Juddmansee.com

It’s been a yo-yo past year and a half for my health. On my birthday back in 2005 I was at my all time heaviest weight of 231.5 pounds. Through diligent dieting and exercise I had my weight down to 192 pounds on August 7, 2006. This was my lowest body weight since I ran the Portland marathon back in October of 2000. Fast forward to this morning where my weight was back up to 217 pounds.

How did this happen? Simply, I got lazy. It started with cutting down on exercise until I was no longer exercising. No matter, I was still losing weight through dieting. Then last August I stopped paying attention to my food intake.

I know these data points because since August of 2003 I have been keeping a spreadsheet to track my exercise, diet, and mood. The spreadsheet is certainly overkill, but it does contain a lot of good data. For example, when I stop tracking my diet, my weight invariably goes up. When I stop working out, I get less sleep, awake less rested in a worse mood, and have a higher resting pulse. Despite the time it takes to track this data, 4 years have shown me that the act of tracking my health helps me to improve it. So yesterday I hopped back on the health wagon.

Yesterday, I rode my bike for 45 minutes down route 1A. Today I did a workout from Martina Navratilova’s Shape Yourself book. Her workouts stress functional fitness that can be done at home, which helps get me over the ‘I’m too tired to go to the gym’ excuse.
So is two days a trend? I hope so, because I feel so much better when I’m living healthy. Assuming things go well I’d like to update the blog weekly with a summary of my week. If I start missing weeks, someone please send me an email and tell me to get my act together.