The (Second) Biggest Loser!

I hinted in my last post a few months ago that some big changes were coming… and then I failed to share with you what was going on.  It’s kinda like the show that ends a season with a cliff hanger and then gets canceled over the summer…  I’m sorry.

The BIG change has been to me… I’m not as big as I was when I posted last because I’m a contestant in Shoreline Church’s The Biggest Loser competition!

When the contest started on December 1st, I was the heaviest person in the contest at 296.5 pounds!   There are 9 participants, and we were split up into 3 teams… I am on the Green team lead by Brian and Tara Buonassissi with Jessica and Cathie.  The Yellow team was lead by Pastor Eric and Darlene Partin with Adrian, Karen and Melissa.  The Red team was lead by Pastor Sam and Monica Blowes with Andy, Judy and Heather.

The first week was pretty insane… 16.5 pounds!  After that, the losses were much more reasonable… 2, 3, 4 pounds.  The week of Christmas, I was happy I lost 2.5 pounds instead of gaining like most people do.  Even attending Christmas parts and a New Years Eve party, I kept losing.

The toughest week was when I went to WV to visit with friends and family… I ate out, had a couple beers, even ate some cheese sticks from Sam’s in Buckhannon… but I didn’t take off from working out. I made sure to get a hotel that had a fitness center, and got up early and ran on the treadmill before driving.  I also ran outside the WVU Coliseum in 25 degree weather while in Morgantown.  I only missed 1 workout while I was gone, and managed to lose 1 pound.

During the last month, we had a weekly challenge in addition to our other workouts.  The first week was a cooking challenge: we had 20 minutes to prepare a healthy meal that would be judged on presentation, taste, nutritional vale, and ease of prep.  We lost to the Yellow team by a very slim margin…

The second challenge involved running stadium stairs… I was out of town that weekend and didn’t have to go through that torture.

The third challenge was even more brutal: we shuffled, skipped, and jogged “suicide runs”.  Cones were laid out at 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 75, and 120 yards.  We started doing shuffles to the first cone and back, 2nd, and so on to the 25-yard cone.  Then came skips to each of the cones and back… all the way to the 120.  Last was jogging to each cone and back… and then a lap around the track.  Everything I just described to you was 1 set… and we did that set 3 times.  Oh, and there was a twist… for the first set we carried a backpack containing bags of sand with the amount of weight we’d lost up to that point.  So, for the first set, I carried 36 pounds!!!  after the first set, we could take 1 bag (10 lbs) out of the backpack.  Adrian and I got to remove 2 bags since we’d lost so much more than the rest.  After the second set we could lose the backpack completely.  This was one of the hardest hours of my life, but I finished… and I didn’t finish last!   Once again, the Green team finished just behind the Yellow team.

The last challenge was yesterday: complete a 10k race!  Since the beginning of the month, I had been running the Couch to 10k program to prepare.  Unfortunately, it’s a 12-week program, and I had 4 weeks.  I started on week 3 and figured I would just run the program the day of the race, then walk the rest (or run as much as I could).  On Thursday this week, I had an idea… what if I just ran intervals the whole way?  I had an app on the iPhone that would help me with that, so I set myself up to run for a minute and thirty seconds, then walk for 3 minutes.  I figured if I could keep a pace of 4 mph, I would finish in about an hour and a half.  I did better than I thought: I finished in an hour and 21 minutes, with a pace of 4.5 mph!  I had Melissa (another Biggest Loser contestant) in front of me most of the way…  If she hadn’t been there, I would have probably had a much slower time.  I really wanted to beat her to the finish, but when I passed her with about 2-3 miles left I couldn’t stay ahead of… I finished about 100 yard behind her.

The competition was split into 2 parts… For the first 2 months we worked with a trainer 3 days a week, and there were prizes for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place finishers in that time.  We did our last weigh-in on Wednesday, and had to wait until today to find out the results.  Today, the Green team finally prevailed: We lost more as a group than either of the other 2 groups, finally beating the Yellow team.  Adrian finished in 1st place with a crazy 19% lost.  Jessica finished 3rd, and I finished second with 15% lost!

Here’s a rundown of my number to this point: Started at 296.5, finished part 1 today at 252.  I lost 44.5 in 2 months, and I lost 8.5 the last week!  I killed it that last week, working out every day… even twice on Tuesday before the weigh-in.

As for the rest of the competition, I’m shooting to end at 200…. 33% lost sounds like a winning number to me!

Coming soon: more details on the workout regiment I’ve been on, the bigger impact of the competition, and more about this weekend!

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