down from 173 at Christmas).

I'm tracking all of my food and exercise at FitDay.com, and I'm using their numbers to estimate my metabolic rate and exercise burn (but sanity checking them with my numbers from my watch and the RMR test I had done at the gym). I'm using their numbers instead of my more personalized ones because they are more conservative -- we'll see how that goes.

I'm shooting for an 860-ish calorie restriction per day to achieve a 1.5 lb - 2 lb weight loss goal per week. What this typically looks like is eating 1600-1700 calories per day, and exercising about 2 hours a day.

My exercise schedule currently looks like this:

Monday: 60 min zone 1-2* cardio, 60 min pilates class
Tuesday: 60 min athletic yoga, 60 min zone 1-2 cardio
Wednesday: 60 min zone 1-2 cardio, 60 min pilates class
Thursday: 60 min zone 1-2 cardio, 30 min strength training, 60 min Fluid Strength class
Friday: 60 min Fluid Strength class, 30 min zone 1-2 cardio, 60 min private pilates instruction
Saturday: 60 min power vinyasa yoga (or off)
Sunday: 60 min zone 1-2 cardio, 30 min strength training (or off)

*I'll discuss the zone business in a later post.

This schedule looks a lot different than the last year, where most of my cardio came in the form of zones 3-4-5 running -- I ran 5 half-marathons in 2009, the first of which in January, and the last in December. But because running was apparently not effective for me for weight control, I'm revising the approach.

It seems like a lot of exercise -- and it is -- but given that I've worked up to it over the course of the past 18 months or so, it's really quite enjoyable.