As we continue the EverydayQB challenge, the weight loss may not be where I want it to be, but striving to develop a healthy and sustainable workout plan is still the pressing aim. As I’ve mentioned before, while growing up and during college football, I had the luxury of others and outside forces motivating me to stay healthy and to be in shape. Now that my days as a college athlete are over, the motivation is more difficult, more abstract. Yet just as important as working out to perform my best on the field is the need to be a healthy individual for the long haul. I’ve got a lot of life left to live and the patterns and plans I establish now will follow me through the rest of my life.

Many of you might be in similar positions: Wanting to have a solid and successful workout plan but not knowing where to get started. Here are four things that every plan should incorporate:

1. Consistency: Whatever plan you create, only a consistent and concentrated effort will produce results. Set a reasonable, consistent goal that can be achieved, whether that is the decision to work out for three days a week or four. The goal is to make your workout plan a habit of your weekly schedule. Consistency will provide the training that your body needs to begin adjusting to your new and healthy life.
2. Creativity: Your work out plan should have a variety of different lifts and exercises. You may have a few favorites that you enjoy doing each time you work out, but there are multiple ways to exercise the same muscles. Furthermore, the variations in exercises can work minor muscles that may be missed in other lifts. Creativity also provides a freshness to your workouts and prevents the feeling of being in a rut or stuck in the same routine.
3. Balance: Any time you’re lifting weights, balance should always be in the forefront of your mind. What I mean by balance is that if you spend 10 minutes working your chest, you should also spend 10 minutes working you upper back. 10 minutes on biceps, then 10 minutes on triceps. You get the idea. Balancing your workouts so that you work all of the necessary muscle groups for positive general health is important. Likewise, you should balance between Cardiovascular and Muscle toning exercises. For most people, a successful workout plan produces a balanced, healthy person, not a body builder with bulging biceps. Stay balanced in your workout.
4. Enjoyment: There may be days when going to the gym is that last thing on planet earth that you want to do, but the majority of the time you should enjoy your time at the gym. Exercise releases positive chemicals into your body and leaves you feeling energized and alive. Exercise with a buddy, take your iPod, do lifts and workouts that are enjoyable and make you feel good. You will work out on a more consistent basis if you enjoy your work outs.

Those are some basic tips to get you started on your workout plan. Summer is a great time to develop those healthy workout habits. Happy Exercising!

Something’s not working. I’ve actually gained back two lbs, so I’ve returned to the 270 benchmark. I’m not sure if it was the news of my wife’s pregnancy that automatically jumped my weight (and probably blood pressure). At any rate, a concentrated effort is needed.

The nice thing about starting this challenge near the beginning of summer is that the opportunities for exercise become more and more numerous. We have located a great park not too far from our house with lots of walking and biking trails and have spent some time there. Its also about time to pull the bikes out and we still have the constant of our athletic club. Perhaps the key to my exercising consistently could be to vary the activities that I am doing and making exercising less of a challenge and more of a pleasure.

Then of course, there’s the eating habits. It seems to get more difficult near the end of the month when food runs out in our house and we catch ourselves eating out more often. Thankfully, many restaurants offer healthy options while eating out. The problem is, I’m one of those guys who likes to order the same thing depending on what restaurant we got to, so I need to change my ‘favorite’ at each restaurant, because my previous ‘favorite’ has not been very kind to me figure.

Any other cross-training advice any of you have would be appreciated. Thanks for you support!

This week in the EverydayQB Challenge was pretty good. Unfortunately, I’m still hovering at 268lbs. Which is currently on 3lbs below where I should be at this stage in the game, but its getting harder to lose weight. The workout regimen picked up the last few days and that got me back down to where I’ve been.

The issue has been my eating. I’m eating great during the day, eating about every three hours while I’m out and about getting things done. But at the end of the day, when I’m tired and relaxing, the seduction of smell takes over my will power.

