{"id":50211,"date":"2016-05-23T07:43:17","date_gmt":"2016-05-23T14:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/?p=50211"},"modified":"2016-05-22T17:43:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-23T00:43:43","slug":"my-weight-loss-story-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/?p=50211","title":{"rendered":"My Weight Loss Story – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Weight Loss Story – Part 1<\/span><\/h3>\n

by Michael<\/span><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Every year, I set personal fitness related goals for myself. In the past, my goals have been around cycling a certain amount of miles. I have a back injury that rears its ugly head from time to time and this has lead me to conclude that if I keep doing the same things, I\u2019ll keep getting the same results. As a result, I\u2019ve decided not to ride my bike everyday or do any of the same exercises on consecutive days.<\/p>\n

Last year, I pedaled 2,100 miles over several commutes from my home to work and back. For all of my efforts, I lost zero pounds last year. Losing weight wasn\u2019t the focus of riding all those miles but you\u2019d think that I\u2019d be able to shed weight without thinking about it due to the biking but that just wasn\u2019t the case. I concluded that while I enjoyed exercising, the reason I hadn\u2019t lost any weight was because of my diet.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4427\"<\/p>\n

My goals this year are to be able to do 100 push-ups in one set and do 10 pull-ups in one set.<\/strong> When I say things like, \u201cI\u2019m going to do more push-ups this year\u201d it holds no water because there\u2019s nothing holding me accountable. I need an amount and a time frame in order to be successful. At the start of this year, I was able to do 15 push-ups and zero pull-ups. My goals seemed lofty for sure but I\u2019m a numbers guy and measurables like this are what drive me to success. I just needed to figure out how I was going to be able to accomplish it.<\/p>\n

My first goal was to work my way up to being able to do 100 push-ups in a day. On the day of the Super Bowl, I was able to do 100 push-ups in a single day for the first time in my life. I did them in 5 sets of 20 over about a half hour period. This was a major achievement for me and it was the first time I believed that I would be able to accomplish the push-up goal this year.<\/p>\n

Then I was able to do them in 4 sets of 25 push-ups. Shortly after that, 30, 30, 30, 10. Last month, I was able to do them in just 3 sets – 35, 35, 30. The next step from this point is challenging and I\u2019ve concluded that in order to be able to do 100 push-ups in just 2 sets, I will need to do 2 things. 1 – I will have to do more than 100 push-ups in a day and 2 – I will have to lose weight. For every 10 lbs I lose, that\u2019s 1000 fewer pounds that I will have to push-up over the set of 100. Tipping the power to weight ratio in my favor was obviously going to be necessary in order to be successful.<\/p>\n

Just like I said earlier about exercising, I need a weight loss goal. I cannot just say to myself that I want to lose weight and have it stick. I just don\u2019t operate like that. At the start of every month, I assess my progress and set a new monthly goal for myself and I get on a scale weekly to monitor my progress. I don\u2019t know how much weight in total I want to lose, I just assume that I\u2019ll know it when I get there. I know that I\u2019m looking for an optimal power-to-weight ratio that allows me to accomplish my push-up and pull-up goals.<\/p>\n

What\u00a0I don\u2019t do is count my calories.<\/strong> I don\u2019t do this because it constantly makes me feel bad. It makes me feel oppressed, like I\u2019m doing something bad that needs constant monitoring when in reality, I\u2019m eating food and I don\u2019t want to beat myself up for doing that. I know what\u2019s good for me to eat and what isn\u2019t. I don\u2019t need to quantify all of the calories I\u2019m consuming.<\/p>\n

The other piece to this is that I exercise. A lot. But this isn\u2019t the reason why I\u2019ve lost weight. I\u2019ve lost weight because of the diet. My exercise looks like this – M\/W\/F, I bike about 21 miles to\/from work. T\/Th\/Sa, I run in my neighborhood. I created a running goal for myself this year of being able to run 6 miles in under an hour. I\u2019m currently up to 4.7 miles in about 45 minutes. All of this is in addition to my push-up and pull-up goals, which I\u2019m working on each twice a week. I wear a heart rate monitor to track this data and on average, I\u2019m burning 6000 calories a week while exercising. Unlike tracking the calories that I consume, tracking the calories that I burn is empowering. It\u2019s proof that I\u2019m working hard and that I\u2019m getting better as I\u2019m able to run further and my per-mile pace drops. This also allows me to not feel any guilt when I want to drink a glass of wine with dinner because I\u2019ve earned it.<\/p>\n

So where am I at now with my push-up goal? I\u2019m up to doing 160 (8 x 20) or 150 (6 x 25) twice a week. For the pull-up goal, I\u2019m just doing as many as I can with the assistance of resistance bands over a few sets. The best part about these goals is that I\u2019m not concerned about failure at all. If I do fail, I will have done thousands of push-ups and pull-ups this year and that itself is a huge personal victory for me. I\u2019ll post an update in January and will let you know if I was successful or not in achieving my goals.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
Part 2 will be posted tomorrow and will detail the food part of how I lost the weight.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Weight Loss Story – Part 1 by Michael   Every year, I set personal fitness related goals for myself. In the past, my goals have been around cycling a certain amount of miles. I have a back injury that rears its ugly head from time to time and this has lead me to conclude […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[418,3258,1202,1248,84,101,4283,2663,154,169,318,319,224,298],"tags":[406,2989,508,549,8627,572,2031,8662,9215,9216,8707,8758,2078],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50211"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50211"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50244,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50211\/revisions\/50244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}