WElp... I came to the conclusion that yes, I am fat. Yes, I can fit into a 1984 Van Diemen but getting out of it... well... yeah. So, I have until March to drop 30 lbs and get back to where I need to be anyway. Plus, since I'm selling all my STF stuff I have no fall-back plan. Do or die.
So... this will be my build thread on me.
Day 2 (didn't check yesterday) 239.8lbs. Not my heaviest, but damn close. Tonight I'm going to get the wife to do some measurements around the important areas (hips, belly, chest, arms). Already getting into the habit of tracking my food with the fitbit app and tracking my calorie ouptut. Today was 15 minutes on the treadmill at 3.5mph and a 4% incline, then 10 minutes on the weight machines to strengthen the upper body.
Lead the way Bobzilla. I need to do the same.
In reply to trucke:
but they built that road right next to the Golden Corral.
SCMODs?
I'll bet they got SCMODs.
STM317
HalfDork
12/6/16 6:06 p.m.
For somebody just starting out, I'd skip traditional lifting like bench press or curls, and focus just on strengthening your core. Your core is the foundation that lets you apply your strength in the rest of your body. Weak core means less strength overall, and can lead to injuries.
Once your core is strong, you can branch out to other lifts. Personally, I can't recommend lower body lifts enough. They work more muscles at once, which burns more calories. Plus, They're the biggest muscles in your body, and therefore working them out causes your body to produce more muscle building hormones. So, as counter intuitive as it seems, doing squats can increase your bench press.
What is your goal? Just to be able to get out of the car in under 10 sec or do you want to make it's motor and brakes work as little as possible? At 239 if you aren't 11 feet tall you have a lot of "potential" 
Weight loss is all kitchen. Exercise is awesome and has it's own benefits, but you can eat a 10 mile run in about 12 minutes.
Google Turkish Get Up. I can't think of a better exercise for getting out of a formula car.
A week ago, out of the blue, I found a 7 minute workout app on my phone. I thought it would be a good way to start a workout regimen to possibly train my brain into accepting working out as part of my routine. I'm 37yo and have never worked out a day in my life. At 6' I'm not really much over weight at 186lbs, but I'm not in the best of shape and figured strengthening my core could do nothing but help my bad knees and back.
Saturday and Sunday went well and I could certainly feel it. Monday I set my alarm early so I could get up in the morning to do it, that didn't work out so well. I'm not a morning person and not an early riser. I thought I would try to do it in the evening after work. That didn't work out so well either as basically when I get home I'm usually physically spent and my knees are screaming at me.
So long story short I did the workout three times and haven't attempted it since then. It's really hard to develop new habits.
As far as the routine, if you haven't heard about it, it's really simple. The propaganda says that it's scientifically prove to assist weight loss and cardiovascular function.
The basics are 13 separate workouts that you do for 30 seconds each with a ten second interval in between. ( They want you to do three sets of the routine which would take about twenty minutes, but I would need to really work up to that. )
The app goes step by step and has a nice countdown timer. It's just called the 7 minute workout and if it sounds like something you would want to try I recommend finding the app.
The '09 Honda Fit motor is legal as of 2010 and conversion kits are being marketed by Honda Performance Development (HPD) for some of the newer chassis. This is not an inexpensive conversion at about $13k in parts alone and would take a long-time to pay for itself in a solo only car. The builder of the motors for HPD is out of Frederick, MD, quicksilver or quickstar iirc, I can get you their contact info. As a bonus they're about 4 doors from Flyin' Dog brewery.
jstand
HalfDork
12/6/16 9:25 p.m.
I lost over 20 lbs between January and May of last year, from 207 down to 184.
I used a combination of tracking my food intake using "my fitness pal" and 45 minute sessions in the treadmill.
I set the goal in MFP to 1.5 lbs per week and tried to stick to the calorie and macro targets. Weighing portions (linch and dinner) and taking lunch to work as salads or wraps made a big difference in lunch calories over buying lunch or taking a sandwich. Planning out the dinner menu for the week was helpful and reduce the urge to get take out. Plenty of chicken along with adding fish and using the steam fresh veggies was an easy way to add veggies to meals.
