This week I had a loss of 1.2 pounds, but I gained 0.2% body fat.  This was on-target for my goals weight-wise, but nutritionally I can’t help but feel I must have taken a dive.  I’ve really been struggling with binge eating lately.  I don’t know what it is, but I seem to be going a bit nuts when I’m at home too long or at social gatherings.  I don’t believe that it’s physical, but instead completely psychological.  I will try and justify eating by saying I work out a lot, but then I’ll go and devour a ton of calories.  Of course I don’t keep track of what I’m eating either.

Today I’ve been focused on trying to keep my goal of journaling before I eat things and I’m starting to reign things back in, but I need to explore where this desire to binge eat is coming from.  I do have a couple of ideas.

1. 
   
2. I’m bored of what I’m eating most of the time.  Now my wife has done a great job of making the dinners very interesting.  However, my daytime meals have been static for several months now.  I think I’m getting burned out on salads and I need to look into making them more interesting.  I don’t want to give up the salad, but I think I need to change it up so that it’s more interesting than just tomatoes, Light Italian, egg whites, and cheese.  I’ve been adding some deli meat and that’s been good, but I think changing up the salad dressing and the cheese might help quite a bit too.  I’ll have to do some looking around for exciting salads.  I recently heard one podcaster say she had the recipe for the Best Ever Greek Salad, so maybe I’ll give that a try since the ingredients are pretty similar to what I have and it looks fairly inexpensive.
   
3. I’ve been restricting myself when I should be lax, and I’ve been lax when I should be restricting myself.  This may seem confusing, but let me explain.  There are a couple of meals each week that I cut back a bit: my weekly cheat meal (Thursday evening) and Saturday afternoon (weekly family meal).  Now while I allow myself to go a little crazy (but hopefully not too crazy) I sometimes find myself trying to restrict myself to a salad bar or something else.  The problem there is that I start overeating in order to compensate for feeling like I’m missing out on something.  Also, there are times when I know that the weekend holds an event where there will be food (such as a birthday party this weekend) and I should show some restraint both on my cheat night and the night of the party, but instead I go crazy at both.  I really need to focus on preparing for these abnormal events and taking steps to try and enable my willpower, such as listening to podcasts, eating something before the events and recording my calories before eating.  I know what to do; I just forget to do it.
   
4. Eating while I’m bored, tired and stressed have also been issues for me lately.  I’ve found that while I have long stints at home and I’m tired or have nothing much to do (other than play ponies) I try to manage things emotionally and psychologically with food; and not good food either.  Why is this food in the house?  Mostly because I haven’t thrown it away.  I have treats from Christmas and Halloween still that I told my wife I would sort out and throw away, but I still haven’t.  At least not to the extent that I should.  So when I’m feeling tired, bored, or stressed I go and get some candy or something else, eat it, avoid recording it, and before you know it I’ve successfully sabotaged myself.  What I need to do is channel that compulsion into something constructive such as reading, doing something active, or doing something creative.  I also need to go through the candy and throw away all the stuff I was keeping for myself (because honestly the girls are blessed to the point where they forget about that kind of stuff the moment it’s out of their sight).
   
5. I need to do some internal inventory of myself, my goals and my attitude in general.  When I first started out I was pretty focused on why I had gained weight in the first place.  Along the way I think that I’ve slowly replaced that work with fitness and I’m starting to feel like I’ve traded one addiction for another.  While being addicted to fitness isn’t necessarily a bad thing; obsession can be.  I seem to sway between the two; either overindulging in food or in exercise.  I’d like to get more focused on my internal dialogue and make sure I’m doing a good job of getting my head on straight for the future.
   

Building a Home Gym isn’t at the top of my to-do list, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about in the future.  Now while some people may purchase an exercise machine such as an elliptical or a treadmill, what if you’re looking to do a bit more?  What should you look for in a home gym and when is the best time to invest in one?

The Purposeful Primitive :

• 
  
• Free weights are the best
  
• Olympic Barbell
  
• Dumbbells
  
  • 
    
  • fixed poundage
    
  • empty handles w/ plates
    
  
  
  
• An adjustable bench with leg extension/leg curl device and an incline curl pad
  
• Power Rack
  
  • 
    
  • Supplemental pulley for cable work
    
  • front crossbar for pull-up’s and the like
    
  
  
  
• Jump Rope
  
• Gymboss
  
• Save money and buy used
  

Men’s Fitness (February 2013)

• 
  
• TRX Home Suspension Kit
  
• Chin-Up/Pull-Up Bar
  
• Adjustable Dumbbells
  
• Foam Roller
  
• Stability Ball
  
• Gymboss
  
• Kettle Bells
  
• Medicine Ball
  
• Wood Plybox
  
• Heavy-Bag
  
• Battling Ropes
  
• The Prowler 2
  

The Ultimate Home Gym Guide

Hello Dodge,

Just getting around to listening to Ep.46 (Kickstarting your Metabolism…).  I got about half way in and listening to you talk about your apprehension for changing workouts from 6 per week, to 3 per week. On that topic, I thought you would find this interesting:

Daily Workouts May Not Be the Healthiest Approach

- http://wellbeingwire.meyouhealth.com/physical-health/daily-workouts-may-not-be-the-healthiest-approach/

” the highest-intensity workout group “complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time”

“Remarkably, the women who worked out six times a week actually were expending 200 fewer calories per day at the end of the study than they had been at the outset, whereas the twice-weekly group was expending an average of 100 calories more per day, and the four-times-weekly workout group was burning 225 more calories per day.”

Keep on keepin on!

Jason

• 
  
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