So, I’ve been on a health kick lately over the past few days. Let me back up a bit to explain how this all got started. Last week my company offered free cholesterol screenings to employees. I signed up because hey, free cholesterol screening. The results came in the mail over the weekend and I believe Carolyn‘s reaction was something to the effect of “OH MY GOSH YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!!!!“. That may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. I had similar results when I got my last physical which was maybe 2 years ago or so.

I’ve had some ideas to get in better shape for awhile now, but just have lacked the motivation to actually do anything, so this seemed as good a time as any to get back on the train.

Most of you have probably heard of the revolutionary weight-loss fad that I am working on now – it’s my own invention. It’s so crazy it just might work. It’s called “Eat less, exercise more”. I think it just might work.

About 3-4 years ago, I started keeping track of my calories. It actually worked out pretty well for me. I followed that for several weeks until one day I was out at some party and gorged on snacks and such and then I just gave it up. You may have noticed that I am very goal oriented.

Thanks to the wonders of advancing technology, I am tracking my calories online at calorie-count.com. I have set the goal of 2000 calories per day, with the understanding that some days I can go up to 2300. If you’d like to follow along with my progress, you can register over there, let me know your username and I can add you to my “friends” list so you can see my stuff. I don’t think you have to track anything – just sign up to spy on me. It’s pretty slick over there – they have just about every food listed with all the caloric contents and you can put your own stuff in there too.

And of course the exercising comes into play. Monday I went out and rode my bike some. I’m not sure if it was due to it being dang cold, or if I’m signifincantly more out of shape than I was 6 months ago when I did EFSM, but it was a lot harder than I remembered it being. I was really hurting.

Funny story about that – I went out to get my bike on Monday morning and lifted off our patio chair cushions that we are storing in the garage (since they were on top of my bike) and found that squirrels had ripped open one to use as a nest. That was annoying. Then I found that in my moving of the cushions, a baby squirrel had landed IN my bike spokes. It was all chirping and so I got out of there (on foot) since I didn’t know if the mama squirrel was going to be around and angry. Eventually we decided to just let it go. Probably should have killed it since it’s just going to be an annoying adult squirrel but I couldn’t bring myself to bash its little squirrelly brains in. We have had squirrels living in our garage all winter due to a hole that we need to patch but just haven’t. So I went back out with gloves on and pried the squirrel off and just left it on the floor of the garage. When I got back it was gone so I assume the mom took it back (or ate it). The last 2 mornings there has been snow on the ground, so I have done a little DDR in the mornings. It gets you pretty going, and conveniently also tracks your calories burned. 30 minutes this morning burned 341 calories.

The goals for my revolutionary “Eat less, exercise more” diet are to go from 210 to 170 by Scott’s next birthday (3/20/07). When I got up and weighed myself on the 2nd day I had dropped from 210 to 205. I quickly calculated that at that pace, I would be done by the end of the month. Unfortunately, I was back up to 208 this morning :-).

I hope you all have enjoyed my non-Rubik’s cube post.