{"id":117,"date":"2007-08-01T17:05:07","date_gmt":"2007-08-01T21:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattfife.net\/wordpress\/?p=117"},"modified":"2013-07-02T18:44:21","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T01:44:21","slug":"woot-for-summer-goals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=117","title":{"rendered":"Woot for summer goals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I hit the first big milestone of the summer. My goal this year is to get down to my pre-seminary weight. 5 years of grad school saw me put on about 35 lbs.\u00a0 I started my workouts at Easter and I just hit the 20lb mark; which was a great psychological milestone for me. Interestingly enough, changing my diet alone didn&#8217;t do much. It wasn&#8217;t until I started exercising every day that I started losing weight. Here&#8217;s a few things I discovered:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Start eating breakfast &#8211; Just a bagel is fine. But you&#8217;ll eat less during the day if you already ate. Starving yourself makes you eat more later, so just have more infrequent bites.<\/li>\n<li>Exercise is worth 10x dietary changes. I didn&#8217;t really start taking lbs off until I started regularly getting physical activity.<\/li>\n<li>Exerice only what you feel like &#8211; but do it every day. If you&#8217;re tired, just walk that day, if not, run. I run about 2-4 miles each night now.<\/li>\n<li>Start where you&#8217;re at. Don&#8217;t beat yourself up if you&#8217;re out of shape. Just enjoy what you can and start easy. I started the first 2-3 weeks by just walking around the neighborhood. Then jogging a lap\/run a lap at the track, then running a mile, then running two. DON&#8217;T push hard &#8211; it just makes you more reluctant to do it next time. The goal is regularity, not intensity.<\/li>\n<li>Get involved in new hobbies\/activities.\u00a0 If you&#8217;re sitting at home in front of the tube\/computer &#8211; you&#8217;ll eat. Go hang out with friends or a new sport instead.<\/li>\n<li>Eat a filling light meal at night. I sit down with a huge bowl of fruit salad at night. By the end, I&#8217;m stuffed &#8211; but it was watermellon, or cherries, or melons, or the like. It adds up to almost no calories, but it feels like I ate a solid dinner.<\/li>\n<li>Drink lots of water\/tea\/Gatorade &#8211; drop the pop. But not so much for calories, but for hydration. I needed to drink a LOT more water to keep hydrated when I worked out every day. That and it makes you feel much more full and I think helps you lose weight.<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t be a calorie counter\/Don&#8217;t sweat the small stuff. If you get a craving for some salty chips &#8211; have a few. If you&#8217;re craving a pop &#8211; get one. Don&#8217;t start beating yourself up over little things you would like to eat; or keeping a count to &#8216;work it off&#8217; later. That said, I don&#8217;t scarf a whole bag of potato chips or stuff a quart of Hagen-das down my neck. Moderation implies that you may eat less, but that you also equally don&#8217;t just cut certain foods off entirely. Relax, enjoy life, and slowly build healthy, sustainable habits. You may not lose weight as fast, but as long as you&#8217;re pulling a few poiunds off each week or so, you&#8217;re doing fine. Sustainability is what will keep it off later anyway.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I hit the first big milestone of the summer. My goal this year is to get down to my pre-seminary weight. 5 years of grad school saw me put on about 35 lbs.\u00a0 I started my workouts at Easter and I just hit the 20lb mark; which was a great psychological milestone for me. Interestingly enough, changing my diet alone didn&#8217;t do much. It wasn&#8217;t until I started exercising every day that I started losing weight. Here&#8217;s a few&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=117\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogroll"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-1T","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1166,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions\/1166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}