Tag Archives: weight loss

Aviation, Health & Fitness, School

This time next week I’ll be sitting in class!!!

I have some more fiberglass work to do today that requires me to leave the house and pick up some materials and supplies over at TAP Plastics. With stuff in hand I can finish the big patch of repairedness by the front door and move on to the next spot tomorrow. There are three spots I have not gotten to yet. If I can get one more done before school starts that will be good. The rest will need to be done on weekends. before the wet season begins.

Not nearly as many projects got finished over the summer as I had planned, and nothing got done on the airplane mostly due to buttstucktochairwhileoncomputeritis; eh, it happens. With any luck being at school will help motivate me to work on weekend projects and if I chunk them down into smaller pieces like paint a wall and not the paint the entire stairwell including floor maybe I can find and keep my motivation to get them done.

It’s kind of funny how I am great at planing and running projects and events in the real world but when it comes to maintenance around the homestead I seem to get stalled-out. Not sure why that is, but I have ideas. We have been here 15 years as of April 1, no joke, that’s our anniversary date here, and I have been itching to move on for several years now. Not like it’s a bad gig or anything, on the contrary, it’s a really good gig that has saved our butts through bad times and has given me opportunities to pursue my own business interests, learn a ton of new skill sets in the outside world, and is now allowing me to go back to school. I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

Speaking about stalled out, the last few weeks have been one of those weight loss plateaus that picks at your resolve to hold fast and keep on track. Well I have kept on track and I am starting to see results again. I am within a few tenths of a pound of my lowest weight in several decades and a few pounds from reaching a benchmark goal. I am still logging my food and exercise and plan to continue with that. A friend recently gave me a bike so now the wife and I can go hit some of the bike trails before the weather turns, in all of my copious amounts of free time of course.

I have made a two year commitment to complete my FAA Airframe and Powerplant mechanic certificates which will be followed with some real world work experience, with any luck anyway. The plan is to start cultivating the contacts and experiences in the restoration world that will position me as a vintage/warbird restoration specialist.

There are other certificates and ratings I want to pick up along the way, most notably a senior parachute rigger certificate which ties in nicely to test piloting aircraft I restore. Another thing high on my list of certificates is to finish my flight instructor and instrument flight instructor tickets. It’s all part of the master plan that I have been working on since 2006.

Sometimes it is hard to believe I have been a pilot since 2004. I want to finish of my first decade as a pilot by reaching several aviation goals but time is quickly slipping away. The AMT program will wrap July of 2013, that will give me till ether April 24 2014, the anniversary of my first flight as a student, or October 11 2014, the date I earned my private pilot certificate. Most likely I’ll run with the October date. That will give me 15 months to reach my other goals after earning my A&P. Hey, all it takes is money and time, right?

FlyBoyJon’s First Decade of Flight Goals

As you can see I am a little better than half way there. It has certainly been an an interesting decade for me and I am looking forward to several more with a lot more aviation.

✔ Private Pilot
✔ Instrument Rating
✔ Commercial Pilot
✔ Advanced Ground Instructor
✔ Instrument Ground Instructor
O Airframe & Powerplant Mechanic
O Flight Instructor
O Instrument Flight Instructor
O Senior Parachute Rigger

As always my friends, blue skies and tailwinds,
~FlyBoyJon

Aviation, School

life on campus…

Back in January I made some decisions about major changes in my life. I know that making more than one big change in life(style) has consequences and it usually makes it more difficult to succeed in any of the proposed areas of change. Having this information going into this year I set up several goals for myself.

First off was the decision to pursue my aviation career whole-heartedly. I have a large and complex design of what that means, but this is not the forum to go into great detail on that, let’s just say that much of it comes down to credibility, and developing that credibility. Step one is to do the traditional credibility builder and get that sheepskin.

For me the sheep skin includes finishing a distance learning program I started in 2006 for an AS in Aviation Operations, second is to go back to school full time while still working the day job. I enrolled in classes back in January for a GE AA at San Jose City College that fulfills transfer requirements to San Jose state where I intend to earn a BS then MS in Aeronautical/Aerospace Engineering.

