Most of my fitness transition plan has been focused on exercise. Get more exercise and eat the same as you did before, and you will lose weight. This has to be true, based simply on physics. Back when I was using the Hacker’s Diet, it worked like a charm. Then it was all about eating less calories, because I wasn’t really keen on doing exercise in my olden days. It worked for a while. Unfortunately I got stressed and stopped countign calories, and weighing every day. I’ve started the weighing again, and maybe I can actually fire up gnuplot again and produce some pretty graphs like the one on the left.

I’ve had an iPod for approximately 5 years now. That puts me a bit ahead of the curve. I still remember seeing the original iPod commercial, and looking literally seconds later for how much it was, and seeing how much I could sell my old player on eBay for. Having been in the mp3 scene for a while at that point, I knew that it would turn everything on it’s head. I got it and replaced my normal player for walking to and from class and listening while coding. Now I have a new iPod video, and it is the chief entertainment while I’m in the exercise room. At first I was just listening to my fairly large music collection. Then I started listening to podcasts again - they are about the right length, and I enjoyed them. Now I’ve harnessed the power of the video iPod to kill two birds with one stone: I’m watching my large collection of Anime at an hour a day. This means about 3 episodes if I skip the openings and endings. I also watch Heroes on Tuesday nights, after I transfer it from the TiVo. The only problem I’m having with this setup is that the screen is small, so I need to hold it fairly close to my face in order to read the subtitles.

Today marks one month on the diet and exercise regimen. I started on the scale at 344 and this week’s average was 337, 7 pounds lighter. I’m going a little slower than my goal of 2 pounds per week, but I seem to be hitting the right buttons at least.

This week (Nov 10 - Nov 16): Minimum: 335.5 (-2.5) (Nov 14) Maximum: 339.5 (-0.5) (Nov 16) Average: 337.2 (-2.05) (137.2 to goal) Exercise Calories: 2563 on 5 days Average Calories per session: 512.16