On the treadmill I used the preprogrammed routines that varied pace and incline over a 45 minute session. I started with 2 times per week and worked up to 5 times per week.
To help track progress i purchased a BT heart rate monitor ($50) to be able to see my fitness improvement. I would alternate between two 45 programs on the treadmill to try to avoid getting used to them, and by using preprogrammed routines I could compare the HR monitor data. Even on weeks when there wasn't much progress on weight I could see the improvement in the HR data.
I could also judge from the HR when it was time to start increasing the speed to maintain intensity as my fitness improved.
Unfortunately i fell out of the habit, and gained it all back. Now I'm going to get back to the diet and exercise again and make it stick this time.
Good luck sir. Hope you can hit your target and then some. Nothing like the thought of racing to motivate you.
In reply to Nick (Bo) Comstock:
Easy alternate 7 minute (or anything up to 30 minutes or so) workout:
5 Pullups
10 Pushups
15 Air Squats
Repeat. No app needed. Shoot for <1 minute per round.
(This same routine is used for the 'Cindy' and 'Chelsea' Crossfit workouts)
In reply to ProDarwin:
It's not really about the workout itself. I can do that easily enough.
It's about the doing it.
I can't make myself get up early to do it in the morning and I'm barely able to walk by the time I get home in the evening.
It's more about establishing a new routine, which is easier said than done. I've got a lifetime of jumping out of bed, throwing some clothes on, running out the door and with a little bit of luck from the traffic lights making it to work on time. That's hard to overcome.
In reply to Nick (Bo) Comstock:
Do 25 pushups before you get in the shower
Do 25 more at lunch
Do 25 more when you get home
Do 25 more before you go to bed
Next week, add another exercise. Add another one the week after... etc
When you get to all of them on that list you will still only be working out 28 minutes a day at 7 min a pop. EVERYONE can squeeze that in. In the beginning it will only be like 2 minutes at a time. YOu can't even piss properly in 2 minutes but you can get some chesticle definition.
In reply to Huckleberry:
Lol, I may be able to do five push ups. Maybe. My buddy was going to nominate me to do that 22 push up challenge thing that was floating around Facebook, he called to ask if it was OK first. I said man, I doubt I've done 22 push ups cumulatively over my entire life. Which is not a lie. It's not that I'm weak, it wasn't very long ago that I was running an 80lb jackhammer all day, or carrying two five gallon buckets over flowing with mud and concrete or gravel all day or carrying two 80lb bags of concrete mix on each shoulder up a hill and around the back of a house (me and one other guy carried two pallets worth, that's 84 bags then mixed it by hand in a wheelbarrow and poured it in one day) Although, that certainly explains the bad knees and back. But I can't do push ups.
I don't really have the mindset for it, or particularly a real desire to do it. I just thought it may help with my knees and back.
Anyway, not trying to hijack Bob's thread. Just sharing my own struggles.
Two months ago, we changed diets. And went to the very controversial low carb one. This is the second time we've shifted to this kind of diet and it works for us.
BTW, the reason we got off of it was that we started running- which promotes carb loading for running. We are working on the opposite theory now, as there's some new studies showing endurance running w/o carbs at all.
My wife found dietdoctor.com from a suggestion to co-workers.
Considering how controversial this diet is, I'm not going to post again, as I don't wish to see the suggestion get bashed- but it does work for us.
Good luck with whatever path you take.
I have been struggling with trying to fit in an exercise routine with working 60 hours a week, and I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination but I have absolutely no time to workout in the evening. I barely have time for my food to digest before it is time to go to bed. I have had some success with taking melatonin to help me go to sleep and that helps me get up earlier. I also received a gift of the Flux Bluetooth Light Bulb, which can be set up to simulate the sunrise for your schedule. In my case I am already at work when the sun actually rises this time of year, so having this lamp come on and gradually get brighter before my alarm goes off actually does seem to be helping me wake up faster and lately I have been feeling more rested. It is completely programmable including the spectrum of light that you want.
