Guess who’s back?

Back again?

Almost as good as Slim Shady, it’s the not-so-slim mctex with my second attempt at dropping this baby weight. I guess I’m being a little hard on myself when I say second attempt — since the beginning of my first attempt, I did manage to lose and keep off 10 pounds. But that probably represented the rest of my legitimate baby weight with pregnancy number two, and so now I’m stuck with these same 40 pounds of pudge I’ve been carrying since my first daughter’s birth in July of 2005. And at 10 lbs every six months, she’ll be in kindergarten by the time things are back to “normal”. That’s just not going to cut it.

And so it is that I’ve regrouped and am back to share with y’all. In the spirit of a new start, I’ve changed my column name from “MS Biggest Loser” to “MILF*-in-Training” — I think it has a more positive sound. I could start by identifying all of my excuses for getting sidetracked in my first effort — the never-ending house construction; the trips here, there and everywhere; the constant stream of “as soon as this is over”. Except it occurred to me that I have lost half of an entire year waiting for the next thing to be over, and have made little progress.

Which is how it came to pass that I actually decided to stop in and join our neighborhood gym early last week instead of once again passing by. I am very fortunate in that my “neighborhood gym” is nothing short of a family fitness mecca — yet another upside in moving to the ‘burbs. This place** is nothing short of amazing in their offerings for the whole family, and they are first rate in terms of both facility and staff. Granted, you pay for what you get, but it’s one of those places where you just feel better walking in.

In a strike of synchronicity, the very day that I joined, the gym was starting a 12-week Biggest Loser-ish type of program that I rolled right into (pardon the pun). The program is structured so that we work out doing cardio (treadmill) work for an hour three times a week (under the direction of a certified trainer); we also are required to keep food diaries which are reviewed weekly by the gym’s registered dietitian. There’s nothing magical nor mysterious about the program — it’s Weight Loss 101: expend more calories than you take in.

Except there is a science to the program that was even somewhat new to this dieting pro. The gym strongly recommends having two tests performed prior to beginning the program, which they claim allows participants to “work smarter, not harder.” 5…4…3…2…1… that’s about how long it took for me to get sucked right into having these tests completed, and the results were very interesting.

The first test calculated my anaerobic threshold, which is explained here. I knew that it was better to work out at a lower percentage of maximum heart rate if I wanted to burn fat calories, but I also knew that things like running — which puts me WAY up in terms of heart rate — burned more calories overall, and I figured more was better. In weight loss attempt number -1 — when I’d been training for a marathon prior to the conception of baby #2 — I’d started to get a clue that this might not be the case when I cleared the 15 mile training mark fat as ever. My anaerobic threshold test result confirmed part of the reason that weight loss attempt had not been a success: my anaerobic threshold is a heart rate of 149 bpm. Looking back on my heart rate data from training (courtesy of my running watch version 1.0), I can see that I was hanging out at a heart rate of about 165 bpm.

From the linked article above:

People who exercise vigorously and have minimal fat loss are exercising above their AT level.

I’m typing one-handed as I’m raising my other hand.

So the results of that test are allegedly going to be helpful in making sure my cardio work does what I want it to do: get me skinny. Granted, while building stamina and speed might help me in my never-ending quest to catch (read: tackle, grope) Matthew McConaughey running Austin’s Town Lake (sightings are high up on the list of urban legends retold wistfully by Austin’s mommy set), the blubber bouncing long after I stop actually trying to move is not going to score me any points. Besides, maybe the baby stroller he’ll be pushing will help me in the speed department…

The second test calculated my resting metabolic rate — or how many calories it is that I burn in a day doing absolutely nothing, which is how I spend far more days than I care to admit. Turns out, I burn 1660 calories doing nothing according to the test, which is far more than I would’ve thought. What does this mean? It means that eating anything less than 1660 calories per day will send my body into a type of shut down, where it will slow the rate of caloric burn because it thinks it’s starving. Yeah yeah yeah, I knew all of this… but 1660 calories? Are they sure??? Given my fatness, I would’ve estimated that number to be about… 50. And based on that number, they’ve got me eating 1800 calories a day — a number that seems staggeringly high to me***. I guess time will tell. Just to be sure, I bought running watch version 2.0, which measures not only things like heart rate, but monitors where I’m working out in relation to my anaerobic threshold and projects total calories burned. I need to make sure I’m burning these bad boys off.

So the team training has me doing cardio work three times per week, which I’m supplementing with another 3 cardio workouts on my own. Because my life mantra is “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” (which I share with you in case there was still ANY doubt as to why I’m fat), I also decided to hire a trainer to work out with me doing strength training an hour a day five days a week.

So that’s where we stand right now. Because I couldn’t work out for 24 hours before the tests, which were performed on two different days last week, my workout routine only started last Thursday… and at the end of week 1, this has resulted in a 2 pound loss (which is the weight depicted).

I will close this entry in the paraphrased words of one of my personal idols, Smokey from Friday… “I ain’t got no job, and I ain’t got shit to do.” (Thanks for the child care, Mom!) I might as well take yet another attempt at this, and tell y’all about it. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment — knowing you are there will be just another thing that will keep me accountable to see this through this time.

Up next time: Why I stay fat.

*Note to my own parental-types: um, MILF stands for “Mother I’d like to… Follow”. It’s a catchy little acronym our generation is using to compliment women who look good after having children. Nice, isn’t it? But since you’re not really up to speed with the lingo, I’d advise you to keep this one out of your own vernacular. Oh, and for the love of all things holy, don’t google it, ok? Thanks.

***That number does seem high, but after a week of keeping a proper food diary, I will say that I’m evidently not as aware of the number of calories I eat as I thought I was. For those who haven’t kept a straight-up calorie log (not points, but calories) in a while that are trying to lose weight, humor me and try it again for a couple of days. The numbers really were surprising for me.