I probably can't do the feeling justice in words, when that ball went through the uprights to win the game will be a moment I (along with probably anyone else from here) will remember forever. I wish I had thought ahead and recorded video of us watching that moment. We were all standing in my theater, pretty much holding our breath, staring fixated at the screen and the moment that was in front of us. There were only two ways this was playing out. The old way we have felt too many times where the play goes wrong, the goal is missed, and the other team comes back to win, or the new way, a way we have never experienced where the stars align, the goal is good, and... well I'll just let this video show you what happens when this path was walked.

http://videos.nola.com/times-picayune/2010/01/saints_video_bourbon_street.html

Yeah, that's 40+ years of frustration coming out there.

I had some people over at the house to watch the game and it was like that. Just jumping, screaming, going nuts. Tried calling people after and the cell network was down, couldn't even text for about 30 minutes.

Now I missed all the craziness going on in the city the other night, but yesterday was another event. The dress parade.

Quick recap, Buddy D was the local Saints broadcaster for ages. He was here through the worst of the worst times as far as being a Saints fan is concerned. He died before Katrina so never got to witness the all time worst moment in Saints history. One thing that was always out there, was his pledge to wear a dress down Bourbon St. if the Saints ever made it to the Super Bowl. It was a long shot safe bet for ages. Buddy D Wiki

Well, the Saints actually made it, so his replacement broadcaster (and former Saints QB) Bobby Hebert decided to honor the pledge and held a dress parade. Only he wasn't alone. Thousands of people lined the streets continuing the party that started last Sunday. Men in dresses were everywhere.

Here's a few of the videos I took (can anyone familiar with video on the iPhone tell me why the 2nd video is turned sideways?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE74Tv92UCc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os8D95PjNDA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiLlWPTrVCQ

So now that we're heading up to the big game, it's time to plan an event. This event needs to be epic.

We're letting it serve double duty as a house warming party / Saints Superbowl party since a lot of my family hasn't seen my house yet. So I'm going to have the game on 3 screens, 2 projectors and 1 TV. I have a keg of Bud Light Lime reserved, everyone is bringing a meal for the party pot luck style, and we're going to have a good time.

I'll post back once we get past that party, and hopefully once all these major distractions are gone, I can finally get back focused on the diet.

Edit: Good read here

Diet was still ugly, had people over for the Saints game which has been an exciting time for us down here. 1 win away from the first Super Bowl appearance in the history of the city. Also had a few other things to attend so it's been just an ugly diet.

That said I still managed to keep things mostly under control during the week and that got me down another 3lbs and back into the 330's. Upper 330's but still.

Another big Saints game on the horizon likely means another ugly weekend. I expect my diet to improve a good bit once these large temptations are removed (which hopefully won't be until after the Super Bowl).

I've also had a set back in exercise. Both knees are now hurting. One knee is very tight and hurts when I bend it too far, so I've had to keep it limited in movement. The other one is back to locking up a little when used a lot. So it looks like my knees are going to end my exercise again for a bit.

I think the plan at this point has to be to get past all this football, clean up the diet, and get out of the 300's so my knees aren't supporting so much weight each day. All that weight is more wear and tear.

Should be going in for my check up with the doctor in a few weeks as well, so I'll get his opinion on this as well.

For now, it's more of the same. We'll keep moving at this slow and steady pace and hopefully at some point in the coming weeks I'll be able to kick this into a different gear.

You must eat!

On a few occasions in the past week I wound up missing either lunch or breakfast, and just completely wrecked my energy level and will to do things like exercise. As is also the case when you skip meals, you tend to make up for it later, and that throws things off as well.

I'm really having to try and focus on eating. It's the weirdest thing to think that you have to make sure you eat while on a diet but it seems to be vital that you keep to a schedule.

Anyone that is starting out and finding they're having trouble sticking to their meals, look closely at how your meals are spread out and see if you can find any problems in that. On good days I have about 5-6 meals spread out evenly throughout the day. Every time I eat I'm not really hungry, but know that it's time to eat so I do. When I'm successful at that, I lose more weight, feel less hungry, and overall have more success with the diet. Now if only I could do it consistently.

