Michaelbox

If you’ve ever talked to me about the topic of weight loss, you’ll know that for a span of fif­teen months, I walked around Madi­son SD for var­i­ous things includ­ing employ­ment and con­sumed a lot of water.

I had a very good rou­tine going on dur­ing that time. I man­aged to walk 8 miles a week just to get to and from one job. I also moved around a lot at a sec­ond job where I was a house­keeper for a four sea­sons resort. In addi­tion to mov­ing around so much, I prac­ti­cally had a water bot­tle taped to my hand, includ­ing many more at home for easy switch­ing. Although I don’t remem­ber my eat­ing diet that well, I imag­ine it was decent, though not the best. I can’t help but imag­ine what all these did for my bud­get. GIven the fact that this was dur­ing the height of our high gas prices, I likely saved myself a lot of money.

What does this all mean you ask? Dur­ing those fif­teen months, I man­aged to shed 40-50lbs with­out a lot of extra effort. Surely if I did some sort of run­ning or gym­rat work, the process would have gone a lot faster, but I wanted to be lazy and most of the meth­ods I used I “had” to do. I knew that I had to go to work so that made a lot of moti­va­tion to do the walking.

This all changed in August of 2007. It’s at that point where I decided to move away from Madi­son and back in with my par­ents for a “break”. This com­pletely broke my beloved rou­tine. I no longer had my moti­va­tors to push me along and I would need to make myself do it. Ask any­one who has tried and they’ll say that’s not always an easy task.

Move for­ward to Jan­u­ary of 2008. It was at this point that I made the move over to Sioux Falls SD. While not my ideal sit­u­a­tion, I did have an instant job at one of the local KFC’s and it helped me to stay afloat while I looked for other work along the lines of my stud­ies from col­lege. Nat­u­rally, being around that kind of food and being sub­ject to it on a full time work sched­ule basis didn’t really help myself diet wise. How­ever, it wasn’t dev­as­tat­ing because I was still up on my feet con­sis­tently and mov­ing around. I can con­firm that some pounds slowly crept back on me, and I was there for a lit­tle bit over a year.

After my time ended at KFC, I moved onto my cur­rent posi­tion as a front desk secu­rity offi­cer at Citibank SD. At the time, I thought the new envi­ron­ment would be a good thing for me and I’d enjoy it a lot bet­ter. The ways I was wrong with this is that I am prover­bially tied to the front desk and can not roam freely around beyond a small radius, includ­ing restroom breaks when­ever I want. That caused me to need to limit my water con­sump­tion rate. I am fully free to roam and walk around the lobby of the build­ing I am in, but there isn’t much space for try­ing to get a heart rate going. The last neg­a­tive thing with this job is that it has an early start time before the sun is risen, and I’m nat­u­rally a night owl. That said, I tend to con­sume things that will help pre­vent myself from nod­ding off, thus food/beverages with sugar or caffeine.

Although I’ve recently already taken some strides to help curb this issue, I weighed myself tonight and the scale returned the weight of 230lbs. I hate to admit that I’m back to the weight I was at when I first started to lose it back when still in Madison.

So, at this point I have to ask what exactly can I do to help reverse this gain, in my cur­rent envi­ron­ment. I am start­ing to go for quick walks when I get breaks at work. The big one would be my lunch break. I’m start­ing to do quick walk­ing tours of the build­ings at work and opt­ing out of stop­ping by the cafe­te­ria for some­thing to eat. This gets me up on my feet and mov­ing, as well as a fringe ben­e­fit of not spend­ing some money on food. Dur­ing this walk, I use stair­cases as much as I can and never rely on ele­va­tors. I am also look­ing to take shorter path walks dur­ing my after­noon break shortly after shift change or some of the other offi­cers. On top of “at work” walks and with spring/summer com­ing up, I want to go for walks around my neigh­bor­hood dur­ing my off time. I already took one 2 mile walk this after­noon and will try my best to stay moti­vated to do that regularly.

Adding to my efforts to walk more, I hope to increase my water con­sump­tion away from work, as well as reduce extra­ne­ous con­sump­tion of sug­ars while at work. To coun­ter­act the risk of nod­ding off, I have recently started bring­ing in work-safe pod­casts on my audio player. The ben­e­fits of this idea is that they require active lis­ten­ing, instead of pas­sive lis­ten­ing that music can pro­duce. The music can fade into the back­ground of my mind and just be there. If I’m hav­ing to pay atten­tion to peo­ple talk­ing i order to com­pre­hend, this keeps my mind more focused and awake. Find­ing a reg­u­lar bed­time that allows me to get proper sleep could also go a long ways in help­ing at work. Hope­fully I can start also alter­ing my food diet away from work as well. Who couldn’t eat a bit bet­ter when at home?

Through these actions that I’m already enact­ing or plan­ning to enact, as well as any sug­ges­tions that you read­ers can pro­duce, I hope I can once again curb this weight issue and per­haps even start bring­ing it back down to what it used to be. I please urge any of you to sub­mit your ideas to me either through a com­ment below or use a way to con­tact me from my con­tact page. I’ll def­i­nitely con­sider any and all suggestions.

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