Weight Watchers

Now that I hit my weight loss goal, I was trying to decide what I should do for maintenance. I think the most important thing is better integrating exercise and better eating habits into my lifestyle. That's the only way this stuff is going to stick. I was trying to think of ways to do that and be accountable. I thought about developing a points system based on eating and exercise. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I decided to sign up for Weight Watchers Online. The first three months is $65 and I was able to finance the expense through a generous birthday gift from my wife's parents (thanks!). So we'll see how that goes. If nothing else, it's forcing me to log everything I eat and be conscious of my food choices. Hopefully I'll also be able to get a better handle on portion sizes and a more intuitive sense of the relative point values of different foods. So far I've only done this for two days. The web interface is pretty slick and makes things relatively painless - although there are some weird things (bugs?) in the site I haven't figured out yet.

The other thing I'm still getting my head around is what a good target weight should be (good target = healthy and achievable over the long-term). 190-195 pounds actually seems pretty good to me. But the system suggested setting a target of 143 pounds - 50+ pounds less than I am right now! I think this was based on BMI but that's totally crazy. When I stepped on the scale this morning, I was 193.4 pounds and 22.4% body fat - 43.3 pounds of fat and 150.1 pounds. So I currently have more muscle than Weight Watchers is telling me I should weigh total. Something doesn't fit here. Even if I got down to 8% body fat and maintained my muscle mass (which would be very challenging), I'd still weigh 163.2 pounds. Anyway, I entered 185 pounds into the system as my "goal weight" but I personally think 190-195 pounds makes more sense (even though it technically means I'm still "fat").

Lemonade stand

JD decided a couple of weeks ago that he wanted to do a lemonade stand and yesterday was the big day. It's great to see him take iniative to do things like this. He was very excited to make the lemonade and cookies and even found the recipe for the oatmeal raisin cookies himself in a book he got at the library. He also painted signs for us to hang up in our neighborhood to attract customers.

After 90 minutes, JD, AJ, and one of JD's friends from church had sold out and made $8 in revenue. Each cup of lemonade was a quarter. Same price for the cookies. So they sold 32 items in all - and ate/drank some themselves. Each kid got to put $2.70 in their piggy bank (we kicked in an additional dime to make the revenue split totally even). Being a MBA, I had actually proposed that my wife and I take 50% off the top to cover raw material and marketing costs but she thought it was ok for all the money to go to the kids. She's such a softie. =)