Ensight – Jeremy Wright

Every couple of days I post to my Twitter account (www.twitter.com/jeremywright) about how I’m doing workout/eating/fitness/weightloss-wise. Every time I get a couple of people (sometimes more) asking how I’m doing what I’m doing, what I’m eating, etc.

In the last 3 months, I’ve lost 25 pounds. I need to lose another 9 pounds to be at what I thought was my goal weight back when I weighed 255 pounds (I’m 234 as of this morning, but will settle back down to 230 quickly). For me it’s been a combination of baby steps, structured eating, public accountability and a program I can follow.

I’ll be really clear. 3 months ago, I was an out of shape, overweight, lazy geek. I could barely manage 5 pushups, I could squeeze out 30 half-crunches per day, I could barely do 1 minute of intense jogging on the treadmill and I could eke out 10 minutes of solid work on the bike. Now I’m hardly a pro athlete, but yesterday/today I did 60 pushups (including 25 or so consecutive), 500 crunches, I can do 5 minutes of jogging (I have asthma so this is the hardest) and I can do a solid 30 minutes on the bike.

So I thought it might be nice to share not just general stuff I’m doing, but the program I built for myself. This is designed for someone like me: slightly motivated, WANTS to lose the weight, doesn’t know where to start and who tends to be an “all or nothing” type of person; which ultimately means you burn out after a couple of weeks.

For me, the secret to most of this was to build habits. I’m FAR from perfect, but I get enough questions that I thought it might be useful to, instead of writing the occasional update post, actually start to publish some of my thoughts as a schedule.

If I manage to actually publish a full 6 weeks of food/workouts/stuff, I’ll probably create a full program based on starting abilities, etc. For now, I’ll just assume people are as out of shape, lazy, etc, as I was and sometimes still am.

Before We Get Started

Before we get started there are a few things I do recommend:

1. Set a realistic goal. My recommendation is 25 pounds. If you have more than 30% body fat, this is achievable within 2-3 months (faster if you don’t slip, but we might as well be realistic, right?).
2. Don’t buy stuff before you need it. Don’t sign up for the gym yet (if you already have a membership we’ll use it though). Don’t get expensive workout gear, diet pills, etc. You can load up on “stuff” once you’ve built your habits if you really want. Until you have, it’s just something to distract you. And what you really want out of this is the sense that you can do it. Not some random product.
3. Take baby steps. The temptation will be to start everything at once. The more you load up on new stuff, the more you drop the ball on stuff you’re already doing. Doing 1 new thing right per week will add up very quickly.
4. Buy a decent water bottle. Preferably stainless steel, as germs and toxins leak into the water less. It tastes weird at first, but you get used to it (note: wash it thoroughly, kthnxbai).
5. If you travel, you need to develop a travel PLAN before you travel.

Let’s Get Started

As with my workouts, I’ll take baby steps. Ideally I’d like to get to 3 (so you have Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 plans), but it might start out slower at first. So feel free to start with the early stuff, but feel free to wait a few weeks for me to find a rhythm too

If you have any tips or tricks or thoughts, PLEASE send them to me at jeremy@b5media.com and I’ll include them, along with credit for you, in my posts. The smaller and simpler, the better. But collective intelligence is a Good Thing.