Loading ...Week 1 In Review
By Thomas | January 7, 2008
Wow! The first week went by fast. That’s likely because we started on a Tuesday, not a Sunday. And we have had some success already! I lost a total of 6.6 lbs in six days and Kenny lost 2.8. Not too shabby! If we can keep up even half this rate, we will both reach and exceed our April 1st goals.
Just a few brief announcements.
- As you may have noticed, I added a little “weight lost since January 1st” tracker box on the right side. This will tell you at a glance who is winning at the moment. It will be updated every Sunday after weigh-ins. For a table of all our official weigh-ins, click the Progress link at the top of the page.
- There is a poll on the right sidebar, asking who you think will win the TwoBrothers.com 2008 Weight Loss Challenge Championship. Go ahead and make your choice (or wait a few weeks to make a better guess).
- We have finalized The Prize. Check it out. If you would like to donate a prize to add to the prize pool, contact us!
- We are taking pictures to capture our body transformation as we lose weight. Our pictures can be found by clicking Progress at the top or by following these links:
I added pictures for front, sides and back to my pics. You can actually see a bit of difference in the right side and back side pics. If Kenny decides to take pics in more positions, I will post them up as I get them.
- Finally, I want to apologize for the database errors that happen when posting comments. We *do* receive the comments, so don’t let that stop you from saying your piece!
I will try to get it fixed as soon as I can.I think I fixed the problem. Please let me know if you get any more errors when posting a comment!
If you have any suggestions about what you’d like to see up here, drop us a comment. We’ll be adding little extras as time goes on.
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | 3 Comments »
A ButtLoad of Chicken!!!
By Kenny | January 6, 2008
Here is my weigh-in photo for January 6th
I don’t know what’s up with the “body fat monitor”. It’s showing that while I went down in weight, I also went up in body fat percentage from 25% up to 27.6%. These digital scales are a little sketchy when it comes to the body fat percentage measuring feature. We may have to find a better way to measure body fat %, or just have more than 1 scale at the final weigh-ins to make sure everything is consistent. Or we can just throw ourselves in a pool and who ever sinks to the bottom and drowns is the winner of the body fat challenge. I just flipped a coin and won, so you go first.
Tommy is off to a very fast start, so it’s time for me to strap in and start taking this seriously. No more bags of deep fried, bacon stuffed doughnuts served on a sizzling platter of lard. It’s time to lock in. The time has arrived for desperate measures. It’s time, to eat a BUTTLOAD of Chicken!
One of my planning practices is to marinade a bunch of chicken breast to eat during the week. I’ll usually do this on Sundays. As the name implies, the first step is to buy a butt-load of chicken breasts. Then just add various marinades & seasonings that you like and pack it all up in some ziplocks. I now have a buttload of chicken breasts ready to cook for the rest of the week. Each bag has 2 breasts of chicken in it so I’ll freeze it all and just take a bag out the night before to bake and eat the next day. I can’t survive on chicken alone, but because it’s so healthy, convenient and versatile, chicken is a staple of my diet. I’ll also freeze some fish like talapia or orange roughy and keep a few packages of tuna around for when I get in a jam. Another major staple of my diet is Turkey Meatloaf. It’s so freggin delicious and good for you I can’t explain it in words- you’ll just have to try it for yourself. I’ll post my Turkey Meatloaf Recipe and after you eat it, you’ll want my DNA for the future when cloning science has advanced enough to where you can combine your inferior non-turkey-meatloaf-eating ass with my genes and create a superhuman race of turkey meatloaf eating supermen and women who will rule the world. Too bad I didn’t bank my cordblood.
Locks of har are $5.00. Saliva in a jar is $10.00. If you want more than that, you’ll have to email me for more details.
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | 4 Comments »
Thomas’s Official Jan. 6 Weigh-in
By Thomas | January 6, 2008
I live in the future in Japan, so it’s already Sunday morning. According to our Rules, that’s weigh-in time. Here are my results.
96.2 kg and 22.6% body fat. 96.2 kg translates to 211.6 lbs. If I’m doing my subtraction right, that’s 6.6 lbs lost since the start of the competition!
The mountain work, Japanese diet and giving up snacks completely really worked for this first week. But I can’t get too comfortable. I was lucky that the competition started during the Japanese New Year holiday. I’ve been off from work this past week, so I had plenty of time to devote to mountain work.
