For those of you who are knew to this blog, you may not know that I am “walking across the US.” I’m doing it a little differently than you might think, though. I wear a pedometer daily to measure my steps. I enjoy doing this, because it gives me a visual record of how active I’ve been. I’m a big fan of simply being active for activity’s sake. Yes, an hour on the elliptical is great, but so is getting 12,000 steps over the course of a regular day. It isn’t the same, but it’s something extra.

Anyway, I have calculated the maximum width or length across each US state, and one by one, I am “walking” across them. I don’t know what I’ll do when I’ve completed all fifty states. I know it will take me a LONG time, because of frickin’ Alaska and Texas. Alaska is 2,261 miles wide! If I figure an average of six miles a day (some days are better, some are worse), then it will take me 376 days. I fully realize that this could take me years. It might take me the better part of a decade to do this.

However, it isn’t like I’m going to someday get to goal weight, and the sky will open up with sunshine and puppies and everything is great. I will struggle with healthy living my entire life. I’m okay with that; frankly, I’m looking forward to experiencing the challenge of maintenance, which I have heard MANY people say is even tougher than losing weight.

So whether I get done in five years or twenty, it doesn’t matter. I’m walking the US, and in 2030, if that’s when I finish, then I’ll decide then what I’m going to do.

But for now, I’m just taking it one state at a time. And per Erin’s suggestion, my current state is her home state of Nebraska! Nebraska is 430 miles wide, and with my typical stride of 1900 steps per mile, it will take me 817,000 steps.

At present, I am 218,907 steps into Nebraska. I have 598,093 steps to go. That’s a long way. Which state should I do next?

I’m still walking across Nebraska. Join me?

Saddle Rock in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska

In other news, don’t forget about my giveaway!

Also, check out the $50 shopping spree giveaway on Mary’s Weight Loss Blog! I can win an $50 Shopping Spree Giveaway from iHerb.com and so can you! Click here for contest details!

This is what I pledged to do.

1. Complete two full one-hour workouts, one of which must be in the weight room.
2. Track every single morsel of food eaten and not eat over my caloric daily limit.
3. In addition to two workouts, go for a nice, long walk.

I did get two one hour workouts in. However, neither was in the weight room. I did an hour of taekwondo on Saturday and an hour on the elliptical on Sunday. I’m very pleased with both, but I didn’t do weights either day.

I did track everything I ate, and I didn’t do horrible on my food. However, I will admit… This jumped up and grabbed me on Saturday.

Cadbury Creme Eggs

I ate it. Don’t know why, but I did. God, it was so good. I know some people are grossed out by the fake egg filling, but I find it the most delicious treat ever, second only to chocolate covered cherries at Christmas.

And I did make it on the nice, long walk. My pedometer read about 13,000 steps on Sunday, which is over my usual 10,000.

As far as my weight… I weighed in at 339, which is less than Friday. I’ll be honest; I really expected to have lost more after two days of eating pretty clean. Oh well. I still have ’til Friday for it to be official.

In other news, don’t forget about my giveaway for Jillian Michael’s 30 Day Shred!

And speaking of “we,” this is who is taking part.

• Carla from The Right Fit
• Lynne from Losing Lynne
• Steve from 265 and Falling
• Kat from Kat’s Adventures in Dietland
• Frank from Male Weight Loss Now
• Sean from Learn Fitness
• Mac from Get Fit Slowly
• Andrew from Andrew is Getting Fit
• Karyn from Fitness Road Trip
• Josie from 35 and Shrinking
• Marissa from Fatty Slims Down
• Jeremy from Stellar Path
• Mike from SUB6
• Andrew from 100 Pounds in a Year
• Erin from Erin Takes Control
• Alissa from Gluten Free Pumpkins
• Craig from My Life, Take Eight
• Ryan from No More Bacon
• Chad from Reconstructing 30
• beej from Journey to Satisfaction

So far, except for the long walk (which I plan to take in a few hours), I am well on track to meeting all of my goals. I plan to weigh in tomorrow, unofficially, and see if I weigh less than I did on Friday’s weigh in.

