Woops

Shit, I totally missed the beginning of April update, and by miss, I mean I probably passed on it on purpose.

Basically, my weight hasn't changed at all. But, I've been running upwards of 20 miles a week, and I feel like I've slimmed a bit. Of course, I would have slimmed more if I hadn't drank my way into finishing a beer club, but hey, these things happen. I also didn't do my diet any favors lately. But, like with smoking, I'm back on track, and the results would have been far worse had I not been going to the gym regularly. Anyway, I've mitigated the damage done, and we're still not even halfway through the year, so we'll see how it goes with a combination of the gym AND eating right. Regardless, I'm feeling gooooooood.

As for the digitize and destroy portion, I've gotten a good portion of the digitize part down, and a small milk crate full of CDs I'll be bringing in later today to be sold. Assuming all of them are taken, that should take care of the goal to cut it down to one cd tower. Books are holding steady, and I haven't bought any new DVDs. In fact, Netflix's DVD service has made watching The Wire more enjoyable than me buying the whole damn thing and watching it in one sitting.

Grad school? Got the GRE scheduled baby! May 2nd, and I've started studying. That's about that.

TV Time - I'm getting there, slowly but surely. There's only a few more episodes of The Office that will ever air, leaving me with just about three shows next year.

So that's that...progress, for the most part.

Marriott and Me - A love story

I freakin love the Marriott, and I want to shout it from a rooftop. Due to a major SNAFU at the hotel I was planning on staying at in Savannah last week, I had to make same-day reservations, and I decided to go with old faithful and stay at the Marriott again. And it was, of course, amazing. I love their service, their beds, and pretty much everything about them. Even their coffee is pretty decent, and their bartender can make a good martini.

Why am I boring my ghost readers and wasting my own time? Because now that I'm out of debt and rockin my finances, I've decided to do what countless yuppies and travel hackers  (same group) have done for years, and get a Marriott Rewards card just for the benefits, and because it's black metal and I'm 5.

Here's the way I see it. I don't use cash most of the time anyway, and using my debit card gets me exactly zero things, other than a way to avoid getting charged interest. Meanwhile, I really like checking out new places, not paying full price, and acting classy. At this point, I'm responsible enough with credit and hopefully savvy enough to game the shit out of the system and reap the rewards.

AND ITS MADE OUT OF BLACK METAL.

With any luck, this will work out great and then I can pick up another card for airline travel, and maybe switch between the two and have all my travel covered. How cool would that be?

Anyways, brave new world!

Where I is...

I had a pretty lengthy post on where I'm at with the weight loss, so I'll skip that one for now and move on to the rest.

#2 - Declutter, Digitize, and Destroy. I'm happy to say this one is pretty much working itself out one bit at a time, between selling my stuff to a second hand store and using Amazon's trade in program I've pretty much cut every down to the limits I set for myself, or at least have them set aside to get rid of one way or another.

Except for my damn CDs. Once I get into the nitty gritty of it, it shouldn't be too hard to eliminate about a quarter of them just based on tastes that have changed. And let's face it, the much bigger problem is preventing that kind of stuff from having a permanent spot to begin with, which is why instead of buying The Wire, I'm using Netflix's DVD service. Yes, it's slow, but it also ties into...

#3 - Not sitting on my ass and watching every episode of The Wire in a row. That's called transitioning. With football season over, this is a lot easier. I have about two hours worth of shows that I watch each week, and I watch my Wire dvds as soon as they come in because Omar will kill me if I don't. The only real change up here is that I find myself going to bed earlier. Working through The Wire is pushing me into six hour territory each week; not my goal, but hardly worth whining about.

Anyway, here's an ad for it! Just because I've never tried this before.

#4 - Yeah I haven't studied at all for the GRE lately. No excuse. 

For the month of February!

So a few things...as you can see, I definitely didn't lose another 10. Closing in on 5 for the month (kind of stealing the extra bit from last month), but halfway to 175 overall. Buuuuuut I've definitely started to feel some changes. I'm easily fitting into jeans and suit pants that I had struggled to put on back in November, which is freakin awesome.I realize that weight loss (specifically, fat loss) is not just a numbers game, but I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that I've added massive amounts of muscle. I'm pretty sure the body fat and muscle percentages aren't accurate. 

