One Month Before and After Picture + Travel Report

Without further ado, here is the one month side-by-side before and after pictures: Warning, no Adonis here!

Before and After @ 1 month - can you tell which?

These two pictures were taken with a similar relaxed pose and in my biased opinion I can see shrunken love handles and gut and some definition improvement in the chest - barely. No six pack abs, but the beer belly screams, "feed me more beer!" Today, I weighed in at 187.5 lbs, which is six pounds fewer than the before picture. That's not a lot of weight difference, so I posit that the difference (such as it is) comes from the Kettlebell workout sessions combined with ranch exercise. 

I now present my travel report card - Food D+, Exercise F. I didn't exercise at all (though I only missed one day, Thursday) giving the excuse that I only brought/wore dress shoes and didn't want to go to the gym (which I didn't even look for) wearing dress shoes and sweats. This morning it dawned on me that I could have exercised anyway by doing some push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and a couple of TGUs (sans weights) to get some activity going. So in the end I admit I copped out on a lame excuse.

From the food perspective, the first day I stayed under my calorie budget, which surprised me. In addition, the quality of the food wasn't too bad either - two soft-boiled eggs, Thundercloud turkey sub with avocado, very tiny bag of airline pretzels, and a meatless baked ziti (which I didn't finish) for dinner. Perhaps I ate too much bread and pasta but otherwise not too offensive a selection. 

Thursday drove my overall food grade down because I ate a hotel waffle (with sugar free syrup) and sausage, a Longhorn Steakhouse steak salad, and in the wait for, then rush between, late flights I drank 1.5 glasses of red wine, ate a Starbucks blueberry scone, and finally, grabbed an Einstein Bros pepperoni pizza bagel for a late dinner between connecting flights. The salad was good, everything else, from food quality standpoint was bad (though red wine is supposed to be good for you which is why I drank that instead of a beer.) Not only was the quality bad, but the total caloric intake of 2200 calories busted my daily budget to the tune of 400 calories. Booo!

Some thoughts about the waffle syrup choice. My choices of accompaniment for the waffle was syrup, of which the first ingredient was high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or a sugar free syrup which replaced sugar with sucralose. I also could have chosen a fruit spread (more HFCS) or eaten the waffle plain, or added sugar. I really love waffles but I get to eat them very infrequently. Therefore I decided to enjoy my waffle, but choose the chemical unknown of sucralose syrup rather than ingest HFCS as the latter is something I've been trying to avoid after reading the, "Fat Chance" book where the author basically labels sugar, and particularly HFCS as a toxin. (And he applies the label based on recent scientific studies.)

I knew heading into this trip that there was a potential to go off the wagon. I have another similar trip next week and I need to take the lessons learned from yesterday's travel experience to improve next week's results, both on the exercise and food front. I saw plenty of fruit offered at the airports and it would have been a lot better from a health standpoint to grab some fruit instead of a scone. We'll see how I approach the food and exercise choices next week.