To train or not to train

Weight: 260.8
BMI: 44.76

The weigh in is happy (17.2 lbs lost! 6.19% of starting bodyweight and 2.95 points of BMI gone!) but not what I want to talk about today.

So, when I started losing weight, I started comparing gyms to figure out which would be a good fit for me. I sort of centered on Results because it was close and came up pretty often when I googled "Best Gym in DC." Still, at over $100 a month plus a $100 joining fee, I wasn't really certain if I was willing to spend that much.

Then, essentially the day after I'd settled on trying to go to Results for a one day free pass, I got a company wide email that we were considering a corporate membership there and that anyone who was interested should write back. I did, and I got 4 free passes to check it out.

I used them before San Diego. While I was there, the corporate membership deal got finalized. The Saturday after I got back, I went in and signed up for my reduced corporate $65 a month (and no joining fee!) membership. Since then I've used the gym every day but Monday, putting in a solid 40-60 minutes on the elliptical machine. I've been too scared to do any of the classes yet, but I'm on the edge of trying the spinning class or yoga fundamentals. They've got a Zumba class, too, which I kind of want to try solely on the basis of the praise I've read over at Learning to Be Less.

The point I'm trying to get to is that, as a new member, I'm entitled to a free personal training session. I've got mine scheduled for next Saturday (the 15th). I want to sort of dedicate the session to figuring out what I should be doing in terms of weight lifting, since I know it's important and I should be doing it, I just don't really know how. (There are also "floor trainers" whom I'm told I can ask how any of the machines work, but I'd rather just wait till the training session.)

The question is, should I invest in a personal trainer beyond the free session?

As of this point, I'm rather torn on if it's worth the money. (It would be $625 for 10 sessions, $1200 for 20. If I did get a trainer I think I'd set it up so I only met with him once a week, maybe twice.)

I recently opened up a Roth IRA for the first time. I put $3000 in, the minimum over at Vanguard where I opened my account. (Side note: if you're not saving for retirement, you should be! The younger you are the easier it is. I particularly like Roth IRA's because you can always withdraw your contributions at any time, no penalty, and can withdraw up to $10,000 in earnings for a first house or in case of hardship. You use after tax money to open the account, and then it grows tax free and you pay no taxes when you use it down the road. For more on why Roth IRAs are the awesomest awesome that ever was awesome, check out this blog post.) I'd saved up a bit particularly for this, but I did dip a bit into my general savings/emergency fund. There's a maximum contribution of $5000/year for people below the age of 50, and I'd like to put that much in before the end of the year. I think the market is cheaper than it will be for a long time, plus compounding generally favors investing as soon as you can. So, one thing I'd like to do this year is max out my retirement account.

Since the end of high school, I've always had this wild dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. The spring of my sophomore year in college, I took the written exam while I was studying abroad in Paris. (It's offered in tons of places in the US, too, but because I was out of the country I got to take it at the US Embassy there, which was gorgeous.) I passed it and got invited to the Oral Assessment, which I failed. And we're not talking a close failure either: I bombed. It was a mess. I hadn't been able to sleep the night before, and I just stumbled over everything and it was all kinds of terrible. I've been thinking of trying again. As part of that, I've been thinking of learning Arabic. While you don't need to know a foreign language to join, knowing a "super critical needs language" (their words, not mine) like Arabic helps a lot. So I've been thinking of taking Arabic classes. They'd be about $800 for the fall semester.

I also want to replenish my emergency fund. While I'm probably pretty secure at my job, and if anything did happen my parents would take care of me (in some future post I'll go into my parents and finances), I like having a bit of savings. I think it's important to save. And I want to get those numbers back up.

So, if I want to add personal training, it means cutting either Arabic, retirement savings, or replenishing my emergency fund. If personal training seems like it's worth it, adding to my emergency fund will probably be the thing to go: it's still got a few thousand dollars in it now, and I can build it up to a level I'm more comfortable with eventually. I'm still not 100% certain though.

So, question for anyone who's ever had a personal trainer: do you think it's worth it? What do you get from your trainer that you couldn't get on your own? How do you think s/he helps you?

