Week 24

PJ Weight: 158.8
Week Loss: -1.2
Cumulative Loss: -32.8


Seth Weight: 174.2
Week Gain: +0.4
Cumulative Loss:  -24.9


First off: A rant

The folks who say "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels" are eating the wrong things.

Losing weight and looking nice and being trim and fit and healthy are all wonderful things.  But I like to eat.  I love it.  I love to eat large quantities of food that is terrible for me.  I revel in it.  Small quantities of delicious but unhealthy foods are a tease, and large quantities of healthy foods are just plain depressing.

I miss eating.

The thought of making a lifelong commitment to constant dieting and exercise - making them a permanent part of my life - makes me sad, almost depressed.  I hate dieting.  I hate exercising.  I like eating.  I like relaxing with a good book.  And while the angel on my shoulder says "If you stay trim and exercise a lot you'll live longer", the fellow on my other shoulder says "If you have to watch what you eat all the time and exercise all the time, what's the point of living?"

So our compromise is this year-long commitment.  It's a good chunk of time.  It's long enough to make a very real difference in our physical well-being, but not an unmanageable amount of time that's too big to get our heads around.  We're hoping that the weight will take some time coming back.  I'm not going to be going out once our year is up and eating a full pound of pasta with bacon and cream sauce for every meal (mmm....carbonara...), but we won't be as strict, and eventually the weight *will* come back.  Maybe we'll say "if our scales are up by over x pounds, we go back on a diet".  Maybe we'll try to follow some kind of maintenance program.  But we'll see.

I just wanted to get that off my chest.  I don't like this.  I've never liked it.  It's very likely that I never WILL like it.
But I'm doing it.
Which brings me to:

Power 90 - Days 1, 2 and 3

We started our exercise program first thing Monday morning.  We're rising an extra hour or so early, going downstairs, and flailing about in front of the little TV we've put down there.

The dogs don't think much of the whole thing.  They came down with us and spent the workouts trying to lick me while I was doing push-ups, and watched us in confusion the rest of the time.

So far, these are my impressions of the Power 90 workouts - Phase I/II

Circuit training - Or "Sculpt" as they call it - This was the first workout we did.  I did it with 3 pound weights, and Seth tried the resistance band that came with the DVD package the first time through.  He found the resistance band somewhat difficult to work with, and possibly too heavy for our current level, so this morning he went with hand weights.  The hand weights seemed much easier to handle for both of us.  I purposefully used light weights, so I could concentrate on trying to learn the exercises and get the forms correct before I start piling on resistance.
The exercise coach Tony is a lot more mellow than I expected him to be.  He's still depressingly chipper, but not nearly as overwhelmingly in-your-face enthusiastic as I was dreading he might be.  I can more or less handle this level of chipper at 6AM, even if Seth & I do snark back at him.  He doesn't seem to mind our snark.
The exercises were straightforward and relatively easy to follow.  You stretch, go through a set of exercises for each muscle group, stretch and then do another set of slightly different exercises for each muscle group, stretch, do a third modified set of exercises, and end.  It took about 40 minutes.

Mostly it made me sore in the legs.  While I can use light hand weights, there's no real way to lessen the impact of lunges on your legs other than to do less of them.


Cardio/Abs - Also known as "Sweat" and "Ab ripper 100".  This was our Day 2 routine.
Again, it wasn't obnoxious.  Well - not as obnoxious as it could have been.  Getting up an hour early to go jump around like an idiot is obnoxious in and of itself.  Tony didn't make it worse.  I found myself doing a whole lot of walking in place while he and his helpers jumped around like loonies.  Something tells me it will be a while before we work our way up to the Phase 3/4 workouts.
There was stretching, a warm up with some yoga moves, and then the main workout consisting of some marching in place, a bunch of jumping jack style exercises, some kickboxing-esque stuff, and some boxing maneuvers.   Then it's down to the floor for 100 crunches at varying degrees of sadism.
Total time - about 40 minutes again.

I'll need a thicker mat for the crunches.  The foam mats we have on our concrete basement floor are fine for most of the exercises we've attempted thus far, but I found the pressure on my back painful and want a bit more cushioning.  I'll see if my old yoga mat will do the trick.  If not, perhaps I'll have to pick up another yoga mat and double-layer them.

The way the program works, you alternate Circuit training and Cardio/Abs every day for 6 days, and rest on the 7th day.  We'll be doing the same workouts until we've progressed enough to move on to the more advanced of the DVD's (phase 3-4).