Another thing, I walked into the break room earlier and a handful of people were in there and some had these really nice looking homemade salads. Now I'm sure not all of those salads were healthy salads, but it got me to thinking there has to be some better salad ideas than the meager ones I make from time to time.

So to anyone reading this, what types of salads do you like to make?

I already have a full time day job, plus some night and weekend help at a 2nd place to help keep them going. So this workload really is going to stretch me thin.

All this left me exhausted many days, I'd do ok with keeping my calories in check for breakfast and lunch, but then dinner would be a blow out. The weekend was mostly ugly as well starting with dinner Saturday and all meals on Sunday.

Still lost a little though, so I'll just keep pushing along. I managed a few more miles last night but not many as I was EXHAUSTED! I did 70 miles last week all total. Not bad for a start, and certainly not bad considering my energy levels.

I'm going to regroup starting with a workout tonight during the Biggest Loser, and just keep pushing forward. Might be a rough month until the work load returns to some level of normalcy. So we'll see what happens.

See you next time.

Sunday was a complete bust. I slept like crap, then woke up early to go see the first showing of Avatar. That's a long movie so we didn't get out of there until the afternoon. Then we grabbed some lunch and some stuff to cook for dinner. Watched the afternoon football game and after it was all said and done I didn't get back home until a little after 10pm. Not crazy enough about the bike to do an hour that late.

Meals were ugly yesterday as well. I wasn't home so I wasn't really in control of the calories as much. We'll see how that works out tomorrow with the weigh in.

It was worth it to go see Avatar in IMAX 3D though. If you have the option to go see this in IMAX 3D, you really need to go do it before it leaves the theater. That was an experience. I can't see that level of immersion being able to be recreated in the home environment anytime soon (and this is coming from someone who built my own home theater). For those of you old enough to remember, this was like seeing Jurassic Park for the first time and seeing the T-Rex come walking out. The technology and special effects in this movie just set the new benchmark.

On to finish the week and weigh in tomorrow morning, bye.

Was woken up by the phone today, never a good thing when you work on computers. After doing some work I was up so I went to workout. Knocked out 10 miles.

Then I did some cleaning and decided after, let's get back on the bike. Another 5 miles done.

Next I put lunch in the oven, but that was going to take 15-20 minutes to cook. Another 5 miles done.

Finally after finishing lunch I said what the hell, and...

Yes, that's 25 miles biked today. A nice chunk of mileage to get out the way. The calories actually flipped back to 0 when I hit 999 (check the video out here), so that's 1,047 calories burned in total and a workout time of just under 99 minutes. Not bad at all, in fact pretty damn stellar!

Considering how I felt the other day after 17 miles, I actually feel pretty good. I maintained a good speed throughout. Didn't really start to feel exhaustion in the legs until around the 23 mile marker. It's amazing how resilient the body is.

Even more amazing is after seeing the Biggest Loser crew struggle to do 26.2 miles in pairs earlier this week, I almost did that much solo.

65 miles into the 500 mile challenge, and good enough for 2nd place overall by a few miles. I expect  Steve to give me a run for my money shortly. Bring it!

I think this is a major turning point in the diet/exercise part of this journey. What do you think?

Oh yeah, I'm also dieting on top of this.

So I started off with a late bowl of cereal around 9am (like to eat around 8), a pair of nutra-grain bars for lunch and some apple slices in the afternoon. By the time I left work I was starving and exhausted, so I turned Friday into Fried-Day or FrieDay as you see above. Stopped and got some Popeyes fried chicken instead of cooking. Was just too stressed and too tired.

I did however manage to get some work done on the bike, popped out 8 miles to round myself out at a nice 40 for the week so far. I also noticed I was hitting better speeds this round after taking a day off. I peaked at 20mph for a few minutes and wound up completing the 8 miles in almost 30 minutes exactly.

