As of today I am down almost 20 pounds, 19.2 to be exact. I’m still a bit away from my 1st preliminary goal and 43 my 2nd goal. I intend to evaluate my diet at that point and see if its feasible for me to lose a little more weight to get to a healthier weight that I’m sure will also make me even more comfortable.

Something really great happened today and just goes to show that this is helping us. Wednesdays are grocery shopping days and usually they involve a bit of pain, especially for Chris. But today he pointed out something that I hadn’t noticed; today at the store he hadn’t complained a bit and he said he hadn’t been in pain during the hour plus trek through Kroger. It makes me so happy to hear him say things like that!

We have broken out the Wii Fit again, though I’ve only used it once so far this week and Chris not at all. But, tomorrow the plan is for both of us to take a go at it. I was so sore from my first trip on it that I chickened out today, but I figure if I stick to 15 minutes every other morning for a week and then bump it up to either 15 a day or 30 every other day I will be burning a lot more calories and seeing more weight come off.

I’d love to get a stationery bike. My mom has one and she loves it and I checked it out at herself and I’m jealous. It’s one of those things that you just have to keep thinking on. We are trying so hard to finish paying our credit cards off to start saving more and I know if I got it it would be another 175.00 on the credit cards. But it may just be one of those necessary purchases if it helps keep me going at this diet. I want to be able to exercise and watch TV or listen to music or read a book and the bike would be great for that. We’ll see! Maybe we will win the lottery!

- Lisa

Let’s just begin with the first couple of weeks have been pretty tough.  I have always been someone who eats what he wants when he wants which has pretty much led to the position I am in now.  Having to change the way I live everyday has had it’s trials for sure.  I now wake up to some kind of breakfast made at home and I try to stick to below a few hundred whereas before IF I even ate breakfast it was a fast food stop on the way to work.

Lunch has been the one meal that hasn’t had big big changes.  While we stay away from the likes of McD’s and Burger King, and replaced it with Subway or another low calorie option we do still go out for lunch as it is what time allows.  Neither of us are up early enough in the morning to make a lunch and prepackaged crap is just as bad as eating fast food in a lot of cases.  Either way lunch accounts for between 600-900 calories depending on the day of the week.  We have most days scheduled as to where we go to help the routine.

Dinners have been the big tribulation so far.  Lisa has been trying a lot of new recipes not many of which have been to our liking so finding meals for dinner that both taste good an provide for a low dose of calories has been tough.

Overall snacking has gone down for both of us.  A few 100 calories snacks here and there or a smoothie pretty much round out the day.  The result for 2 weeks of this was a loss of right round 10 pounds.  Hopefully next week I can follow it up with some more loss or at least allow for verification that last week wasn’t a fluke.

My personal goals are pretty simple. I want to lose weight, become more active, keep the weight off, and train my brain to accept healthier options and smaller portions as the norm. I want to curb my emotional eating and quit vegging out in front of the TV all the time. I would like to lose 57 pounds this year. It’s a big task, but not impossible. It’s a little over 1 pound a week and since doctors recommend losing no more than 2 I feel I’ve got a healthy, reasonable goal that I can stick to if I just work hard and don’t let myself go crazy anymore.

I’ve got new recipes to try that I’m counting calories on, and a big thing is that I need to start having a light 200-300 calorie breakfast in the mornings to keep myself going and avoid pigging out when lunch rolls around. I have the desire, and I’m gaining the motivation and hoping that we can stick this one out together with support of family and friends. I’m going to try to blog at least weekly about my progress to keep myself going, and I’m also using sparkpeople.net as a tool to help track my weight, food, and to find recipes and motvation from others out there going through this same struggle.

Tip – AllYou magazine at Wal-Mart has a 10.00 off any Healthometer scale. We bought a 29.99 scale last night and was only 19.99 after the coupon. The magazine is only 2.24 at Walmart so it pays for itself just using the one coupon, but they have 30+ dollars of other coupons in there as well as article and yummy recipes

The Progress and Goal: My personal goal is to be down to about 225 by the end of the year. Considering I am currently at 350 lbs it is quite a task. Especially considering how sedentary my lifestyle is. This is another change we are attempting to make. While we are starting by just changing the diet we also are going t slowly add more physical activities to our daily routine.

We would appreciate everyone’s support in this, family or friend we will need your help. Keep a eye out for more updates as this is where we will do it.

Christmas Eve with Lisa’s Family

Christmas Morning at Home

We are both going to change diets and start an eventual workout routine. I need to loose weight for health and sanity reasons tracking progress on this blog will help me my motivation. So keep up and help support us on our goal.

When they first met and I introduced Lisa as her future daughter in law, I wasn’t sure exactly how serious she though I was. She looked at me and just said “oh really?” I am hoping now that she was looking down on our wedding and seeing how perfect of a day it was, and hoping she knew how badly I wished she was there. Now the time has passed we have been married for a month and I can’t stop thinking about it.

But enough of the depressing crap. Lisa and I were married 1 month ago today. Things got super hectic trying to get everything together for our wedding and then for Lisa’s sisters wedding this month. But now that things have settled down we hope to get more posts and updated on the blog here. Ill leave you with a few wedding pics taken by one of Lisa’s friends. proffesional pics incoming in the next week hopefully.

There are only 3 months and about 3 weeks til the wedding and I have begun trying to lose a little weight to make sure that the dress I bought fits me. We recently got Iphones and they have a million different apps you can use. One is called “Lose It!” and it is a calorie counter you can use. I can keep track of what I eat and how many calories, and it also records my weight and based on the amount I want to lose per week tells me how many calories a day I can have. I’ve been doing Wii Fit to try to burn more calories so that I don’t go over my daily total, and so I don’t starve myself either.

I have my fitting at the end of the month, so my goal is to try to be at least 5 pounds lighter by then. I think I can do it. It’s just a matter of sticking to my goals and passing on things like chocolatey desserts and sodas.

Chris and I will be together for a year in just over a month. I’m hoping that we can book a hotel in Galveston and spend a weekend there alone. We’ve been twice, once together and once with Liam but they were both day trips and I’d really love to actually spend a couple days there, relax, and take my time exploring and just enjoying being away from town.

I think that’s about it for now, hopefully I’ll update more. I have been wanting to update with some of my fitness stuff, just not sure how to do it so we’ll see.

So what has been going on? Well we had Liam this past week. We went and picked him up from his mom’s last saturday, while also picking up some of my mom’s personal belongings after she past away. Everything went well for the most part. Those that know Liam also know how much of a pain he can be and I could tell he got to Lisa on more then one occasion.

We spent all day Wed, in Galveston. We went to Moody Gardens, the Beach and a few resteraunts. We ate WAY to much. But next week starts our pre-wedding diet:(.

Here are some pics of the excursion:

And I think I’m adjusting to cooking and cleaning pretty well. I haven’t let things get out of hand yet and we work together on things, like taking out the trash and doing dishes. We have a set date night. Friday’s are going to be our movie nights or a dinner out night. Doing both right now isn’t as affordable as we’d like, but we decided on an either/or until Chris is working. We saw Friday the 13th last weekend for Valentine’s Day. Hehe, yes a gory violent slasher on V-day. We’re good like that.

Speaking of Valentine’s Day, our first together was great, amazing. Chris got me flowers and a bear and some candy, and even wrote me a song and got a frame to put it in. I couldn’t have asked for anything more, and would have been perfectly happy with just being with him for the day but the extras were much appreciated.

I’m sure as time goes by we’ll get on each other’s nerves a bit and probably have an argument or two, but nothing will take away from the comfort and happiness I feel knowing that we’re finally together and we’ll never have to be apart again.