Down 17.5 Lbs

So with the back issues, the Holidays were a little tough, but I made it through! New year's eve was one of the best nights I've had in a long time. I was also back to work this week and everything is going really well. I plan to stop in at the gym today for the first time since I was hurt... swim a little and lift a little on every machine as best I can without causing any pain.

I'm having an awesome weekend and I'm thrilled with how my surgery is recovering! On top of all of that it's football playoffs and the Pats are in, I got a new car, and I'm down 17.5 pounds. Pretty nice last two weeks! :)  

Down 10.5 lbs

So things are going great! I'm completely used to eating no more than 2000 calories a day and I'm not feeling sick or tired. I think my body has acclimated to the new diet and I feel awesome!! I'm still 100% excited to keep this up!

I'm down 10.5 pounds and have been doing this for 19 days and only missed on one with 2300 calories or so. I'm allowing myself the occasional slip up because everyone's human. 

My back is sort of another story... I had a little setback. I began having some sciatica nerve pain again. I also still have a lot of numbness in my left leg. These are things that I thought were supposed to be gone after the surgery and they made me pretty nervous. I called the surgeon's office and they told me this is likely "Reminder Nerve Pain". It is something they expect will go away over the coming weeks/months. They sounded confident, but not certain and they told me to call them back if the pain significantly increases. In the meantime, they are having me take ibuprofen to help reduce inflammation to see if it helps. This is the only setback from my surgery. Otherwise I'm feeling 90% of my old self and I'm ready to get back to work and to the gym!!

Nice thing about this diet... if I eat a light breakfast and lunch, I can still go out with my brother and sister to a great restaurant like this for dinner!

Being Reasonable For Christmas

Ok so I've learned something today... I had an awesome Christmas!!! My family is great and it was a great day. I actually made it through Christmas without slipping on the ice and even under 2,000 calories. Last night (day after Christmas) I was (and still am) basically in bed all day because of my back, but I decided to swap dinner for some whiskey lol. What I learned is that's not a good idea. I finally missed my target and went over on calories by 300 or 400 or so due to some late night pretzels lol. 

I decided a few days or weeks back that I'm not going to hold myself to unreasonable standards.... so I went over calories for a day...big deal :) I'm going to get back to it today and continue moving forward with my goals. It's more important that I stick to trying to be under 2000 calories a day in the long run than that I actually do it each day. In addition to that.... my back is feeling pretty good. I still need to rest it most of the day, but pretty soon I'm feeling pretty good about getting back to the gym. I'm thinking I might go back to work in a few days as well. I drove for the first time today... earlier than they said I should but I felt pretty good doing it. My recovery is really moving along well and I'm excited to be a normal human being again!

Add in to this... that I had some nerve pain that came back... which obviously made me a bit nervous. I called the surgeon's office today to hear the bad news and it turned out to be positive news. They told me that they call this "reminder nerve pain" and that it's likely to go away on its own. I couldn't ask for a better present on christmas!! Hopefully I'm done with this back issue in a few weeks/months and I can get back to doing the things that I love!

18 days in and 1 day slightly over 2000 calories :)

Surgery

14 Days in a row under 2,000 Calories - Down 7 pounds.

Ok, so the master plan has already been changed slightly. I'm no longer looking to avoid surgery because after 6 months of being careful, resting, icing, physical therapy, spine injections, going to the swim gym, and trying to do everything I could to heal my disk problem... I was getting ready for work on Tuesday December 12th, and I sneezed. It was just a regular sneeze, nothing too crazy, but somehow it was enough to slip my disk and re-herniate it such that the doctor told me it was "Huge!!!" and I needed surgery.

I got a microdiscectomy at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston on December 16th and everything was successful. There were no complications, however my left leg is numb. The doctors and I are hoping this will go away in "One Week" which is tomorrow. It is still numb, but it's very minor compared to my previous nerve pain.

They went in to my spine at "L5/S1" and removed part of the disk that was damaged. They also said they might remove some bone. It has a 90% chance to not re-herniate. Because of this, I physically cannot work out right now so the new plan is eat under 2000 calories and workout for at least 45 minutes every day for 365 days if i'm physically capable of working out. 

Thank you to everyone who came to visit!

Mom, Dad, Joe, Sarah, Carolyn, Julia, Lauren, Lance, Justin, Jeff,  and others that offered but I told them I'd prefer no visitors for a few days! You all really made this time in the hospital so much better. Thanks to the nurses as well for everything they did even though they'll probably never see this, they deserve some recognition... I was a pain in the ass lol :)

These photos and videos are after surgery.

December 10th, 2017

Today is day 2 out of 365. I'm feeling great. I have a lot more energy to do things during the day, but I've been crashing at night. Last night I fell asleep early and just now at 5:45 PM, I almost fell asleep. I think I need to try to eat more earlier rather than later in the day. Since I'm limiting calories, it's difficult not to save some for later in the day out of fear I'll be starving and close to 2,000. I'm really very excited about the year to come. My back still has pain when I stand too long or do certain things, but for the most part the last injection worked well and I think core exercises are improving everything.

Today I used the Keiser equipment for the first time. It's going to take a bit to get used to, but it functions very similarly to traditional weight machines. It's easier to use and I'm confident that the workouts will be better.

This is the #1 focus in my life right now along with work of course... and I can't wait until tomorrow to keep it up.

Day 2: under 2,000 calories for 2 days in a row and 1.5 hours of working out at the gym today. Weight = 292.

Food I'm making tonight to help keep me motivated! 8 Vegetable Tofu Wraps for the week:

December 9th, 2017

 Today I joined: 

SwymFit is a workout facility in Boxborough, MA focussing on low impact high gain workouts that is perfect for rebuilding muscles and repairing injury. Many of the workouts are pool/water oritented.

1 day in a row under 2000 calories and I swam for an hour and did doing a regular physical therapy workout. Tomorrow I'm going to focus on weights... I'm going to try to alternate each day with a steady focus on diet. Weights at SwymFit are called Keiser. They are hydraulic so there are no moving weights. It's pretty neat stuff:

http://www.swymfit.com/

https://www.keiser.com/

Beggining of the Program:

I want to start off by saying thank you! The more people read and pay attention to this, the more likely I am to be successful... You're helping me out so thanks!

So I've realized how important it is to be in good physical shape over the past 12 months. 2017 started with me lifting entirely too much weight in January and I hurt my back. I learned that I have a degenerated disk. After that I was in bed for a couple of months with lower back pain. Once the back pain went away, I joined a softball team and I tore my hamstring... another 3 months in bed. After that was healed I decided to test it out on a mountain. I hiked Mt. Manadnock and I was not ready. My leg felt great...unfortunately I did not realize that because of my degenerated disk, I was damaging my nerves and discs the whole way down. There was no pain on the mountain...I thought I was fine... but the next day I couldn't walk. That started a 6 month rehab including physical therapy, multiple spine injections, and it's now december 9th and I just this week feel pain free enough to join a gym. I have decided that this year is going to be  a transformational year for me. I'm not out of the woods yet. I'm pain free because of the last injection. If the medicine wears off too fast, I might still need spine surgery. For this reason... I've decided to workout every day for 1 year... Avoiding surgery, getting healthy and fit, look better, feel better. It's amazing how much of a motivation intense pain for 6 months can be! I'm going to document this on this website as my life in 2018. Thanks for being a part of it.

I'm also going to make a my fitness pal site to track everything I ingest. Feel free to track me or friend me! Jamey19

I'm not going to do shirtless photos (You're welcome) :) ... not yet anyway... but I'm going to be taking photos of my progress and new exercises I learn and equipment I use. My starting weight was 296.