travis' brain dump

Having a baby. Dead serious. If you ever need time to fly by and lose track of the days that have past, having a newborn in the house will do it. I seriously can’t believe my son will be 3 weeks old tomorrow. It feels like yesterday. It’s probably due to the lack of good sleep and the holes in the memory that causes but wow.

I’m starting to have flashbacks of when my daughter was first born. I can honestly say I can’t account for the first 6 months of her life. I remember next to nothing about anything from that period of time. Pretty scary.

Anyway, having the new kiddo around is kinda fun. I feel sorry for poor Amanda though who has the worst sleeping schedule out of all of us. She’s been doing really good with though, I’m really impressed.

On another note. Started the second round of P90X this morning. This should be interesting since I’m switching up the workout times to early morning instead of after work. It’s just easier on my schedule and my body. When I get home in the evening, the last thing I want to do is work out after a day of dealing with my usual day of tasks and being gone from home for almost 12 hours. Early morning though seems to be the trick. I’ve got a friend of mine, Adam, who is joining in. I think he was successfully destroyed this morning, lol. Still, 4:30 am wakeups… *shudder*.

We’ll see how this goes.

Well that’s it in a nutshell. 🙂

Ok, so I forget what week I’m actually on. I think this technically qualifies as week 9 or 10… I’ll keep the count right from here out (since it’s important). So far most of the changes are remaining visual which is kind of interesting. Muscle definition improvement, endurance improvement, flexibility, etc… It’s just funny watching the scale dip 5 lbs then come right back up but still have your clothes fit loose, exception my shirts… the more it gets loose in the belly, the tighter it gets on my shoulders.

So here I am. The home stretch of this workout plan as it looks on paper. It’s nothing but toss up after toss up here keeping my body all confused and unable to plateau out. To add to the mix and confuse myself even more I’ve adopted a military style early morning pt routine to really get things moving. Nothing like waking up at 5am to blast yourself with everything from jumping jacks to pushups then head out for that 2 mile run.

It’s nice though, it actually seems to help me have more energy during the day altho I feel like I could eat an entire cow all day long. We should see how well this works out in a few weeks. I should be coming to the close of this last phase in the next 4-5 weeks upon which I will rest for a week and probably start this routine all over again. (what… i like it ok? :))

So, i’m hoping by the end of this I’ll have at least hit my goals of 3″+ off the waist and 20 lbs stable. Honestly, if I stopped building so much muscle up from this blasted thing I’d probably have hit my weight goal easily by now, lol. 3″+ is still the solid goal for waist line though and it doesn’t appear I will have to worry too much about that… I may actually end up exceeding it if this toss up in the final 5 weeks does what I think it will.

We shall see.

So I got lazy on posting last week and didn’t get a report up – at least I wasn’t lazy on the workout plan though. 🙂 Everything has been going pretty smoothly. I’ve really been enjoying this second phase with the exception of the Yoga… That too however I believe is starting to grow on me. I might actually make it through the entire 1 1/2 hours eventually. LOL

I’m scheduled for another cool-down week after this week which actually saddens me. I’ve really been enjoying this phase. It’s been nice to see much of the fat being changed over to muscle. Weight hasn’t really been a dropping factor but body fat percentages, appearance and waist size is definitely changing so it’s nice to still see some results in some form or fashion. I assumed most of the weight drop would occur once I get more towards the end of it and I’ve balanced out the muscle gain from restoration of lost muscle mass.

So far so good though. I just need to make sure this time around when faced with a cool-down week I don’t completely blow it like I did last time. I definitely don’t want to suffer like that again.

Go watch the video first:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/06/23/kyung.fat.busters.cnn

Japan is definitely taking the fight against obesity to a new level. New laws out there are now making it mandatory for citizens to be measured and monitored. So much for those plus sizes, now your waistline has a limit and being over that has some consequences to not only you, but your employer as well!

While most American’s see this as a mandatory waistline as infringing on personal rights and privacy, taking steps to ensure the health of it’s citizens seems to be  necessary step for Japan. Think about the savings on their health care costs…  By focusing efforts on getting healthy and prevention of health issues, it’s far more cost-effective and practical in the long-run than our current system of ‘treating’ the symptoms of poor health and weight related health problems.

Take the risk of acquiring type-2 diabetes for example. A MAJORITY of the people who suffer from this disease suffer because the onset was directly related to being overweight. How about heart disease? Again, being overweight DRASTICALLY increases risks for the onset of this health issue.

I’m not saying everyone has to run out and get rail skinny as that’s just nasty. (not to mention extremely unhealthy as well) Being more aware of ones health and making a solid effort to improve upon that is incredibly vital to a long, healthy life.  Even if you’re not able to exercise due to a medical condition, there is always the choice to eat healthy. And yes, there are those who do eat healthy and do have a little extra weight… at least you’re trying. 🙂

What absolutely escapes me is how people can be consciously aware of their overweight conditions, do nothing about and instead complain about it while scarfing down a bucket of Ben and Jerry’s or some KFC. C`mon people.

While I don’t see the extreme’s the Japanese government is taking as a solution to our problems I do think there should be some type of greater encouragement and motivational techniques employed to get American’s to be a little healther. According to the CDC in 2006, only four states had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Twenty-two states had a prevalence equal or greater than 25%; two of these states (Mississippi and West Virginia) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%.

WOW PEOPLE!!!