Tim's blog, week 2: Positive steps

To start off, let’s do the numbers from this past week.

1. 109,191 steps;
2. 152 floors;
3. 49.05 miles;
4. 20,515 calories burned;
5. 10,925 calories consumed; and
6. 5.3 lbs. lost, (hooray!)

My week has included many little victories and some old, challenging behavior. From an exercise standpoint, I continued to make sure that I stayed active through the day, offsetting sedentary periods of time with active periods of time and keeping the same goal of 10,000 steps. My average was 15,599 steps, and my best day was 22,253 steps, or 9.62 miles (getting out of bed after that day was challenging to say the least). I feel like I’m increasing my awareness of when I need to exercise and I'm looking for ways to move around after extended periods of sitting still.

I’ve begun to gain a little insight into how much I’m eating and the quality of that food. As I said last week, logging food is extremely helpful, and I’m finding that this practice can also trigger negative emotions. Logging food forces me to look at “what is” and “what’s true” – for example, after a rather challenging day, filled with both frustration and disappointment, I fell into an old behavior that I believe is clinically known as “trying to consume every piece of food in sight.” After arriving home, I felt guilty and, dare I say, ashamed about my breakdown. As I sat staring at my computer monitor, all I could think of was that this was the first day since I had started this project that I ate more calories than I’d burned. So, with resolve and after some soul searching, I typed “Seafood buffet, 1,000 calories in one sitting.”

Just typing it again, I’m feeling the sting.

Here’s where I believe I’ve exhibited a tiny bit of behavior change: Instead of an extended session of beating myself up over this breakdown, (OK, I did beat myself up a little on the drive home), I changed my clothes and took a half-hour walk. I didn’t want the last picture in my brain to be me sitting at a restaurant compulsively eating too much of the wrong type of food. I happily awoke the next morning back on the right track.

It bears saying that my relationship with food has been at times as comforting as my best friend and at times a destructive nemesis to my health. Changing my eating habits is essential to improving my health. As I look at the data in my food logs, a pattern is emerging: Lots of salt, lots of carbohydrates, foods that are high in calories and fat and are very dense and highly processed, and probably worst of all, very, very few green vegetables. Taking on the issue of feeding my body healthy food, in moderation, will require a slow, deliberate ascent up the Mt. Everest of my eating behavior. And so this week’s goal is to begin the climb, consciously and with an open mind.

A few people have asked me to report on how I’m feeling. So, to end this week’s blog, I thought I’d give you a little more insight into how two-plus weeks of this experiment has positively affected me. In general, I’m feeling a whole lot better and I have tons more energy, my clothes actually fit (as opposed to being too tight) and many of my friends and family have commented that I look thinner, healthier and appear to be in a more positive state of mind. In addition to walking, I re-joined a gym and have been going at least twice a week and doing some moderate weight training, and as a result, I’m feeling stronger and more energized.

So things continue to be moving in a good direction and I look forward to updating this blog next week.

Tim Castallo is a coordinator for mHIMSS