A mixed day, again, likely more pros than cons.
Food was good, I had lots of space so I had extra cereal, fruit, and even half of my peanut butter chocolate bombe that I made yesterday. And then another half that I didn’t count, so, there’s an asterisk.
I got work done! Well, not much, but stuff!
And, I exercised! It was another nearly-100°F-day, but with it being overcast for most of the afternoon, it did manage to cool off to about 78°F and 30% humidity, so I walked. And my muscles are killing me (DOMS / Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness from yesterday, despite only doing exercises with 70 lbs). I was going to do the rower and elliptical, but I decided that a walk was better and I’d hate it less. So, I actually resumed my old walks, making it well past the top of the hill (made it to the top in 11min 50sec, so on par with the last two times), walked just over 2.0 km, and turned around.
It was finally a long enough walk that I got a VO2 max reading, which was higher than it’s been in awhile … like, two years. I’m not sure if I believe it, but I’m not going to let that skepticism ruin the feel-good feeling of seeing that value. 34.7 takes me into a different part of the curve where every little increase will put me in a non-trivial higher percentile. So, I’m in about the 15th percentile now for men aged 39, as opposed to about the 8th percentile when I was around 31.9. Again, assuming it’s not a fluke. I need to get to a value around 41.7 to be at the 50th percentile for men my age, which is my first goal. And then, of course, there’s my brother at around 55 which is around the 95th percentile … but that’s a different issue. (Last time he visited, he walked up The Hill while drinking a beer and wasn’t even winded. 🤦)
Anyway, that’s a good way to start the week. I also motivated myself a bit by doing another “fantasy” thing, but this time imagining what my weekly summary infographic would look like if I were actually doing everything I want to in a week, like a perfect +100 points, like doing all the exercise I want and hitting 4000 calories expended per week, etc. I think that helped me with motivation for a walk today.
I think another thing that helped me was that I read a study that suggested one can lose up to 31 calories per point of bodyfat per day, maximum, before you start to lose exponentially more lean mass. So, (31 calories÷day÷lb-fat) x (64 lb-fat) x (7 day÷week) ÷ (4082 calories÷lb-fat) = 3.4 lbs of fat I could potentially lose per week. That’s 1.5% of my body mass, which is super-high, but allegedly doable.
I’m not at all going to shoot for that — I have projected losing 0.725% of my weight per week and 80% of that being fat as my goal, but it’s interesting to see that – allegedly – I could lose up to twice that. Through a shiznit amount of hard work that I’m not going to put in. But maybe one week every-now-and-then I might try to be more aggressive and see what happens?
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