I start work again on Tuesday. I think hiking in the mountains will be impossible for weekdays from now on. It’s dangerous to hike at night. It’s easy to get lost and its so dark that you can’t see your path well. Big rocks that you don’t see can twist your ankle and put you on the sidelines. Then there are the wild boars and the bears. I’m going to have to find another way, at least for weekdays.
And another picture has been added to my gallery. I don’t see much difference yet, do you?
Tune in for Kenny’s official weigh-in within the next 24 hours.
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | 9 Comments »
It’s the Calories STUPID!!!
By Kenny | January 5, 2008
Tommy’s right about calories. If you want to get more specific think about this; There are 3500 calories in 1 pound of fat. Here’s what it boils down to. If you want to lose 1 pound of fat, you simply have to burn 3500 more calories than you consume. For our purposes here, it doesn’t matter if those calories come from protein, carbs or fat. A calorie is a calorie. There is a lot of evidence out there that shows that a fat calorie is metabolized differently from a protein calorie, and a carb calorie, etc…, but that really only matters to geeks and scientists and other fat asses who sit around all day eating and trying to act smart. Just remember, so long as you’re keeping your calories in relative check, the above “a calorie is a calorie” mantra is true.
The first thing you have to do is figure out what your Metabolic Rate is. Your Basal Metabolic Rate BMR is how many calories you would need to consume every day to keep your body and it’s basic functions up and running. There are hundreds of little 2 second programs on the web like this one that measure your BMR. Your BMR is nice to know, but not all that useful when trying to lose weight- you really need to know more about your individual overall metabolism, which is how many calories you would need to consume every day to maintain your current weight. This is much trickier to calculate, because we each have different metabolisms and lifestyles.
I know that my current metabolic rate is about 2700. So this means that theoretically, if I keep living like I live, and eat 2700 calories every day, I won’t lose or gain any weight. However, if I consume 3500 calories less over the course of, let’s say, 1 week (about 500 less per day), I’ll lose 1 pound that week.
I know what my BMR is because I track everything I eat, and how much I exercise on a daily basis, as well as how much I weigh on a weekly basis and enter all the data into into a software program I purchased. So long as I keep good records, the program will track changes to my Metabolic Rate as I lose (or gain) weight, eat less (or more) and exercise more (or less). In reality our MR fluctuates all the time, so by logging everything into a program that has all the algorithms and stuff figured out, I will always know what my Metabolic Rate is each day. Armed with this knowledge, if I can manage to eat less than 2700 calories today, I will have burned more fuel than I have consumed and I will lose weight as a result. If I do this over time, I will lose a lot of weight. Or if I want to get more specific and set a goal for myself like, “I will weigh less than 215 pounds by April 1st and will be crowned the Ultimate Weight Loss Challenge Champion and make Tommy cry and give me money”, the program can create a daily budget, that continually adjusts over time that guarantees that I will taste Tommy’s salty tears of sadness and defeat.
Tommy, you can climb all the mountains you want, but when the rainy season comes and your fat ass is sitting on the balcony, drinking a coke, eating dog meat, staring at the picture of me accepting my belt, wondering where it all went wrong, just remember- It’s the calories STUPID!!!
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | 5 Comments »
Find An Exercise That You Can Love
By Thomas | January 5, 2008
Losing weight isn’t just about dieting. Exercise is important too. To lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you put into your body everyday. You can limit the amount of calories that go into your body by dieting. To increase the amount of calories you burn however, you have to get moving!
Some people just don’t like to exercise. I don’t have anything against exercise myself, but there are some forms of it that I don’t enjoy doing at all. I’m not a treadmill person. I get really bored if my scenery doesn’t change when I’m running. I’m not into swimming, jump rope or squat thrusts either. If I were to base my exercise regimen completely on squat thrusts and treadmills, I’d basically be giving the 2008 Weight Loss Challenge to Kenny. I wouldn’t be able to keep it up because I wouldn’t be enjoying myself.
You have to find an exercise that you like. I like the be outdoors, in the forest with the bears. Luckily, my little town has some mountains to the south behind the elementary school.
I love to climb mountains. And since it’s all uphill, it’s an incredible cardio workout. My heart rate gets up much higher than it does when I jog. More importantly, when I am in the mountains, it’s easy for me to “lose the time”. Every trip to the mountain I get to explore new trails. This exploration takes my mind off of the physical discomfort that my body is feeling.
