T - 220

Last night we did Stuffed Turkey Burgers from Ellie Krieger; Yum!

I have to say that it's getting cold again here in Wisconsin, and I thought it would be fun to pull out the grill to remind us that spring and summer are coming. Turns out it's not the greatest idea in the world to grill when it's cold out. Mostly because the grill has to work that much harder to heat and cook the food, as a result, you the grill-master have to crank up the heat to compensate. While the burgers still turned out delicious, there may still be remnants of them on the grill because of a little sticking problem. (guess I should oil it up better next time). Anyhow, these Turkey burgers were stuffed with reduced fat Mozz & roasted red peppers. Wow. Very good. Personally, I wanted a little something salty on it, but it's certainly a great recipe that we'll likely use again in the near future.

Also I want to thank Bart for the daily regimen advice, run and weight lift on alternating days (this was news to me). Also, do the elliptical after lifting for maximum effect. This corroborates a Men's Health article from this month that talks about a study showing the effectiveness of cardio after lifting. The lifting can be as little as 30 a week (10 mins/day over 3 days) to be effective. It also gives me new inspiration to do something, in otherwords be active every day. I like it, let's see if I can make it work with everything else.

~B

Conflicts of Interest

222 Days out. So, some of you realize that I run a beer blog in addition to a couple other blogs. The beer blog happens to hold a conflict to the real purpose of this blog, which is of course to get fit etc before the big day. I'm not saying that I don't drink beer anymore, it's just in moderation.

In fact, this weekend was the first weekend since I started this blog that I picked up a six of new beers for the purposes of review. The other beers I had this weekend were really about having a relaxing beverage with dinner or just relaxing in general. So I guess my point, is that unless you're very lucky, nearly anytime you're driving for something goal-wise, you're going to run into conflicts between multiple things you want or need. Like anything, if you can find a balance or a happy medium you will be best served, but that is not always possible. So, some days it's going to come down to hard choices and unfortunately in this case, I think the beer blog has to suffer. I'd like to be on a track where I was posting 8 new beers a week, especially since that blog gets much better traffic than this blog, but at least for the next several months, I'll have to be sure that I keep that to one or two posts/reviews per month and hope that will be enough to keep some level of readership.

The benefit here of course, is that this blog can continue to grow, and you all can continue to see how I progress towards this goal of being fit by September. So far, so good. I'm down about 7lbs, which I'm pretty excited about, we'll have to see how that continues to go.

~Brian

Invites? Oh yeah.

So we did much of the work around our invites last night. Whew.

We had to pick out the verse and the script and the reply cards. Glad that's done. Hopefully we'll have enough, and this weekend we can get the rest of the save the date stuff done and out the door. Not much of an update I realize, but things are going steady at the moment. Not much to report.

A little over 32 weeks to go

As of tomorrow, I will have been tracking eating habits for a week, and I wanted to see what effect that amount of tracking has had on how I've been eating. I've felt for some time now, that unless you're adamant about nutrition info, you really have no idea about what kind of impact you're having on yourself with each meal.

228 and counting

So last night we tried a recipe from the Martha Stewart Food magazine, I love that magazine BTW. You can find the instructions here.

So we weren't able to find the boston bibb lettuce that it calls for, and I think I grabbed a small onion rather than the shallot it calls for, but the whole thing was delicious. I think next time, rather than trying to approximate lettuce cups, maybe we'll just add shredded lettuce and make it a kind of salad. It was delicious however, and I've been surprised at how once I started eating better and less, how I haven't been as hungry as I thought I would. I feel like I'm making progress towards my goals and that's inspiring me to go farther.

We served it with a side of snow peas and brown rice steamed. Very very good.

Cheers!

229 to go, how's it coming?

So, the first thing you should know when looking at the graph below is that I adjusted my calorie goal down, because a) I'm excited by the progress I'm seeing, and b) 2700+ seemed like a lot. So as of Saturday I'm just under 2500. And while I would have been above the line anyway on Friday and Sat, it wouldn't have been so egregious.

