omfg

i hadn't lost like any weight.  so i signed up with a personal trainer a couple of weeks ago and am hitting the gym hard.  i work out with the trainer for 30 minutes two times a week.  then i replicate each of those workouts on another day of the week, and i have one 'rest' day of 45-60 minutes of cardio.  and i end up working out another day sometimes.  so it's 5-6 days a week at the gym, an hour a day.

mind you, on top of this i'm 'dieting'.  and drinking a fuckton of water.  66-128 ounces every damn day.  66 ounces is what i drink on my off/rest days.  workout days i drink between 99-128 ounces.  i was using an app from livestrong and had it set to lose 2 pounds a week, which is 1000 calorie deficit.  and it was telling me i was burning like a gazillion calories working out, and i was eating at least half of those calories back.  but i wasn't really burning that many calories, so i was eating extra calories.

enter me buying a heart rate monitor.  so that way i was able to accurately track how many calories i was burning each workout.  i even wore it for 24 hours straight on an off day so i could determine how many calories i burned a day while sleeping, eating, and breathing.  basal metabolic rate.

and then i decided to use a new app.  the livestrong one is neat (awesome husband uses it for his body building and he's gained like 4 pounds since he started using it [can you imagine needing to GAIN weight? if only]) but the community had a huge mix of people.  including body builders and anorexics.  and it's not that i have an issue with people trying to gain weight, but reading the stuff the anorexics were going through and writing about was emotionally taxing to me. 

so i started using myfitnesspal. which i really like.  they have a facebook-like timeline thingy that you can interact with your 'friends'.  so i can friend request people who have similar stuff to mine - like a lot of weight to lose, or who just started, or who weigh in on the same days as me, whatever.  and we can cheer each other on and shit like that.  and this time, i set it to lose 1 pound a week to see if it changed anything.

and it has.  between eating more calories, using my heart rate monitor, and having almost two weeks of personal training under my belt, i've lost 2.5 pounds.  which brings my overall total to just about 4.4 pounds.

paltry, really.  less than 2% of my overall body weight.  but it's almost 2% more than last month... so i guess that's good.

in other news, tattooing continues unabated.  i'm at the point where i barely want to post photos of my tattoos because some of them are half finished and whatnot.  plus, my half sleeve is almost half done so i kind of want to wait until it's done.  you can always find me on instagram - stephgas - where i generally post photos of shit like that. 

busy times, peeps, busy times.  i just wish i had more time to tell you all about what's happening in my life.  because OBVIOUSLY that's why you're here ;)  until then, take a look at this:

my baby jakes <3