Lost four pounds in January!

I'm quite pleased! In college, I used to work out and got into pretty good shape. But, I slacked off and I just got back into it last year. In September, I rushed myself into it and pulled an abdominal muscle. So, I just got restarted again in mid December. I also made the committment to drastically reduce my beer intake.

I want to lose three pounds per month in 2005. That would get me down to my fighting weight. I was drinking about 100 beers per month, mostly Michelob Ultra with a few homebrews, and in January I cut that down to 17. I was surprised that I hardly missed it at all. And I'm sleeping better. Doing the math, I saved about 9,200 calories that way.

I worked out ten times, and figure (based on tables I've found) that I burned off about 3,300 calories. So, that's a total reduction of 12,500 cals in my "caloric economy" in January. One pound of fat is gained/lost through 3,500 cals, which works out to a reduction of about 3.5 pounds.

When I weighed myself, I had lost 4 pounds, which means that my regular food intake, inclusive of all the fatty garbage I eat, was still responsible for an additional 1/2# of weight loss. I don't eat well, but I always knew I didn't really eat that much. So it seems beer really is responsible for my post-college (class of '98) weight gain.

I gave myself two weeks of cardio before January in order to eliminate the possibility of "water weight loss" throwing off the numbers. I drink so much water and coffee I've never really retained water anyway, but I thought I'd give it two weeks of heavy sweating before I weighed in the first time.

Pretty sweet!