I have also changed things up on the exercise front. I've started running and working out more, nothing too crazy, so that is probably adding a bit to the "tighter" feeling. As I had previously noted, dropping down to this point has been easy for me in the past, so going beyond it is going to be interesting. So I'll be shooting for another 5 pounds lost during the month of March. 

Umm...new post!

Ugh, what a crazy busy February it's been. For a short month, I still managed to pack quite a bit into it, and yet going to the movies wasn't one of them because there hasn't been anything worth seeing since Silver Linings Playbook came out.

I'll be doing the monthly rundown Friday, but I wanted to take the time to pat myself on the back for going six months without smoking (as of Valentine's Day, I <3 me). So knowing this, I go into my dental appointment, only to discover I HAVE A FREAKIN CAVITY. WHAT THE DONKEY PUNCH!?!?!

Let's recap. I'm 27, smoked between the ages of 17 and 26, been drinking for the past decade, was a heavy soda drinker before that, and never thought twice about high fructose corn syrup until two years ago, AND NOW I get a cavity?

There is no justice in this life.

And there sure as hell ain't any in my mouth.

...yeah we'll go with that.

Anyway, so this Valentine's Day, I treated the everlovin crap out of myself. Snagged the Bond 50 blu ray collection off Amazon for $130, $90 of which was from a bunch of old textbooks I had sent back as part of my decluttering resolution. I realize buying a 22-movie James Bond blu ray collection seems a tad contradictory, but I justified this due to the fact that A) It's Bond, and B) It's James Bond. It's not like they're gonna be keeping ALL of those on Netflix anytime soon.

I also bought some sweet pens from Tu(weird dotty thing)l. These are some nice pens! Not something I usually get excited about, but hey, when you got your pen brand figured out, it's one less thing on your plate. 

Still Losing? I'm gonna need to think of better titles

I hit sub 195 pounds this week! And then promptly ate a stromboli last night, erasing most of the benefit. The good thing is that I should bounce back for tomorrow morning's weigh in, and that's good, since I wanted to at least get below 195 by the month's end. So screw it, that stromboli was delicious and I earned it.

So as of now, I'm looking at over 11 pounds lost since the beginning of the year, and I'm finding myself feeling a lot better because of it. It's amazing what not being bloated and pounding potato chips and monsters every night does to a person. I've gone into this on a whole "hack of the week" kind of approach that I do kind of regret. Yeah it was important to see the weight I could lose by not eating out, just as it was important to realize that life is gonna happen and I will eat out, but by far the most important has just been taking as much control as I can, as easily as I can.

For instance, here's a quick breakdown.

Breakfast - Two eggs, two strips of bacon, coffee with a bit of cream
Snack - piece of fruit, banana
Lunch - sausage, generous portion of frozen veggies
Snack - almonds or sweet potato chips
Dinner - Some portion of awesome meat/fish/chicken, veggies, and a possible salad

And no goddamn energy drinks. Ever. Even the coffee has felt less necessary as of late. As you can see, I'm following a low-carb approach, I'm hesitant to call it paleo, but it is sort of what I'm aspiring too. I haven't been working out very much either, mostly sticking to a 3 mile run with coworkers once a week (I'll bump it up to twice a week once I'm not dead by the end of it, somehow I've slowed down since I quit smoking). I'm also not exactly sure what calorie count all of that adds up to, only that I don't feel as if I'm starving myself. At first I felt hungry and eat just about all my food at work by noon; now I've been able to eat one piece of fruit before my lunch, and then save the other one for an hour later or so. I do know that I don't want to eat less than this any time soon, if ever, because it seems like a small amount (or more likely, a smaller amount than I'm used to cramming down my facehole).

In other resolution news, I've sold a few of my books on Amazon and sent those in. I still haven't dealt with my CD issue, but it has been kind of far down my to do list, to the point that I only just thought about it.

TV time? Not an issue now that football season is over. The only TV I watch on a regular basis is How I Met Your Mother and NBC Thursday comedies, except for 1600 Penn, that show is a horrible shit pile. However on the computer front, I found a stupid free to play Star Wars MMORPG, and yeah...crap.

And on the grad school front, I have opened the GRE book. The GRE book is open. Boo ya.

Anyway, weigh in posting will be tomorrow. Hell or high water. 

Most of this weeks weight loss/gain

Pizza bad, mmmm Kay?