Obesity Epidemic

Sitting here eating lunch of chicken soup and pudding, I stumbled across an interesting article about obesity on the Washington Post.

According to the article, one's chances of obesity increases when someone in their social network becomes obese. Wow, crazy... I hope I haven't had a negative impact on my friends over the last few months.

Luckily, I know from person experience that the opposite is true. Among obese friends and family members, drastic weight loss also seems to be epidemic. About a year and a half ago, my mother lost a bunch of weight. Her weight loss has since influences several of my aunts and uncles, as well as me. So I guess mom deserves a big thanks!

And while I'm here, I figure I'll share my accomplishments to date: I have lost 40 lbs in the past 8 weeks (an average of 5lbs a week), and I'm really hoping to keep that rate up.

I'm still struggling a little with exercise, though I've been traveling a lot lately, which tends to get in my way. Every week I manage to meet the 2000 calorie goal suggested by the program, but I'd really like to be hitting 3000 (since research suggests that that is what people who successfully keep weight off do). So to help me achieve that, I've decided that I need to try really hard to do about 500 cals of exercise a day (which would work out to 3500 a week).
I think i need to set a "start date" for going back to the gym... I have a friend that has said she'd be my gym buddy 2 days a week, so perhaps we will start going soon.

Well, I need to get my traineo page up to date!