I knew that once I stopped going out to eat when I travel that there was going to be trade offs. The up side: I’d have time to hit the gym, and I’d be eating store bought food. The down side: nearly total lack of social interaction.

My routine so far for this trip:

• wake up at 6am
• get ready for work
• have breakfast in the room
• work for 8–12 hours
• head directly to the gym
• cardio or weights, alternating days
• back to the hotel & shower
• dress in comfy clothes

At that point it’s 8 or 9pm. I figure I have 2–3 hours of time I could spend filling the gaps. On a “school night” some TV in the room, a video on my laptop, or something else I can turn off when it’s time to sleep is probably a good idea.

What about Friday night through Sunday?

There’s a particularly awesome trainer at my local Ballys. Her physique reminds me of Demi Moore in 1997’s GI Jane. The sum of our interaction since 2005 has been a wave and a smile and the occasional, “are you still using this?” when she’s training someone out on the weight room floor.

Yesterday I was laying on my back doing my ab workout and she walked right over to me.

“Want a tip?” she asked, and walked over to grab one of the half-circle balance platforms and placed it under my feet.

I had been doing leg lifts and touching my heels all the way back to the ground before pulling them back up to my chest. She put the balance platform under my heels and it made a big difference. I wasn’t bouncing when I hit the floor any more and there was a lot more control in the motion.

I thanked her for the tidbit and we got to chatting about my struggle with losing weight, what kinds of things I’d been doing, and of course, the GeekFit Podcast. She was really nice about everything; said she’d noticed how hard I’d been working and that she remembered where I was when I started at Bally years ago.

It was a really nice bit of motivation and one that was perfectly timed with me heading to Chicago for 3 weeks this Sunday. I’m armed with my national gym membership, a reservation at an extended stay, and a determination to return either 6–8 lbs lighter or 1.5 – 2% lower in body fat. It’s going to be awesome.

Another update from McBlog on JrMint’s transformation. Keep it going!

Today marks the 30th day of my “official” start of my new workout program and my new diet. After weighing and measuring up with my trainer today, I’m totally stoked to say that I’ve lost 18 pounds (down from 220 to 202), my body fat has lowered from 28.8% to 23.2%, I’ve dropped 1.6&Prime off my waist, 1% off my neck and about a 1/2% each off all the other areas (legs, thigh, etc…). Needless to say I’m very happy, and plan on continuing on with things until I reach my first goal weight of 192 and a body fat under 20%. I’ll regroup and set new goals there.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what conditions led to my putting the weight back on. I guess it’s one part moaning about where I am now, and two parts trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The short list was the new job, the travel, and the all-you-can-eat expense account, but I think it started even earlier than that. I’m almost sure of it because I remember being a little uncomfortable in my interview clothes for my current job.

Thinking back, I remember hitting 300 lbs. I felt great and clothes fit that hadn’t in a really long time. I can’t quite pin-point what brought on the backslide, but it’s not hard to guess how it snow-balled. It just takes a couple days to fall back into the old routine. It’s unfair, and it sucks – oh how it sucks – but that’s just how it goes. You would think that if you were doing something for 2 years it’d take a little longer to revert, but it just doesn’t.

Cheating once or twice a week, doing things in moderation, but keeping the routine going is the only way to truly make a lifestyle change.

A quick progress update for a friend of ours who recently started the great weight loss journey. He posted this on his blog this morning:

Okay thats the workout update. Weighed in at 210.1 today. Thats down over 10 pounds in 2 weeks, so i’m quite happy. My current goal with my trainer is 192 by mid july. The diet is definitely helping out…I’m on a pretty regular 6 small meals a day and I keep it right at my 33 weight watchers points. I don’t feel hungry all the time and I’m eating stuff that I like so that doesn’t make me grumpy like most peoples diets do. Also doing 64-96oz of water a day. [] I feel better then I have in a long time…..so I guess as long as this doesn’t kill me or I give up I should be doing great in month or so. Here’s to no early cardiac arrest!

We’re sure he’s not alone, so shoot us a message about your updates!

