Cruise A

Our Cruise May 4-18 2016


Here's my problem. When I am home, I am very active, and control my eating pretty well, but when we are away, I move around less, and eat like there's no tomorrow.

This wouldn't be an issue, except we travel a very great deal.

Black Thursday hit while we were down in Arizona this winter. My weight was up by 11 pounds. A complication was going to be that after returning home, we would be going on a two-week cruise to Alaska less than a month later. Cruises are the absolute worst for weight control.

That gave me under a month to try and get down to my ideal weight for the cruise. Otherwise things could get ugly.

I started running significant distances daily ( 8-10km ), and cutting down on the old food ration. Things started going nicely, but then a family emergency called Helen and I to Victoria for a week. Victoria is full of fabulous places to eat. There is no way my weight drop could work as well while there. I kept running, but there was no Jiu-Jitsu, and tried to stay food-sensible. I continued to get smaller, but more slowly.

That meant, in practical terms, I had under 4 weeks (including Victoria) to drop 11 pounds. Actually, my goal was to go down a little further; another 2 pounds as a cruise-food buffer. So 4 weeks for 13 pounds. I wanted to weigh 173 pounds when boarding the ship.

Today, we boarded, and my weight was an even 171 pounds. My weight loss had exceeded expectations, and I was down 15 pounds. My ideal range is from 173-175 pounds. I didn't just have my hoped for 2 pound buffer, but actually had one of 4 pounds.

This isn't meant to be bragging. My "program" is not one of self-denial, but rather of calorie usage. Take for example, yesterday.
I ran 8km, and my fitbit says I burned about 700 calories. Later, I was at Jiu-Jitsu for 2.25 hours, and burned over 1000 calories more.

Every day isn't that intense, but if we just call it a run every day, and JJ three times a week, that works out to 7900 calories lost to exercise every seven days. That's about 6.8 pounds of my 15 pounds of weight loss was from those two activities. The remaining 8.2 pounds came off due to diet or about 2 pounds a week.

To pull that off, my food intake must of been down by an average of 1000 calories a day. Actually, somewhat less as I am pretty active in other ways not mentioned. Let's just guesstimate things at being down by 800 a day.

That's less food reduction per day than the equivalent of 2 fried eggs, with 4 slices of bacon, and two slices of unbuttered toast. Not even any hash browns, for Pete's sake.

Once onboard, it is much, much harder to stay active, and almost impossible to not over-eat.

It is my intention to run every day. This is much harder for me to do than at home. There are three options. The first is to run in the gym on a treadmill. This is one of the most boring activities ever devised by man.

Another option is to use the on-deck running track. This time this won't work. The ship is tiny in cruise-ship terms, and has no track at all.

The best option is to run on shore whenever we have a port day. In our two weeks onboard, we have a total of 6 port days. All are at decent running spots, and we will be tied up there long enough to both do the tourist thing, and to run. This being real running, it will be easy to crank out significant numbers of miles.

The harder problem will be to not over-indulge in the wonderful food onboard. It is infinite in quantity, and wonderful in taste.

Step one will be breakfast. I love breakfast food, but will not be egging or baconing at all (well, maybe once or twice). Something more like a bowl of oatmeal will suffice.

Step two is lunch. They serve supper-sized meals for lunch, or we'll hit the buffet, which is even worse. I will eat a lot more midday onboard than midday at home. My intention is to go ahead and eat, but to limit portion size, and to stop well before bloating has begun.

Step three is supper. The multi-course meals are very weight-dangerous. I'll just have to do the best I can.

Step four is all the eating opportunities squeezed in between the real meals. Not a big problem, as by resisting these I am really just re-directing calories into the yummier, real meals.

Summary; small breakfast, sensible lunch, and not-crazy supper, with no snacks, accompanied by big runs in port, and boring treadmill runs when shipboard.

My hope is that after the cruise, although I will have gained weight, it will not be anything that requires another major stint of dieting. It is not unrealistic to think I can keep this weight gain down to maybe 5 pounds in total. Doing this would have me using up my 4 pound weight-buffer, and a bit more. Losing a couple of pounds after the cruise will seem like nothing at all.

To see how well things all go, I will not be posting this blog until after the cruise is over.

(At the cruise's end my weight was just under 180 pounds)