The Speculist

I've chosen a few personality parameters around which to shape my program:

1. Unsurprisingly, given my association with this blog, I am far more motivated by numbers and the gadgetry involved in collecting them than other means of experiencing the process (such as how I look in the mirror or how I am feeling).

2. I live rock-throwing distance* from a city-parks-department-provided, state-of-the-art, fitness center. It has about two-dozen stack- or plate- loaded weight lifting machines (again the gadget factor), costs me about 25 - 30% less than comparable or lesser private health clubs in membership dues, and is even directly on at least two of my paths home from work.

3. Finally, for now, before and beyond the fact that I am a Speculist and a gearhead, I am a foodie. This means that the ' diet' portion of this exercise will consist of reducing portion sizes and shifting my food choices toward whole grains, minimally-processed fruits and vegetables, and lean meats. (The 'exercise' portion of this diet will consist of controlled and machine-guided weight lifting to raise my overall abysmal activity level and maintain whatever level of muscle mass I've managed to hang on to, combined with low-level cardio activities calibrated to put my system in the 'fat-burning' zone.)

All of these choices have been made to maximize the probability that I can continue the process long enough to achieve the ultimate goal and minimize the possibility that I will fall back to old ways when, or if, my primary and secondary goals are achieved.

PROGRESS REPORT: Good News and Bad News

The Good News -
In the week ending Friday, January 26th, 2007, my body weight has decreased 3.2 pounds from my starting weight of 231.8. While this is about half of Phil's first week progress**, it is 33% higher than my target at this point. In future installments of this series I will explain the means and reasons I've used to set these weekly goals, for now it is sufficient to know that I'm meeting or exceeding them.

The Bad News -
Over the same period measures of my body composition, as quantified by Percent Body Fat (%BF) and Percent Skeletal Muscle (%SM) and enumerated by daily use of the Omron HBF-500***, have both been going the opposite directions from those intended. %BF is up 0.5% and %SM is down 0.3%, implying I've gained 1.8 pounds of body fat and lost 0.7 pounds of skeletal muscle and 2.5 pounds of 'other' in the week between Friday the 19th and Friday the 26th.

EVALUATION:
I'm on target to make my goal, but there are some disturbing implications to the information so far. I haven't been at this long enough to determine the degree to which my measurements could be influenced by variables such as hydration, exercise frequency, and metabolic and hormonal fluctuation, among others, so I'm going to stick to my plan for a while and see how things develop.

Next time, more on the tools I've chosen to assist me in this process and some additional insight into my goals and how I've chosen to set them.

NOTES:

* In the interest of truth in blogging, the fitness center is not, actually, within the range to which I could throw a rock of any size. According to Google Earth it is 913.5 feet from my bedroom as the crow flies, 1,364.56 feet from my back door by the most direct footpath, and a quarter mile or so away from my garage by car. Unless I want to drop the cost of an Italian supercar on outfitting my basement, this is the next-closest big pile of top-quality body-modification machines I have access to.

**This is ABSOLUTELY THE LAST direct comparison readers will find in these entries between my path and Phil's. We are different people, using different means to achieve broadly similar goals of physical and psychological modification. I make the comparison at this point only to introduce the subject of my goals and the means by which I have chosen to set them.

***I'll get more in depth in my discussion of the gadgetry involved in this process in future entries. For know it might enlighten the reader to know that the Omron HBF-500 'Body Composition Monitor' is a scale with electrode patches for inductively estimating Body Fat Percentage, Skeletal Muscle Percentage, relative level of Visceral Fat (fat around the internal organs as opposed to sub-cutaneous fat, and calculates Body Mass Index and Resting Metabolic Rate in food calories.