Day six

Well, the first week is close to over.  I'm surviving.  Annoyance is beginning to turn to acceptance, and at this point I'm used to the shakes, even if I certainly don't like them. At the same time, I'm really looking forward to vegetables at this point, which I think will reappear in my diet on Monday.

The workouts have upped in difficulty. Yesterday we put on a lot more weight than Wednesday—about 25% more on average. This put me right at my limits, and it was quite tough. On most of the machines I don't think I could have added one more plate and still finished. I also did some reverse push-ups (I don't know their actual name, but they were basically elevated push-ups facing upward instead of downward), and that was the only time I couldn't hit the goal the trainer had picked for me. After ten he could see that I definitely wasn't going to make it to twenty, so we stopped there.

The lack of energy also really got to me yesterday evening. I actually took a short nap, something I haven't done in like a year, and I went to bed early and got a pretty solid ten hours of sleep. I feel a lot better now, but I'm going to need to be better about getting adequate sleep. When I was consuming 3,000 calories (or whatever; that's a good average for someone like me), I could get by on less sleep and not be this exhausted, but at about 1,600 minus 700 in exercise, I'm going to need to be a lot more disciplined for the next few weeks if I'm going to survive this.

On the upside, it's been effective. I'm down 10 pounds since starting, and about 6 this week. Based on what the doctors have been saying, six pounds in a week is just about the absolute maximum that is healthy; ideally, I'll lose more than 1% of my weight per week, but no more than about 2%. I believe that if I go past the 2%, the fear was that I wouldn't be able to develop muscle at the same time.


Currently listening: Kerli—Hurt Me