I can do a 2-hour hike up in the mountains and feel great the whole time. On the other hand, it only takes about 20 minutes of jogging before I get restless and want to stop. The only trick here is that I found something I loved and turned it into an exercise, which is much easier than doing it the other way around.
Find an exercise you can love. Make a list of your passions and interests and see if you can find a way to turn one of them into a physical workout. If you can do that, then you’ll magically find that you love to exercise.
I’ve been hiking in the mountains for seven of the past seven days. I feel great and I actually look forward to exercising everyday. My fat brother Kenny doesn’t stand a chance. If you want to watch me destroy him and win the 2008 Weight Loss Challenge Championship, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | 6 Comments »
When You Can’t Refuse Food
By Thomas | January 4, 2008
The New Years holiday is big in Japan. People get together with their families, eat special New Years food and visit the shrine. It last for about a week and even the banks close.
So when New Years rolls around, it’s time to visit the in-laws. Now, over time my in-laws have figured out what I like to eat. They know I like beef. They know I like to drink Coke. They often take me out to eat yakiniku. That’s really awesome of them I think!
What they don’t know is that I’m participating in the TwoFatBrothers.com 2008 Weight Loss Challenge and hence on a diet. This is what was waiting for me at the in-laws house yesterday:
Yakiniku! and Coke! Aahhhh!
Now, nobody in my wife’s family drinks Coke. They bought that bottle specially for me because they knew I was coming over for lunch. I can’t refuse to drink it. I can’t refuse to eat the yakiniku either.
What do you do when you find yourself in a situation like this? I’ll tell you what I did. I told them politely about my diet and then I ate the food and drank the Coke anyway. They know about my diet now so in the future they won’t have to buy Coke for me. And I cheated for one day on my diet to avoid a social blunder. That’s it.
If you find yourself in a situation where you are faced with a choice like this, I say go ahead and break your diet and then inform the people involved about your dieting goals. Then they will know for the future and you can feel better about refusing next time.
My weight was at an all time low this morning, so apparently no harm was done.
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | 4 Comments »
I was a miserable fat ass, now I’m just a fat ass.
By Kenny | January 3, 2008
I have a confession to make. I’ve actually been losing weight since September 2007 when, at 263.8 pounds and unable to climb a short flight of stairs or play with my 3 year old daughter for more than 5 minutes without feeling like I had just run an uphill marathon with a dead yak tied around my waist, I decided it was time to make a change. Over the last 4 mos, I’ve read everything I could get my hands on regarding health, weight loss, fitness and goal setting and I’m happy to report that I’ve gone from a miserable 263.8 pounds to much more manageable 230. Though I’ve learned a lot and have experienced positive results, I still have a long way to go to get to my ‘fighting weight’ of 205.
Like a lot of people making a body transformation, (the kind that doesn’t involve making a suit from the skin of dead people), I’ve hit a plateau. But I’m determined to fight through it with the help of this blog and the competition with Tommy.
Getting started is the hardest part. I’d like to share some of my experiences up to this point as well as blog about the rest of my journey as I go for my 205 pound goal. But not right now, because I’m freaking tired so you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.
By they way, are you about a size 16?
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | 2 Comments »
Eating trick #1. Have a plan.
By Kenny | January 3, 2008
Wow Tommy- that’s very insightful. I think we all can relate to over-eating or eating like crap when we’re bored or anxious. Sometimes I’ll feel like ordering a pizza after a particularly long or stressful day at work as a “reward” for my toil. I find that I’m in the most trouble when I find myself hungry, bored and stressed and there’s ‘nothing to eat’.
Nothing to eat???
That’s right. The kitchen and pantry may be filled with food, some of it healthy food, but in my weakened state of mind the perception is that there still is ‘nothing to eat’ so I’m going to order a pizza or eat chips, snacks or other BS because it’s easy and rewarding.