So, I really can't say enough good things about this Livestrong/MyPlate app. The iPhone app is like $3, but it's really nice to be able to track things while you're out and about. In this case, it needs a little updating because it sometimes has a bad sync or something (adds stuff I didn't eat), but it's like 95% of the way there.

Like I said to my bosses at SearchDaddy...

This thing isn't going to work if we don't start tracking with some analytics:

so it's 232 days to the wedding, and I'm pretty excited to have discovered the Livestrong/MyPlate app; what I realized from that website is that a guy my age, weight and size ought to be eating calorie-wise, and I've been able to record then all the things I eat in there (they have a handy little iphone app), or drink. Then I can get a sense of what I'm doing to myself. So far, I have a lot of sugar and salt. I should have figured.

Yum! Great recipe..

234 days to the wedding...

So last night was Julie's night to cook. We did a chicken with Ginger and Miso paste in the broiler, but I think the real star of the show (and I think she would agree with me) was the roasted corn and edamame salad. Wow. Very tasty, and if you're looking for a nice summery side to go with a sizable protein, this is a good bet.

So coble that with the discovery of the myplate/livestrong app Bart told me about today, and I'm a happy camper today apart from the fact that I discovered the shake I've been making in the mornings was like 1100 calories. It's mostly fruit, so I thought it was healthy. I guess it's like most things, even water in excess will kill you.

But I did run a mile today, and I did get in another mile on the elliptical, so I'm feeling pretty good. Surprised that my appetite is actually smaller. Now I'm not saying this has anything to do with the health conscious attitude we've been focused on, but perhaps more to do with the illness I was experiencing on Friday which sapped my appetite for much of the weekend. All I know is I'm eating less, feeling pretty good and my size 34's don't feel as tight as they did. :-D

~Brian

Eating healthy is part of it too

So last night we tried a new recipe, and as often happens, we switch off nights cooking and so last night I made Salmon BLT's,

HOLY CRAP.

Wow, they're really just what they sound like, but damn they were surprisingly tasty. So I should mention that we got some healthy wheat bread, substituted turkey bacon for the real deal, and left out the mayo. So the mixture that goes on the bread with the lemon and cayenne is kinda hot if you made it like I did, and pretty zippy with all the lemon, but it really doesn't spread due to the lack of mayo and I think that was a weakness of our meal, but with that, the lettuce and tomato the whole thing was really good, if not kinda dry. I sort of wanted another one as soon as we were done, but it was still pretty filling. We did also use frozen salmon fillets, I'm sure this would be a million times better with fresh (isn't everything?) but respecting a wallet and a belly means frozen. No worries, it works.

On the side we did broccoli slaw with a low fat asian dressing. very good stuff, and it's a nice way to add simple veggies and crunch to any meal. In fact, I had the same side with my lunch today. Next time I might make the panini. Yum!

~B

So, it's January...

And I'm a little late in getting this blog started as referenced here, but hey, that happens.

The goal isn't going to move, so I need to pick up the pace, eh? You may or may not be able to see here what my current run status is, just in case you can't, it's here on the Nike site.

I'll admit that the nike plus thing doesn't track my time on the nautilus well, and since I did a mile on there for the first 8 minutes of my run, the times and averages are a little off, but that will happen, eh?

Right, so approximately 186 days to the bachelor party, and 236 to go till the main event. Today I proposed the idea of running the flying pig half marathon to Julie in an effort to get into shape, and put me in a good place to try and run Chicago in October. Going to see how training goes between now and then, but I bet a lot of people in Cincinnati who are avid runners are thinking about this race about now. I want to talk to a guy I work with about the pig, and Julie's cousin Pat about his training regimine in running the NYC marathon this past october. Glad I have good resources to reach out to.

So What's the point of this anyway....

Don't I already have three other completely useless, unread blogs out there?

Of course I do! But this one will help me track my progress (hopefully with people cheering me on) as I try to get fit for many goals this year, but most intentionally, my wedding. Hence, this is a countdown to September.