I was looking over my 2016 posts and weights and suddenly realized a whole quarter of the year has gone by. And in that 3 months, what have I accomplished? Well, basically I maintained, while eating what I wanted and not moving a whole lot. I started the year at 229 pounds, and today I weigh 230. A pound gain. I think my lowest weight of the quarter was 228 pounds.

I am setting goals for the month of April, and then on May 1 I will update whether I met those goals or not.

1. Wear my Fitbit all month, tracking my activity. Yesterday I got 7501 steps, so I will try to average more than that per day over the course of the month.

2. Ride my bike every day. Minimum of 5 minutes, every day, but of course I will do more most of the time. I mainly want to build the habit of getting on it every day. Eventually, when I am able to ride for 30 minutes/day or more, I’ll give myself a day or two off per week. But for now, daily shorter rides will be good. I’m marking the rides in my planner calendar in orange ink along with my daily steps, so I can easily see how I am doing with these goals.

3. Start lifting again. I am not getting specific on when I will start, except that by the end of the month I want to be doing some kind of lifting routine 3 days/week, probably 15-20 minutes long. I still have my old notes of which exercises I used to do so I will start with the basics, at home, with hand weights.

4. Hydrate, a lot. More plain iced tea, iced coffee, and water.

5. Cut back on carbs and portions. I am not going to count calories, carbs, fat or anything else, but I am going to keep with the “eat what I want” while subbing lower carb foods like vegetables for higher carb grains and starches and knocking it off with the sugary stuff (very limited portions).

Weight goal: lose 5 pounds (weigh 225 or less on May 1).

I worked in the yard, biked and walked today and feel great! I’m happy. Hope you are too!

(c) Escape from Obesity – Read entire story here.