For me, the key to overcoming this obstacle is simple, but not easy. I plan. I prepare my meals in advance and plan, to a certain extent, when I’m going to eat them. Today for example, I knew exactly what I was going to eat and when (about) I was going to eat it. I made everything up this morning in about 15 minutes. I made a shake for breakfast which I consumed at 9:30, and I made a huge chicken breast wrap for lunch to eat at 12:30 and I had a frozen meal to eat at 3:30 or 4:00. At home, I have a chicken breast marinating in the fridge to bake for 20 minutes on 400′ to eat tonight. Also, I have a huge stash of mixed nuts at my desk at work- nuts are good for you, so long as you don’t go overboard and they are certainly better than chips or a glass of hot fat. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to make another shake for breakfast, cook a chicken breast and spinach for my 12:30 meal. Eat another frozen meal at 3:30 and eat turkey meatloaf for dinner. Done! The trigger for me to over eat is simply hunger. If I let myself get hungry, without a healthy food within reach, I’ll eat impulsively every time.
By the way, spinach is f’ing good for you and so is chicken breast. I get a whole bag of fresh leaf baby spinach and sauté it in a big pan with 1/2 tablespoon of butter (I know, I know), then I add 2 tablespoons of fat free cream cheese. All this while I’m baking a chicken breast for 20 minutes in the oven. Sometimes I’ll add carrots or onions, or mushrooms to the spinach and viol la! I have a delicious, healthy meal to eat for lunch. It’s filling and only about 350 calories. It’s amazing how good healthy food tastes when you’re hungry. The key is to having it around and to plan on eating it.
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | No Comments »
Overeating: My Biggest Obstacle To Losing Weight
By Thomas | January 3, 2008
My biggest obstacle to losing weight is overeating.
I drink lots of Cokes, eat lots of chocolate/sugary foods and eat snacks during the day, all of this when I’m not really hungry. For meals, I fill my plate to the brim and often go back for seconds or thirds. Sometimes I eat dessert for lunch! Clearly I do a lot of eating that I don’t have to do.
To win the 2008 Weight Loss Challenge, I will surely have to stop this habit of eating when I’m not hungry. To do that, I first have to determine why I eat when I’m not hungry. Then I have to learn to recognize when I’m about to eat something I don’t need and train myself to do something else instead.
I found this article about recognizing your eating habits last night. It says:
To become aware of your eating habits, keep track of situations in which you find yourself craving unhealthy foods. Write them down in a notebook or on your weekly menus. Keep a list of what, when and why you eat for a few days. See if any relationships or patterns emerge. Ask yourself if you tend to eat when you’re bored, angry, tired, anxious, stressed, depressed or socially pressured.
Starting now, I will do exactly this.
Of the top of my head, with no data, I think that I overeat when I am bored and anxious. Also, now that I think about it, I often couple certain activities with eating. I almost always have an unhealthy snack and a Coke when I watch a DVD for example.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that I really need to learn to identify what triggers me to overeat. That’s my mission for this week. Once I get this obstacle out of the way, the Weight Loss Challenge Championship is as good as mine.
Here are some short articles I found on the topic:
- Get in touch with your eating habits
- How to stop emotional eating
- Support weight loss with a food and exercise diary
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | 2 Comments »
Day 1 of the Weight Loss Challenge Championship
By Kenny | January 1, 2008
Twofatbrothers.com is an idea that Tommy came up with after I challenged him to a friendly weight-loss competition a couple of weeks ago. I just sort of mentioned it in passing, thinking it would be fun and motivating to have a contest where we could each set personal health goals, go after them and use the competition aspect to keep each other on track and accountable while having a little fun with it. After obsessing over the idea, Tommy came up with the blogging concept where we could not only hold each other accountable, but we could make everything public to where we really have to make a commitment to succeed or else ‘everybody’ would see you fail.
Coincidentally, we both have a goal to weigh 205, which is the upper weight threshold for the light-heavyweight division in MMA, a sport that we are both very passionate about. So, 205 is our ultimate goal. Now Tommy and I are brothers, but we’re not twins so we are going to measure and compete in terms of percentages of weight lost and total body fat percentage. We will still track total pounds lost and compare that to our goals, but because everyone’s body is different and we are starting from different points, total pounds lost, while motivating and easy to track, isn’t as fair for competition as % of body weight lost and total body fat%.
Here is my original weigh in photo from this morning.
I hope this contest will be interesting, educational and motivating for Tommy and I, as well as anyone else who wants to follow along until April 1st, when I will accepting my Weight Loss Challenge Championship belt and Tommy will be adding another pink ribbon to his vast collection of honorable mention and participation awards.
Let’s get it on!!!
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 | No Comments »