And, for everyone, trainer or no, base instinct, what would you do? Pick three: trainer, Arabic, retirement, emergency fund.

Onward and Downward

Weight: 261.5
BMI: 44.88

Counting both the day I started and today, I am 30 days into this whole weight loss journey. When I started, pounds dropped pretty quickly. But after that, things became tougher. I'd be coaxing my body to drop just a bit of weight each day, and some days it would. Other days it would revolt. There were quite a few days where it just said "nah, I think I'd rather go up on the scale today."

Somehow, since I've gotten home from San Diego, the pounds have been just melting off. Initially it made sense: I was bloated from eating lots on Friday but didn't actually weigh that much. But, this is beyond just bloat dropping. I've lost over a pound for 5 straight days. I'm 4 pounds below my prior low. This, really, is just wonderful.

Too good to last, yes, but for now wonderful.

I'm now down 16.5 pounds in total (1.1 day to day). That means I've lost 5.94% of my starting bodyweight and 2.83 points of BMI. In order to hit my mini goal of 250 pounds by September 15th, I need to lose 1.96 pounds a week. This is the first time ever that my mini goal has needed a sustained loss of less than 2 pounds a week.

I am smiling. And it's not just numbers that are making me smile. I walk to work every day, and I now walk fast enough to catch a light I used to miss. The suits I wear to work every day all feel a little big. I was able to increase the resistance on the elliptical machine and still blast through my workout. When I stopped by the grocery store after the gym to pick up some extra produce, I actually stuck to my shopping list. Yesterday after dinner, I wasn't all that hungry for desert, and it wasn't because I ate too much.

There's a long hard road ahead. For now, though, I'm happy to be walking it.


And in case anyone's curious, thus far the new guy seems really nice. I ate breakfast at my desk this morning without feeling embarrassed about it, and it was definitely in large part due to all of your "He probably can't hear you and wouldn't even care!" comments, so thank you. :)

Tuesday Weigh In

I somehow didn't hear my alarm this morning and woke up late for work, but I did hop on the scale before I dashed off:

Weight: 262.6
BMI: 45.07

In the chaos of the morning, I just made a mental note as I finished rushing to brush my teeth, pack lunch, etc. I just kept the number in my head and planned to jot it down at work.

Then, as I was on the way to the office, it hit me: I've lost 15 pounds. NICE!

So, there's a bit of a spring in my step today. I'm still worried about the issues I brought up in last night's post, but I'll deal with that tomorrow. For today, I've lost 15 pounds (15.4 to be precise), and if that's not excellent I don't know what is.

A New Colleague, and New Embarrassment

So, I work in DC as a low-level economist. It's basically an entry level job, the sort of thing one has for about a year or two before moving on to grad school or something else. My office is this shared, sort of U-shaped thing--you can't see the other person unless we both roll out our chairs about 5 feet, but we can always hear each other. It's about one step up from a cubicle in terms of privacy.

Last Friday, my office-mate, easily my best friend in DC, left for another job. Her new position is in Texas: close to her family, better paying, more what she wanted to do, all around an excellent and amazing step for her. But it means this wonderful, sweet girl who I loved to bits is being replaced with a stranger. And I just found out he starts on Wednesday.

I am petrified.

One of the things that's big for me is eating in bits throughout the work day so I'm not particularly hungry at the end of the day. I'm really bad with night time eating, but I've found that having a dinner early in the evening (6:30 or 7) and then essentially closing up the kitchen works really well for me. So, on a typical work day, I'll bring:

1 banana
1 fat-free yoplait yogurt
1 chewy chocolate chip granola bar or 1 polly-o string cheese
~12 baby carrots (I guesstimate when packing in the morning and count before I eat)
1 apple or other piece of fruit (today I brought 1/2 cup of blueberries)
1 sandwich, made of: 2 pieces of light style Pepperidge Farm bread, 1 slice of cold cut (right now, I'm working on a half pound of roast beef), 1 tablespoon of miracle whip, two slices of tomato, and a bit of lettuce.

