Weekly Post 10/14/2019

Highlights:

  • Pizza Party With the Famliy
  • Chicago Marathon
  • NO work on the weekend again!
  • Bears Bye Week

Lowlights:

  • Missed out on a skins golf tournement
  • Bears Bye week

Goals for next week:

Stay under 230 LBS for 2 days this week

With the Chicago Marathon taking over the city this week there was a ton of fun energy building all week. So the family decided Saturday would be a great say for a pizza party! The apartment complex where my brother lives have a pizza oven/grill outside next to the pool deck. It was way too cold to take a dip in the pool, but I was eyeing the hot tub pretty hard all day lol. My mom made enough dough and brought all the topping you could think of. We were all jacked up for this stellar pizza setup. The wind turned this adventure into a major struggle. The wind gusts were the overpowering heavily vented casing of the pizza grill leaving the inside temp close to 420 degrees and taking close to 22 min to cook a single pizza. I was shooting for 500+ degrees and hoping the pizza would be cooked in 12 to 15 min. With the extra time in the oven, the crust was becoming undercooked compared to the toppings. After two pizzas in the in grill, we decided to move into one of the party rooms that was set up to be a kitchen that you would see on the cooking channel. The kitchen is equipped with a super nice Wolf range oven. This monster of an oven was able to cook three pizzas at one time and have no problem keeping the temp over 480 degrees letting us catch up and get all 7 pizzas out in a short amount of time so everybody could enjoy their pizza at the table together.
The day after, Sunday the Chicago Marathon ran right past my house and gave me a great opportunity to practice my photography skills especially shooting in manual mode with some very fast subjects running right past me. This exercise turned out to be very hard, keeping the runner composed in the frame while panning seemed almost impossible. I tried to use the eyepiece, the back screen and just holding the camera in my hand without aiming at all. Pictures taken using the eyepiece kept the subject most centered in the frame. While not using any of the assets on the camera and panning using my hand and keeping my eyes on the subject yielded the best-looking results since the camera speed most accurately matched the runners at full speed. Not sure if I’m ready to share my photos just yet. I am still pretty new to this hobby and do not have the best practices for hosting and displaying pictures that are 75-6 MB each. Once I have that process figured out I will update this post and start making a gallery page for everyone to view.

My weight has continued to trend the right way and I am looking to have the scale stay in the high 220s. The breakfast smoothies and lunch salads are making the difference in my weight loss but, alas the salads are becoming boring. How long will I be able to stay with the ultra-consistent meals??? I’m not sure but the progress on the scale is making the fight that much easier to win.

Weekly Post 10/7/2019

Highlights:

  • Broke under 230 lbs
  • trying out intermittent fasting
  • No work on Saturday

Lowlights:

  • Bad take and bake pizza
  • Bears lost

Goals for next week:

  • Lose 1 lbs

I started to experiment with Intermittent Fasting. I choose to begin with the 18-6 protocol. With a 6-hour eating window and 18 hours of fast every day. This should increase the rate my body drops that unwanted fat I’ve been packing for so long. It will be hard to execute this diet if I have to move off my cushy 9-5 pm work schedule say to my early 6-2 pm shift will make that window to small since I will be up on average for 3 hours than usual. Meaning I will most likely not have a long run but will be having to cycle on and off depending on my work schedule. This will be an exploratory experiment to see if I can handle it and to observe how fast my body and mind adapt to the eating schedule.
It was another tough Bears loss to the Raiders in London. We looked and preformed flat and willfully underprepared the entire game. Credit to Coach Gruden for beautifully scheming Mack out of the game. This is all I want to say about this game as this season is quickly becoming depressing.

There was a sweet deal at Mariano’s for $12 for 2 Take and Bake pizzas. As a big fan of these pizzas, this was a no brainer for me. The 2 types of pizzas were straight sausage and 3 meat. We ate the 3 meat on the first night and it tasted great, the next night we heated the Sausage and boy did it disappoint. There was to much cheese and the cheese tasted watery. It as was painful to eat. I only made it 1.5 slices before I gave up, they were that bad. I finished the rest of my dinner with a nice big bowl of Jerry Garcia ice cream. I will give Mariano’s another shoot if this deal pops up again. Who knows I could have just been unlucky and picked the only bad pizza out of the place, and if it’s just a bad as the first one it will only be a 6 dollar loss and I’ll get to have ice cream for dinner again.