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!


Monday, December 5, 2011

Worth a thousand words (but I'll only type ~50 here)

Looking back at photos of myself, I can safely say there are very few recorded moments of sadness compared to happiness.  While one might think that's because it's impolite to take pictures of crying people, or that unhappy people will refuse to stand still for a photo, in my case it's because life makes me happy.  Even when it doesn't.