Smell is one of the most powerful triggers for desire, yet it lays often just below our conscious awareness. But I became full aware of just how powerful smell is to my desire to eat last night at a friend’s house. We were watching the season finale of Lost and, like most of the other days this week, I had eaten very well. But then, it came, the smell of double fudge, peanut butter, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate brownies baking in the oven. They smelled fantastic.
The next thing I knew, I had a plate of brownies in my hand and I was eating, eating a lot. They tasted even better then they smelled and my mouth and heart melted at the creation of this delicious dessert. The problem was, I couldn’t stop, and I didn’t care.

It all started with smelling those brownies, a latent desire that produced a disastrous (yet oh so tasty) end to my day of healthy eating. I can almost hear the brownies taunting me from inside my stomach.

Hopefully, now that I’m aware of the power of smelling food and the negative effects it can have on my goals, I’ll eat better this week. We are heading to Boise to visit my brother and see his afl2 team, the Boise Burn, play a game. He’s excited to show us all of his favorite restaurants, so it’ll be a good test of will power. Here’s hoping I can stay strong. Maybe I’ll bring nose plugs.

I’m back on track! I lost 2lbs this week, down from 270lbs to 268lbs. It feels good to be under 270 and working towards my goal of 245 by August 1. I think it had a lot to do with a disciplined eating schedule this past week. While I didn’t spend a lot of time in the gym, I was out in the wilderness and doing physical labor around the house, so that must have helped. I was triumphantly disciplined this weekend at a camp retreat that I spent some time at, there were opportunities for brownies and smores and I passed on both of them! (Although I did have a few cups of hot chocolate).

I will post the list of foods I have eaten this week (as promised) later today!

Keeping track of what i have been eating as helped to be more aware in the evenings when I have had a tendancy to overeat. Furthermore, knowing the approximate amount of calories I have consumed has been helping. I have also tried to ‘graze’ every 2-3 hours with lower calorie foods like carrots, apples and yogurt, and in doing so curb my hunger around meal times. As I have done so, I’ve found that I am craving less and less those other ‘sweets’ that add many calories and pounds that I don’t need and am trying to eliminate.

So now, the next step is still to get into a regular workout routine to be healthy and balanced. I keeping telling myself that ‘starting tomorrow’ and I’ll begin. Well the final time I make that statement is today! I will try posting my workout schedule on here as well to see if that externally motivates me to work out when I’m feeling tired and lazy.

Thanks for reading and for all of your support!

Well, I sort of reached my goal this week. I guess, in a way, I didn’t reach my goal for this week in that I only lost 1.5lbs, but since I lost 3lbs the previous week, I am still 1/2lb ahead of where I am projected to be. That brings me down to 270.5lbs. My goal is to average losing 2lbs a week and so I need to make up for a little less performance this week. I maintained the same workout and eating pattern, but I knew at some point that I would start to really cut down on eating ANYTHING that is heavy in calories or fat content. That moment may be here. So this week will entail and even stricter eating regiment and continue to work out as many days as possible, and we’ll see what happens.

Since the NFL Draft begins tomorrow and continues through Sunday, the EverydayQB decided to play a game with himself. Here’s my top ten draftees prediction. Let’s see how close I can get to being right and if I do well, I’ll give myself a pat on the back! Enjoy draft weekend!

1. Detroit Lions-QB Matt Stafford (Georgia)
2. St. Louis Rams-OT Jason Smith (Baylor)
3. Kansas City Chiefs-LB Aaron Curry (Wake Forest)
4. Seattle Seahawks-QB Mark Sanchez (USC)
5. Cleveland Browns-WR Michael Crabtree (Texas Tech)
6. Cincinatti Bengals-OT Eugene Monroe (Virginia)
7. Oakland Raiders-WR Jeremy Maclin (Missouri)
8. Jacksonville Jaguars-DT B.J. Raji (Boston College)
9. Green Bay Packers-OLB Aaron Maybin (Penn State)
10. San Francisco 49ers-DE/OLB Brian Orakpo (Texas)

Agree or Disagree? Join the conversation below. Happy Draft Weekend!