This actually only adds up to about 600 calories throughout the day. Most days I have the banana and yogurt shortly after arriving, the granola bar around 11 or so, the roast beef sandwich at 1 or 2, and snack on the fruit and baby carrots throughout the rest of the afternoon. When I go home around 5:30 or 6, I'm hungry but not ravenous, and have 600-700 calories left to make myself a relatively extravagant dinner.

There are many, many reasons I love this system. The first is, quite simply, that it works. The lack of slip ups on work days is proof of its day-to-day effectiveness. I like that it doesn't feel like deprivation: I get to pack a whole ton of food in my bag each morning, and when I get hungry at work, it's fine because I've almost always got something left to eat. When I've eaten everything, I tend to be sated--there's a lot of fiber and a lot of volume in it. I like that it leaves me enough calories to eat a big dinner. I like that when I'm hungry at night, I can tell myself "it's okay, tomorrow you'll have enough food at work and feel better" and I like that it's true. I like that on mornings when I actually am ravenous--which has happened once or twice in my 4 weeks of diet--I can actually get something that's close to a binge in terms of satisfaction by eating the sandwich, granola bar, yogurt and banana all in the morning, and that I'll still have baby carrots and another fruit to get me through the day. I can (partially) lose control, but since all the food I have is the food I've brought in with me, I don't actually mess up my diet. I like that it's healthy and delicious and feels like it has variety: there are tons of flavors of yoplait, tons of different fruits I can bring, the sandwich is different depending on which meat I use, and I even get some chocolate in the granola bar.

There are many, many things I like about my diet. Up to this point, there's been precisely one thing I've disliked: people walking in on me eating. I can almost hear them thinking, Ew, gross fat Hadley, of course she'd be eating when I stop by her office. And, for self-conscious me, that's a substantive drawback. But it's rare enough that it's only happened a few times thus far, and is easily outweighed by all the good parts. 98% of the time, the only person who could hear me eating was my dear office-mate, who was possibly the sweetest and most non-judgmental person in DC. (Yes, I know that's like saying someone's the least corrupt person in New Jersey, but I swear she'd count as nice even by normal standards.) So yeah, she could hear me eating, and while I'd still rather she didn't, I wasn't really embarrassed because it was just her.

Now, the person who's going to hear me eating is some strange boy who could easily be thinking, Ew, gross, I can hear her eating like all the friggin' time. And who could tell people, "No wonder Hadley's so fat, I can hear her eating like half the day." Scary!

So, I have until Wednesday to figure things out. I need to balance the embarrassment vs. my continued success. And I think I want to not be embarrassed about my weight in the future more than I want to not be embarrassed by eating seemingly-massive amounts right now, but right now, well, I'm just scared.

Goodbye, 5% of my starting weight.

Weight: 263.6
BMI: 45.24

Let's start with the good news first: I'm more than half way to my mini goal! I'm 28 days in and I've now lost 14.4 pounds and 5.18% of my starting body weight. My deadline to hit 25--a 10% loss of my initial bodyweight--is 9/15/2009, which is 43 days away. No matter which way you slice it, I'm pretty darn happy with the 263.6 number.

Things, however, weren't looking so sunny immediately upon my return from San Diego. The first two days went relatively well. I perhaps ate a bit more than I would've if I'd been at home, but not by much. By mid week I'd succumbed to french fries and a glass of white wine. Thursday I went on an In-n-Out burger outing. Friday was pretty darn close to an unmitigated disaster. In the morning I ate a scoop of hash browns, two pieces of sausage, and berries and cream. On the flight from San Diego to Atlanta I ate both complimentary cookies and an $8 turkey, apple and brie Sandwich with honey mustard (delicious, by the way). Stuck in the Atlanta airport, I ate a grilled Chick-Fil-A sandwich and fries. Disaster. Delicious, delicious disaster.

And it showed. My weight on Friday evening was a super high 269.4. By Saturday morning I was down to the still insanely high 268.0.

I dropped quickly from there though. Yesterday, I joyfully hit a new low of 264.7, and today, an even lower 263.6. I feel like I might be in for a small gain tomorrow, but we shall see.

I'm on track. I'm more than halfway to my first goal. And I've lost an amazing 14.4 pounds in 28 days. Now if I can only stop dreaming about Chick-Fil-A's delicious, delicious waffle fries, we'll be in business.