Another big change/goal is to get back on the weight loss train and get down to a weight more acceptable for a test pilot and competitor in aerobatics competitions. I set up an ambitious but very doable plan to loose 150 pounds in a about two and a half years, 60/50/40 ponds a year respectively. To do this I am using the calorie counting method.

So far school is going well as is the weight loss. I have a mid-term 4.0 at San Jose City College, and I just wrapped my first quarter with a 15 pound weight loss. I am tracking weight loss success by quarter rather than daily or by month, it seems more practical.

What has not gone so well is that I have not been getting as much done on the day job as I would like. School has been taking up much more time than I had anticipated, mostly due to the way I scheduled classes. This is something I can fix relatively easily. Changing my schedule next term and knowing how much time I need for study I will be able to make better use of my time.

Another goal that has not gone as well as planned involves building the Volksplane. It has been several weeks since I last posted here and it has been longer since any work was done on the airplane. I have been keeping up with my time-cards which points out vary clearly just how poorly I have been doing in this area. Frustrating yes, but I am not stressing out on this one, I know life happens and I know I am trying to do a lot all at once, so this is not a huge surprise. With any luck this too will be fixed with my scheduling changes next term.

Things that have just not happened are, getting up much earlier consistently to get personal stuff done and any last minute homework before classes, and going for daily walks and stretching. I also toyed with the idea of starting ether yoga or Ti Chi as part of the early morning regimen. Here again, not all that stressed out. These were set out as part of the over-all move towards getting fit. As long as the weight loss continues, I have time to add these in as I get closer to my goal weight.

As you can see, I am 2 for 6 as of now. It is still early though, the second quarter of the first year of a ten-year plan has just begun. All things considered, I am pleased with how things are shaping up. I hope to have my goal ratio up to 4 of 6 by the end of this year.

There are still lots of things in motion and school is a very fluid thing, being engaged with three institutions and having opportunities from outside my major come up keeps the decision making cycle in high gear. Right now the major stress is figuring out the particulars.

As Cornelius Robinson would say “Keep moving forward!”

Until next time, blue skies and tail winds,
~FlyBoyJon

Health & Fitness

Points

Losing weight with Weight Watchers, sort of…

Google Chart api version…

If you are on Weight Watchers this may or may not visually mean anything to you, but it is a big part of your life. This is the Points Counter formula. Points (p), calories (c), fat (f), and fiber (r). Starting to look familiar?

So why am I writing about this? A couple of reasons, I am considering joining WW but I have some reservations. My wife is a WW and has lost over 125 pounds on program. I need to loose about 145 pounds myself. I don’t like the whole “sunshine up yer skirt” thing that pervades motivational groups. I prefer facts, formulas, and just making it work. I quit smoking cold-turkey, granted it was after several attempts over the years, but I did do it without a program or support group. The real question is can I do my own “program” and make a go of it. I think so.

Today is the first time I have started tracking “point” values, hence the formula above. I want a convenient calculator for my BlackBerry, so I am making one, the formula was a starting point, no pun intended. Coding a simple webpage in PHP is next step.

One of my challenges with “logging” is the way I cook, not so much by recipe but by intuition. “Logging” in WW parlance, this is the practice of journaling all of your food intake by thier point system. To make it all work I need to be able to count ingredients quickly and accurately while/before cooking, and I need to track by decimal and not whole points otherwise I know a lot of things will slip by. It is the work load of all of this that has, in part, kept me from going on “program” in the past.

I don’t know where all of this is going, but it may make for some interesting writing.

So far today… [43 of 44]

Breakfast *12*
Venti Mocha (non-fat, no whip, triple shot) [5]
Huevos Rancheros Burito [7]

Lunch *12*
3 boild potatoes (3oz, 5oz, 5oz / 2, 3, 3) [8]
Honey Mustard dressing (2 oz) [4]

Dinner *10*
2 lean ground turkey patties [8]
corn (2 small cobs) [2]

Other *9*
water 2 ltr [0]
passion tea (w/ agave) 2 ltr [0]
honey roasted peanuts (1 oz) [4]
1 can apricots (15 oz) [3]
WW latte ice cream bar [1]
1 orange [1]

WordPress api version…
[latex size=”3″]p=left(dfrac{c}{50}right)+left(dfrac{f}{12}right)-left(dfrac{r}{5}right)[/latex]