My next step will be to wake up even earlier so that I can get in 20-30 minutes of exercise each morning. I plan to mix it up between strength training (including situps and pushups/pullups), stretching and walking. I am taking it one step at a time and setting my alarm earlier by 5 minutes each day so that I don't freak out about getting up at 4:30 all at once. LOL
In reply to alfadriver:
In defense of your low carb diet: Low carb works for a LOT of people. If anyone was trying to get body fat reduction without the obsessiveness required to count every calorie and perfectly time every meal I would happily suggest drastically reducing their starchy/sugary carb intake. It is about the only true "He just did this one thing and the results will shock you!" body transformation trick out there. If everyone was a lab rat with a happy scientist doling out the perfect food at prescribed intervals I truly believe that a moderate carb, perfectly timed, low calorie diet would be a better path to fat loss, but the insanity of our rat race often favors low carbs.
In reply to Nick (Bo) Comstock:
same for me. It's the motivation/doing it part. I'm blessed to have a job that has a gym and a 1 hour lunch break. I did this in 2014, lost almost 30 lbs and then turned 40 and lost all motivation. I'm just getting back into it again.
As for the weight, I have a particularly weird shoulder issue where the socket area is too small for the ball area of the upper arm bone. What happens is it plls in and causes inflammation of of the tendons in that area causing pain and discomfort. I can alleviate that with stretches and then once the irritation is under control, re-strengthen those muscle groups to hold it out of that area a little better. It's basically just multiple variations of pull-ups at lighter weight. The side effect is it also tones up my flabby old man arms at the same time.
So I'm not really "hitting the weights" in the traditional sense. where I can lift 120-140 in these areas at low reps, I'm doing 60lbs slowly, at 20-30 reps. To be honest, "bulking up" wold be bad for me in this case. My normally wide shoulders just barely fit now!
We'll need a picture of said C-mod car. You know, for reference of what you need to squeeze into
alfadriver wrote:
BTW, the reason we got off of it was that we started running- which promotes carb loading for running. We are working on the opposite theory now, as there's some new studies showing endurance running w/o carbs at all.
If you find that your sweat smells like ammonia from the new diet, don't be alarmed. It is just your body eating itself!. It does not know how to get the energy it needs because it was trained that there were easy sugars right there at the top for so long. So it's burning proteins needed for building muscle instead. DOH!
The trick (for me) was to get up, not eat anything beforehand and run 10 miles on an empty tank 2 days a week (which REALLY sucks) until whatever systems responsible for energy became desperate and discovered the harder to convert but readily available body fat stash. Boom... sweat goes back to normal BO stink and fat (not weight though) comes off instead of muscle. I didn't make this up. I asked the interwebs why I smelled like cat piss after a run and found articles from Runnersworld.
Apparently that change does not happen for some people - in which case - stop eating that way or stop doing endurance type training because if your body is going to eat all the muscle proteins anyway it sort of defeats the purpose of all that work.
Good luck!
Spoolpigeon wrote:
We'll need a picture of said C-mod car. You know, for reference of what you need to squeeze into
Ask and you shall recieve
Also the same car that this belongs to:
Also, I have once again cut out soda. Even though I have been drinking Coke Zero (it's free), its' still not good. After 2 days, my sleep pattern has gotten a little better with less wake us in the middle of hte night
Good luck! I am kinda in the same boat... Been working in the office for a couple years, and i effeminately have a belly now... I have been working out for almost a year, 2-3 times a week, haven't lost any weight, but am definitely stronger. But I haven't changed my eating habits much.
Huh, 230-something needing to get to 200. Never exercised regularly, not always good at the food intake...sounds awfully familiar. Like you are talking about me in fact.
OK, I'm in.
so I took measurements last night. The only good news is at least my stomach isn't bigger around than my chest. so.... for my own embarassment and good:
Stomach 46"
Waist 40"
Hips 44"
Chest 47"
and the disappointing part.... biceps are down to 15". I haven't had that little of muscle in my arms in 20+ years.
So... some serious work to do here. I am up to 25 minutes in the work Gym at lunch and keeping my daily calories right around 1700.Fitbit is showing my daily calorie burn around 2500-2900 this week.