I'm hoping to do a pair of 10-12 mile sets on both Saturday and Sunday to give me another chunk of mileage so that I can pop over the 100 mile mark sometime this week. I'm really hoping a month of biking will get my cardio built up so that I can start in on the elliptical next month (I tried it a few months back and it killed me after a few minutes).

That's it for now, lots of football this weekend, and a lot of house chores and work. Plus we're planning on seeing Avatar on Sunday and that's like a 3 hour movie. So it's going to be a hectic weekend. I'll probably just post a few updates over on twitter on my exercise progress and then a weekend recap on Monday followed by the weigh in on Tuesday.

See you then, thanks for coming by.

Had a pair of nutra-grain bars for breakfast and a few apple slices. Lunch was a grilled chicken Caesar salad (which was awesome by the way). Grilled chicken and the lettuce were fine, it's the dressing and croutons that hurt although it was light on the dressing side, not drowned in it.

Dinner went over to my girlfriends to have dinner with her family. They had made baked potato soup and a salad. The soup was pretty amazing, I'm sure it wasn't low in calories though so we'll see how that pans out on the scale this week.

Didn't get home till about bed time so there was no biking yesterday. Today I hope to get back on track. Already my diet has been clean again today so we're on our way.

My goal for this weekend is to bike at least 50 miles. We'll see how I do. Gotta make up some miles somewhere.

I managed 14 more miles and just over 550 calories burned. I'll post the pic tomorrow.

That brings me to 32 miles so far and 468 to go, that's going to be a long road to travel. I'm going to need to double down on weekends to come close to pulling this off. I'll do my best, and if for some reason I should come up a few miles short they won't go untraveled, they will be done even if I miss the deadline by a day or two.

Meal wise I kept is similar, bowl of cereal for breakfast and lunch, but I added 2 nutra-grain bars as a morning snack and afternoon snack, some apple slices, and some wheat thins. Dinner once again was some baked chicken breasts and mixed veggies. No dessert. Few sticks of sugar free gum as well.

All told pretty clean. Tune in tomorrow for the next bit of progress. I can tell right now tomorrow's update won't be so positive lol

Knee actually started hurting again about 2 miles in, but not enough to stop so I kept going to 18 miles. Wanted to quit at 10, really wanted to quit at 15, was going nuts about mile 17 but had to finish Biggest Loser and wasn't coming off until the credits rolled. Then I was so close to 18 I finished it out.

Was funny as well because about mile 6 they showed the first challenge to the people, bike 26.2 miles. I don't know if I'm in better shape than some of these people (physically I weigh as much as at least 2 contestant's starting weights) yet they looked like they were dying a few miles into the challenge. Plus they had a partner to split the miles with. I did 18 miles solo yesterday.

Was pretty proud that I stuck with it and pushed through the wall. It certainly wasn't easy, but I also didn't feel like I couldn't continue. I have no doubt if I was in the position on that show where it was bike to stay on the show I wouldn't have been going home.

Took a snapshot of the finish.

My time was actually a bit shorter than that, the clock kept running during my rest periods. I'll need to do a better job of stopping that. Overall the workout burned 754 calories. The counter is set to count backward from 500 calories which was my old goal back when I started the diet. It actually finished around mile 12 and I had to restart the counter. So the 246 you see is the calories remaining in a 2nd 500 calorie program.

As for meals yesterday, I was very controlled and very low on calories. Special K Red for breakfast, and Raisin Bran for lunch (small bowl with skim milk). Some grilled BBQ chicken breast for dinner with some mixed veggies. The chicken I found at Sams, pre-cooked and frozen, so it just had to be microwaved warm. 2 small breasts at 170 calories per. Wanted to get those and try them out as an emergency meal in the even I don't have time to cook. Having a quick option available helps keep me on target.

I also had some apple slices for about 100 calories, a nutri-grain bar for 130, and a frozen lemon ice dessert for 120 calories.

I'd be surprised if the total calories was over 1300 yesterday meaning I burned almost everything I ate.

Weighed in this morning and it showed, really showed. You'll see just how much next Tuesday. Day 2 begins now.