Week 5: Weight Loss Update and My Thoughts on Fogo de Chao
When you're on a weight loss journey, routine is your friend. Knowing ahead of time when you're going to eat, what you're going to eat, and when you're going to work out simplifies the decision making process and helps to keep you on course.
But inevitably something will come up that will toss your bullet proof routine out the window. For me, that disruptive event was a trip to Arizona to visit my family.
In this weight loss update video, you'll find out how I did in the face of some serious temptation without my trusty routine as my safety net. Also, I share some thoughts what once was one of my favorite restaurants, Fogo de Chao.
Transcript:
Hey what’s up guys..
I know I haven’t posted a video in a few days, and that’s because I’m visiting my family in sunny Tucson, Arizona.
Now before we get into numbers, let me just share with you what I’ve been up against this week.
Road Trips Suck When You're Trying to Lose Weight
We drove here from Northern California, which is about a 13 hour drive. We split that into 2 days, so we’ve spent a lot of time in the car which is typically a killer because you end up eating just out of sheer boredom. We worked around that by planning our meals ahead of time and making lots of coffee stops, but it was still tough to resist snacking.
Nostalgia is Your Enemy
Once we got the family together, that’s when the real exercise in will power began. My wife and I haven’t been back to Arizona since we relocated to the Bay Area a couple of years ago, so of course visiting all of our favorite restaurants was a huge priority. There’s an amazing place in Scottsdale called Chelsea’s Kitchen that we used to go to all the time so of course we ordered one of everything on the menu just for the sake of nostalgia.
Vegans Hate Me
And most everyone in the family is doing the low-carb thing, so we decided to go to Fogo de Chao. If you haven’t been to a Fogo de Chao before, it’s basically a full blown meat extravaganza that combines the service model of a dim sum restaurant with the pricing model of a buffet and the menu of a steakhouse. I’m pretty sure that it was originally conceived as some kind of nefarious vegan plot to get carnivores so OD’d on meat that they wanna hurl just thinking about the next time they have to eat a steak.
Well, mission accomplished, vegans.
Well played.
Anyway, I went to Fogo de Chao and ate my body weight in meat, because… how could you not?
I mean, they have guys with knives that are basically the size of katana blades running around and pressuring you to eat more meat. And if you tell them no, they look all dejected and get all passive aggressive, which is definitely not something you want from a dude wielding a samurai sword.
So, needless to say, I spent a couple of hours in the gym trying to walk off my meat baby that evening.
The Moment of Truth
So, now that I’ve successfully lowered all of your expectations, let’s get to the numbers.
Last week I weighed in at 368.8. This morning I weighed in at 368.3 for a staggering half a pound lost!
Look, it doesn’t seem like much, but considering the week I’ve had, I’m just glad the number is moving in the right direction. On any other trip, I would’ve gained like 5 pounds already, so I’m relatively pleased with the results.
The Plan for Next Week
So, for next week my plan is to obviously get back to my routine and start hitting it hard again to see if I can lose a couple of pounds before I head off to Manila in two weeks for work. Travel has always been rough for me, and international trips in particular since I don’t typically have much control over what’s served on the plane, so I tend to overcompensate by eating a ton before the flight or starving myself on the flight and then overeating when I land. Then of course, there’s the difficulty of eating well when you have you to eat out for every single meal and your schedule is all screwed up.
But we’ll take that all one step at a time.
Thanks guys! Catch ya later!