I’ve talked to my advisors and gave it an ample time to consider. Since I’ve met my recent short term goal it’s time to set some new ones, and to lay down a plan of how I’m going to get there.

First, since I’m now at 250 pounds, I’m going to set my next short term goal at 235. This is do-able within ten weeks if I keep to eating a healthy diet and make an exercise plan to fit my goals.

There won’t be any changes to my diet, except I’ll need to reconsider what I eat and how much I eat considering my new, lower weight.

For exercise, there will be more changes. With my weight finally going below 250 pounds, it opens up a larger range of exercises, especially cardio exercises, that I can do without as much worry of injury. In the previous months, when I started at over 300 pounds, many cardio exercises were not an option to me. Partly this was because my fitness level was too low to consider them. But also my history of knee injuries meant I needed to be careful about the stress I put on them.

Less weight means less stress on the knees. And in fact, I’ve had much less problems with knee, hip and back pain since the weight has been coming come off. So, I’m going to start doing more intense aerobic workouts, and hopefully start getting involved in more daily sports to bring variety to my exercise.

To compensate for this, I’m going to do some minor tweaking to my weight training. In the past I’ve been a little more intense on the lower body workouts and less intense on the upper body workouts. This was in part to take advantage of the exercises you can do to larger muscle groups in the lower body workouts. It was also partly to baby the elbow I had surgery on eleven months ago. But the elbow has been responding well. It seems ready to work harder, so it is time to take advantage of this.

So the exercise program will:

::: Increase the amount and intensity of the Cardio program as well as add more variety to it.

::: Either keep the same intensity or slightly decrease the intensity of the Lower Body workouts so as not to overstress the legs.

::: Increase the intensity of the Upper Body workouts.

In three weeks, we’ll check again to see how everything is progressing.