For the past month I’ve been the helpless neighbor. We moved into a new duplex in a cul-de-sac of houses and duplexes about five months ago and we love where we live. This is the first time we’ve actually had a yard to take care of and a garage to fill up with junk. Because of these new additions to our living we don’t have a lot of tools, etc. that are needed in maintenance of a home. In come our awesome neighbors. The other people in our cul-de-sac have helped us with lawnmowers, tools and other things and have offered us kindness and assistance. It has been great to receive such generous giving and kindness from our neighbors and we are enjoying getting to them.

I am also the helpless neighbor because I am forgetful. Two weeks ago, in the rush to get out the door in the morning, I locked our car key and house key in our house. We didn’t have a spare key or any windows open and so we were forced to call our landlord so he could open our house for us. Our neighbor allowed us to wait in her home for the landlord because it was cold outside.

So, trying to prevent this situation from occurring again, I took our spare car key and spare house key and put it outside in a safe place in case it happened again.

Fast forward to yesterday, ready and motivated to go to the gym, weigh in and work out, striving towards my goal of losing 2lbs a week. While we were driving to the gym, I realized I had forgotten to put some clothes in the dryer that I needed later on that night. So we ran back to the house and I rushed inside, set the keys on the washer, changed the laundry and went back outside and locked the door behind me out of habit. The moment I stepped out the door I realized I had done it again. The keys were locked inside. No problem! I’ve put our spare keys in a safe place outside. I went to grab the spare key and unlock the house. Unfortunately, I hadn’t check to make sure that the spare house key was actually the spare house key. It was, in fact, the house key from our previous apartment. So, we were locked out again.

As I realized I had to call my landlord for the second time in the month to unlock our apartment, I also realized that both our phones were inside. After a moment of despair and frustration, our next door neighbor, connected to us by a half wall of our duplex, comes around the corner. I tell him of our plight and ask if we can use his phone to call the landlord. He told me he could do one better. The crawl space above his garage was connected to mine and I could crawl over to my garage and drop down into it and open the door from the inside.

I figured it was worth the risk, even though I’m a big guy, to avoid the embarassment of calling the landlord again, so we started to put the ladder up. My neighbor started telling me about how they’d done this before with another neighbor, when that same neighbor walked by. I’ll be honest, I had visions of myself falling through the ceiling and spending months in the hospital from the fall, and at that very moment, the very neighbor that had competed this task before walked by and asked what we were doing. He then offered to crawl through the space and open our door. I willingly accepted his generous offer and he effectively got us back into our home.

This exciting story is all to say that we ran out of time to work out yesterday. However, may it be know, I still lost not 1lb, or 2lbs, but 3lbs, this past week, beating my goal by 1lb. I ate much better (minus Easter weekend) and worked out a few more times. I still have yet to reach my goal of five times a week but we are getting closer.

My point is this: We need each other. Having people that support you and are willing to come alongside you in your distress is paramount in a healthy and successful life. We are blessed to have great neighbors, friends and family that we can count on in our time of need. Hopefully you do too.

Everyone has a success mechanism and a failure mechanism. The failure mechanism goes off by itself. The success mechanism only goes off with a goal. Every time we write down and talk about a goal we push the button to start the success mechanism.-Charles ‘Tremendous’ Jones

Let me start off simply by stating the facts: I reached my ‘mini-goal’ and dropped the first 2lbs of weight for my goal of 245lbs by August 1. So I’m now sitting (literally) at 275lbs, 30lbs to my goal.  I was relieved to weigh in yesterday and see that I had gotten off to a good start. Now let me emphasize the ‘good start’ aspect of that last sentence and say that I didn’t meet every part of the steps I laid out to reach my goal. I only worked out twice during the week and, while I ate less and was more aware of what I was eating, I still made poor eating choices.

