On the road again.

Thanks for all two of my readers for commenting! Although, I think that you might have to have someone RETURN to be called an official "reader." Either way, I was excited.

Yesterday, two rather easy miles on the *NEW* treadmill. For the record...

I absolutely love it. In every way possible.

Yes, it is missing some of fancy schmancy electronic crap, but really, I didn't use any of it anyway. What it DID do was accurately read my heart rate. Which is something that I've yet to see any of the treadmills at the health club do.

It is one of those foldable treadmills, so we can keep it up when not in use. I like this, because now the kids can't "run" on it while it is turned off and burn out the motor. Sara used it yesterday, too, when I had to come back to work for a couple of hours. She thought that it was great, too.

I see the future opening up, and it has a ton of running in it.

On a little sadder note, I have realized how out of shape I have become, at least relative to when I was doing the hardcore marathon training. Running at 6 MPH had my heart rate over 160. When I was training hard, it would hover around 130 or so.

Also, I ran for two miles, and was completely winded. I used to be a 5K without even hardly breaking a sweat. (OK, I would sweat like a horse, but you get the metaphor.)

However, I was re-reading my old blog (which no longer exists, except on a hard drive in my backpack) and I remember when I was starting to run. It started with a quarter mile. I was happy to do 4 laps (16 laps to the mile on the track I was running on) without stopping.

Oh, how far I have come since before the journey began.

And one last thing - I was re-reading something I was writing last October, and I have pretty much maintained my weight since then. I have gone down, up, down, up, etc., but in the end, I am not worse off now than I was then.

Considering Christmas vacation and the rest of the holidays...

I'll take it.

So I'm back on plan completely. WW has come out with some new rules about how many points you get. I now have 9 more than I used to. Which, by the way, makes COMPLETE sense to me. I have always thought that I was eating too little. They say that to lose weight, you have to calculate your BMR, add calories for normal daily activity, and then subtract 500 for a 1 lb loss per week, and 1000 for a 2 lb loss per week.

Why was I losing 6-7 at first, and 3-4 per week later?

Because I was not eating enough.

So now I think that the loss will be slower, but definately more long term. Do you know what you can have for 9 points?

Two microwave entrees. A couple of sandwiches, if you make them right. More fruit than you can comfortably eat in a sitting. (Understatement?)

What it comes down to is this - I'm going to try it out to see how it fits. I figure that 9 points per day figures out to about 500 calories or so (on average) so my loss should only go down my 1 lb per week. And if it's easier to maintain the plan this way?

*shrug*

So have a great day...

-Silas