Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Talkin' bout a resolution

This year I made three New Years Resolutions, and I thought I'd use this post to explain what they were, and how they turned out.

Resolutions:

1.Get a pet kitten!

3.Learn a new language (French)

3.Lose weight/exercise more

Thankfully, I am quite happy to report that I have accomplished (or continue to be accomplishing) all of these goals this year, and now I'd like to share some stats/pics/etc about each one.

1. This May, Claire and I went out and got a kitten.  I knew I wanted a young cat, so I waited until Spring when there were more to choose from.  He was born in mid-February, so by this point he's about 10 months old.  His name is Rupert, he's very high energy, and he looks like this:
This was taken when I'd had him about a month (so 4 mo's old)

2.  After work, about three days a week, I started teaching myself French.  I chose French for a few reasons, but mainly because it is widely spoken, uses a similar alphabet to English, and I know quite a few people who speak French so I could get extra help when I needed it.  Also, I am already decent at German, so I thought I'd get a new language under my belt (though I definitely would like to continue pursuing German to get completely fluent at some point).  Anyway, J'ai étudié le français après le travail, trois ou quatre fois par semaine.  I have a lot to learn, but I feel like I've made good progress, as I've completed Rosetta Stone levels 1 and 2, and I'm in the middle of level 3.  Each level is broken in to 4 units, and each unit is broken into about 4 sections, and each section has about 10 subsections, so there's a lot to work through.  However, I plan to keep this up in 2012 so I plan to be well versed in it by this time next year.
My favorite sentence that I've seen in Rosetta Stone so far was: Le jeune gens jouer à un jeu.  Nice alliteration there.

3. Weight loss/exercise!  Let me say one thing first:  Working in an office is not good for your health.  When I lived at KU, I walked to class every day and occasionally worked out, so I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted to eat it.  Those hills at KU are no joke, and walking across campus every day was great exercise.  However, after graduating and getting a job last may, I realized that sitting practically all day long and eating/drinking whatever I wanted was not working for me anymore.  So, after 6 months of that, I decided to start keeping track of my weight and managing my calorie intake.

I know that it's quite cliché to say you are going to lose weight for New Years, and never do it.  I decided not to fall into that trap, so I took some proactive steps to keep myself on target.

The first step was signing up for a Lose It! account.  It's a free website that lets you log what you eat each day, and manage your calorie intake.  This was important to me.  I'm not the "diet" type of guy, so I decided that I would take minimal steps to change my diet, and instead would focus on consuming fewer calories rather than saying "NO MORE ______!."  So, I logged every day (except weekends--those are guilt free), and now have a comprehensive profile of where my nutrients come from, and how many calories I consumed each day for the entire year.  You do not want to know how many times I had chicken strips...oh my.  

However, by using that site, I was able to curb my munchies.  I practically never snack anymore, and I stopped keeping Dr. Pepper in the home (though maybe I'm fooling myself and just eat out more often now? Nah...).

I also kept up a light/moderate work out routine of hitting the gym for at least a few minutes about 3-4 times a week, which I also did a decent job of logging.  In the end, I met my calorie budgets and lost weight (see below).

Using withings, I set a daily calorie budget of no more than 1400 a day.
This macro view shows my month to month trends.


In addition to the website, I also purchased the Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale which measures weight, reports BMI, and has a rough estimate of your body fat percentage.  It was a little pricey, but is nice because it reports my weight to my Withings account which I could track online, on an android app, or through loseit.com's withing plug-in.

Love that trendline
If you're wondering why there's a huge jump from February to March, that's because it's when I replaced my old scale with the much more accurate Withings scale.  It just goes to show my old scale was saying I weighed much less than I actually did, so the top number on this graph should be ~168 pounds instead of 160.

Also, the reason the measurements go up and down is because I measured once in the morning before work, and once right before bed, and naturally, you weigh the least right when you wake up.

You can see that I set a weight goal of 140 pounds, and I have recently hit that and play to stay around that mark :)



So, dear reader, I'm happy to say I accomplished all of my resolutions.  Next year I plan to keep these up, but I probably won't be getting another pet for a good while.

Hope your resolutions (should you choose to make them) come to fruition!


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