Overall workouts 07 JUL-13 JUL

Where I work, the employee union was negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement covering, among other things, a raise. Some of that raise was retroactive, as the process had been going on for a while, so we all got some form of back pay.

Knowing that pay was coming, I made a commitment to change my body, my habits, my exercise, and my eating so that I can stop being a fat paramedic who sometimes struggles to move around, and start being a slim, hot paramedic that girls swoon over and who doesn't struggle to breathe after moving a patient.

Part of that commitment was to make a plan, some of which I've enumerated below. As part of that plan, I bought myself a Wii with the Wii Fit + and Balance Board, with a personal commitment to use them every day I'm not at work for at least half an hour.

A couple of days before that, I started getting myself prepared for the daily exercise routine by ... exercising! Yes, you heard that right. Basically, I wanted to kick-start the process a couple of days early. I have an old beater mountain bike that really never was much fun to ride and didn't really work right (it ran, but the shifters were loose, it's not sized properly, and I never had the time or money to get it fixed up), and I've since put that on a mount and made it a stationary spinner. It's a basic setup, with a stainless steel resistance wheel and adjustable tension, and that's about it. It works fine, though, as a spinner, which is what I started doing.

A couple of days later, I was able to go get my Wii and I was off. That was basically this past weekend.

So, for the week of 7 to 13 JULY 2010:

30 minutes of spinning

rest day

42 minutes of various Wii Fit activities, including step aerobics, running in place, and yoga

rest day

43 minutes of various Wii Fit activities

55 minutes of various Wii Fit activities, plus push-ups and crunches

43 minutes of various Wii Fit activities

For a weekly total of 213 minutes of exercise on five days, averaging a little over 42 minutes a day. All told, estimated calorie expenditure was 1642 kCal from exercise. Combined with estimated calorie intakes from Sparkpeople.com, the total weekly deficit was about 3000 kCal. Since 3500 kCal is a pound, that's a little less than a pound of weight loss (estimated) for the week.

From here out, I will post a daily workout blog on Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday (my work days are Wednesday and Friday, and I don't have any chance to workout usually, so I treat them as built-in rest days).