Well, here goes!

Tonight marks the first actual day of my big life change. After Derek got out of work, we started our new routine of meeting after and walking (rolling) home together. He works exactly 1 miles from our apartment, so round trip that means a two mile walk. To start off though, I'm going to meet him halfway, just so I don't wear myself out so fast. Once my body gets fully used to it, I'll meet him at work and do the full trip. Shockingly, it won't be as long as you'd expect for me to adjust. The mile today was nothing, which I suppose is a big perk of living in the city. My body is still used to walking the mile+ a day to and from work.

I also took a big step and for the first time since February, went to the gym! Of course, being the coward that I am, I went at 1 am when there was no one else there. I really hate working out in front of other people. Some of you may know what I'm talking about. It's an awful feeling that even the endorphins of working out can't help. you can feel as good as gold walking into the gym, but once that 120 lb blond chick gets on the machine next to you and goes 5X faster, your self esteem drops quite low. So I fixed that problem by going while every sane person in the building was sleeping.

I started on the elliptical. It was the first time I have ever actually used one, because the one time I tried at LIU, it made my knee very uncomfortable. It was...an experience. I set the machine to "weight loss" and entered in my weight an age, and it gave me my workout. It started out on resistance level one, which wasn't too bad. I had my ipod with me, but instead chose to listen to the TV entertainment thingy attached to the machine. After a few minutes, it moved up to level eight, at which point I thought I was going to die. But, I barreled through. After I hit the halfway point, I accidentally hit the reset button and it canceled all my progress. I was so tempted to quit. I'm really good at quitting. I've quit softball, soccer, karate (1 lesson), swimming, ballet, tap, jazz, gymnastics and cheerleading. I've also quit the violin, the french horn, college and every diet attempt I've started in 21 years. But today, I didn't quit. I restarted with the same settings and finished my routine.

After my twenty eight minute elliptical, I attempted the stair...thing, but decided against it. It was very uncomfortable on my knee, and wasn't worth the risk. Instead I did a few of the arm machine things and some ab exercises. Total it was about a 40 minute work out that I plan on refining a little bit (with some internet research) and doing twice a week. I also have a "yoga for weight loss" DVD that I plan on doing twice a week.

After I got back home, I took what has officially been deemed the longest and best bath ever taken. I don't know if you've ever taken a bath after a workout before, but oh man it's amazing. By the time I got out and finished my post bath shower, it was 3 am.

Now here I sit, watching Hawaii 5-0, wondering just how much pain I'm going to be in tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll be in well enough condition (as in, I can actually move) to take my first set of "before" pictures. Since I don't own a scale, and have no intention of buying one, I'm going to rely on a series of photographs to mark my progress. To me, this isn't about the number. It's not about how much I weigh and how much I lose each week, it's about how I feel and how.

This, of course, means that when I say "Cameras, Books and 100 Pounds" I don't actually know if I'll lose that much. The healthy weight range for someone my height is from 117-155, depending on my body frame (How the hell am I supposed to know what my "frame" is?). So I suppose I'm aiming for somewhere in that range, but we'll see what happens. Like I said before, I really just want to wear a medium shirt, instead of the 2XL I wear now. But we'll leave that discussion for another night!

I would just like to ad a quick P.S. that according to fittracker (my new favorite website), I consumed approx. 1913 calories, and worked off 420. According to the website, in order to maintain my current weight, I need to consume 2365 calories a day, making my goal calorie intake 1865. I went a bit over today, but to be fair, Derek brought my Popeyes home for lunch today as my fairwell to fastfood lunch. All in all, I'm quite proud!