Starting today I’m going to attempt to post 1 picture each day to our GeekFit Flickr Group. My goal is to post what I’m eating for lunch each day. I’d like to invite you to join in on this as well by uploading a picture of something to our flickr group. It could be your scale showing your current weight, the food you will be eating, something that motivates you to get out an exercise or even your awesome new equipment.

Below is a video showing you one of the ways to go about submitting a photo or video to the GeekFit Flickr Group. Let me know if you have any questions.

I already touched on this a bit in a previous utter on GeekFit, but I wanted to elaborate a little here after I’d had some time to think about it.

Last week I was going to the gym pretty regularly and I could tell that I was feeling better. It was the usual batch of progress: more energy, less stressed, looking forward to my next trip. Then something happens and I’m moved to take a day off from the gym. It could be I stayed up too late and a morning gym trip is unreasonable or the afternoon was busy and I didn’t have time to go then. The really interesting thing happens the day after the day off from working out which I’m calling Second Day Syndrome (SDS).

Like I’m constantly trying to convince my wife, my memory is terrible. I can pretty well remember yesterday, sort of recall the day before, but beyond that it’s a good thing I take notes well. During SDS the memory of going to the gym and not going to the gym are both fresh in my mind. Not going to the gym is a slightly fresher memory so I’ll say that a workout has about 40/60 chance of happening. On the next day the odds drop to 30/70. Add that to the guilt of not having gone now for 3 days and you have a recipe for disaster.

So what do we do about the dreaded SDS? If your memory is as bad as mine you might want to follow a steadfast rule of “no more than one day off in a row.” I’m going to give it a try and see how I do. If this is all I needed to do to stay consistent I’m going to be relieved and upset I hadn’t done it sooner.

With Ivy working a little later in the evenings, I changed my workout time to fall between when I finished working and when she got home. This worked for a while, but only while I was at home. As soon as I had to travel somewhere, the afternoon routine fell apart. Invariably one of three things would happen: the client or co-worker would want to go out to dinner, I’d know someone in the area and they’d want to hang out, or I’d need to spend the evening preparing to resolve some issue raised that day.

Last night I put my sweats, tank, shoes, socks, etc. in my office chair and when the alarm went off at 5am I crept out of the bedroom, got dressed, and headed to the gym. There were a lot of new faces, so I’ll have to introduce myself to 1 or 2 at a time. This morning I met Tyler with whom I commiserated about the “getting started again” blues. He sympathized and I hustled through my workout ending with some ab work. Tomorrow I’ll do some good old cardio.

In short, it seems the only time that’s consistently available to me is the early morning whether I’m home or traveling. So back to mornings I go although not as early as I had been going initially. 3am comes a bit too early…

I’ve been using the Backpack service from 37 Signals, Inc. for the last few years as a journal to track my food & exercise each day. I’ve even given it a geeky title of I/O (shorthand for for Input/Output). Their interface is easy to use and they offer a free account for the basic service, so there isn’t any commitment to start playing around with it although you can’t go wrong for $5/month for their upgraded version.

And now, on to the second part of the subject: goals. They say the best way to stick to something is to make a public declaration of your goal so you won’t be able to squirm out of it. Here we go: I’m going to lose 40+ pounds by January 1st, 2008. That means clean intake, consistent output, and putting out a new podcast on a regular basis.

This is a public link to my backpack page that gets updated throughout the day as I eat and exercise: http://xinu.backpackit.com/pub/1218865. If you create a food log of your own, post it here in a comment and we’ll mention your name on each new show, encouraging you to keep kicking butt & and taking names. Let’s do it!

Jason’s public backpack page is: http://abstrakone.backpackit.com/pub/1229049

I’ve started a GeekFit SparkPeople Group. Listeners, we invite you to join the group and being tracking your progress and making a change in your life.

1. Visit www.SparkPeople.com, sign up for a free account and setup your personal program.
2. From your MySpark Page (if logged in) click on the �SparkPoints� tab.
3. From the SparkPoints section, click on the �Groups� sub-tab
4. Search for your organization�s group name. Your group name is filled in below.
5. From the Group Homepage, click on the �Join this group� button.
How to Get Started Today!

http://www.sparkpeople.com/myspark/groups.asp

Group Code: WTLZSMV3RRI9R7GPDPFI1RPLYWCR8C