I offer no excuse, except to say that I’m at a starting point. In starting new habits and breaking old ones, I realize that Newton’s laws have seemed to play a part. Particularly the truth that objects at rest, tend to stay at rest. Since my lifestyle for the past year has been mostly sedentary, the first week of adhering to a rigorous schedule was strenuous. But what I found to be true about objects at rest staying at rest, is also true of the converse statement, that objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Yesterday, (day one of week two), I had an extremely productive day. I had a solid workout and the rest of my day was very productive. I ate healthy and minimal throughout the day (excusing two bowls of icecream last night) and I found that as I started the day active and productive, the momentum of the morning carried me over through the rest of the day.

This gives me hope for the future and, as the ball is so difficult to get rolling, hopefully as I push to develop these new habits and leave the old ones behind, the ball will start rolling faster and faster and the progress and habits can become more and more productive.

So there’s my first update, as honest as I can be about how I did this past week. Thank you to those of you who commented and have mentioned that you are supporting me to attain this goal. Here comes week two…

One of the most difficult parts of the transition from everyday athlete to everyday businessperson or everyday family life is the struggle with eating and exercise. I have found that external motivators are crucial in a healthy diet and exercise habit. For me, those external motivators were always sports. Preparing for sports, working out to improve skill and ability and eating healthy in order to be at my top performance level.

But now that those external motivators are long gone (almost 3 years ago) I have not found any new external motivations to encourage me to eat healthy and exercise regularly. There are two other factors contributing to this problem; busyness and a love of eating.

Because I am busy and doing lots of different things every day, it is often difficult to have a set schedule to exercise. I’m usually tired at then end of most days and want to just rest and get ready for the next day. Secondly, I love to eat. I mean, really, I like food. Food is one of the world’s greatest gifts and I don’t want to be unappreciative.

When working out and playing sports on a regular basis, I was able to eat whatever I wanted. I have continued those uninhibited eating habits post-sports, but have not been exercising to maintain a normal weight.

Consequently, I am heavier than I wish I was and feel that I weigh more than is healthy. I have not developed healthy eating habits and a regular workout schedule. So what am I to do? What will be my new external motivators?

This is where I am hoping you can help me. I am hoping that this blog can be an external motivator. That you, the EverdayQB community, can keep me accountable to my goals. Now, before you think that this blog is just going to turn into a weight tracker blog, don’t worry, the integrity and focus of the EverydayQB will stay the same. But once a week, I want to be honest with you about how I am doing, so that we can encourage each other and I have an external motivator to keep me working hard and developing good habits.

My second external motivator is my five year anniversary of marriage to the most beautiful and incredible woman in the world. August 1, 2009 will be our five year anniversary and I want to be as close to the man she married, at least in my outward appearance, (hopefully better and wiser as well) on our five year anniversary as I was the day she said, ‘I do’. She deserves the best I can give her, not just in my outward appearance, but in my overall health and eating habits. I can still change those habits before life passes me by and I am forced to deal with the health issues that come from not eating right and not exercising.

So here is my goal: To lost 32 pounds in four months.

I weighed in yesterday at 277 lbs. I played college football at 235.

My goal is to get to 245lbs by August 1. This means losing the healthy average of 2lbs a week, which makes 8lbs a month and over 4 months, is 32 lbs. Doable and attainable, and with these new external motivators and a plan in place, I think I have a shot.

My plan is:

1. To work out a minimum of five times a week, for a minimum of 1 hour each workout

(currently I work out approximately 2-3 times a week for 30 minutes)

2. Every time I watch a television show and the commercials come on, to do core body exercises until the show comes back on.

(This will probably only happen at home, just so I don’t wierd or gross out our friends)

3. To control my diet by eating less during meals, having healthy snacks and not drinking large amounts of soda.

(Still forming the eating habits, more to follow, open to suggestions)

So there are the three steps in my plan. I believe that working out more often and being mindful of what I am eating will get me on the right path, and I can adjust based on the rate and which I am losing weight.

So here it goes, the challenge to my inner self has been set forth and I am hoping that you can support and journey with me through this plan to reach my goal.

If you have suggestions or ideas that will help me with my goal please leave a comment. Remember, leaving a comment will also place you in a drawing to win a free NFL QB jersey!