As a reminder, don’t forget that I have my second giveaway still going on, here. This giveaway is Jillian Michael’s 30 Day Shred! Check out the link above to find out how to enter. The giveaway ends March 12 at midnight.

No, I am not on Myspace right now...

I was honestly nervous going in to it. I was really surprised by that; I have taken classes at this school for years. I’m going on four years there. However, I was so rusty, I felt like a green belt walking out onto the mats today.

However, it was the most fun I have had working out in a LONG time. It was a pretty simple workout, and we didn’t spar today, but it was still so much fun. I’m sure we’ll spar next week, and I guarantee I’ll feel rusty again, but I have made the first step back and I am so happy about it!

Meanwhile, while I’m here, I’m going to post my second giveaway! I had planned to wait ’til tomorrow, but I’m going to go ahead and do it now because that $14 is burning a hole in my pocket.

The giveaway this week will be coming to you directly from Amazon, but no, Amazon did not donate it. (I will happily accept donations and give them out in giveaways, just in case some corporation or company out there is thinking about branching out into blog giveaways. Let me know. )

But this is something I’ve read about on several blogs, but I have not yet used this item myself. I want to, for two reasons, which I’ll explain as soon as I tell you what the item is.

30 Day Shred

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, Jillian Michaels is one of my five freebies, so I’m interested in anything she does.  And two, I’ve heard this DVD workout will kick your tail.  I’m typically not big on video workouts anymore, now that I have a gym, but there are times that it would be nice to have a video here at the house that could give me an intense workout.  (All I have are Sweatin’ to the Oldies, and those don’t really challenge me anymore.)

There are FOUR ways you can enter this contest.  You can do one, some, or all, for a total of up to four entries.  You must come back here and leave a comment for each of the four you’ve done.  (In other words, if you’re going to post it on your Twitter account, make sure you come back and post a comment with your twitter user name.  If you post it on your blog, make sure you leave the link.)  And I will ship this anywhere, so it’s open to anyone on the planet.

1. Entry One – Answer this question right now, in a comment.  “What is the most intense workout that you do on a regular basis?”
2. Entry Two – Post this on your Twitter account.  “@stellarpath is giving away Jillian Michael’s 30 Day Shred! #giveaway http://bit.ly/d4uTwj”
3. Entry Three – Post about this giveaway on your blog, including a link back.
4. Entry Four – Follow me on Twitter and let me know, so I can follow you back.  (If you’re already following me, just state that in the comment you make for this entry.)

This giveaway is going to run until March 12, 2010, at midnight, so you’ve got almost a full week.

We have beautiful weather here in Kentucky, so I’m getting off here to go enjoy my day.  I hope you do the same!

As I suspected, this was not a good weigh-in. I am not, however, distraught about it, because I knew it was going to happen. Frankly, my weight actually peaked a little higher than this in the past few days, and it’s going to drop.

I weighed in this morning at 340.2, SIX pounds heavier than last Friday.

Again, I’m not stressing it. Diet and exercise took a major backseat this week. That’s my fault, even with my illness, and I could have done better. I’m going to own it and do better next week.

My motivational image for this week is below.

Why this one? Granted, this isn’t some muscular guy that I want to look like or someone executing some amazing martial arts feat or climbing a mountain or the like. It’s healthy food. I’m putting that up there because I acknowledge how much better I feel when I eat healthy. When I was sick over the past week, my diet slipped. Now that I am almost well, I can acknowledge that part of my yucky feeling was the poor attitude and actions I had toward my diet. I’m sure, if I had kept eating healthy, I would have felt better. Instead, I used being sick as an excuse to eat Pop Tarts for breakfast or a drive-thru cheeseburger for lunch. I know better than that.

Even after just one day of eating better, I feel better. That tells me my body craves good healthy foods, and that’s what I need to provide for it. I’m sure I’ll mess up again in the future. The siren song of Pop Tarts and McDoubles is too strong for me to resist for forever. I just have to remember that such foods are an occasional treat, not a staple of my diet.

It is what it is. Time to move on and make better choices for the next week.

Weekly $5 Goals Update– I think we’ve got a giveaway coming this week…

1. Reach 330. – Fail. Ten pounds up from that. I’m hoping to hit 330 next week, though. I’m going to leave this goal intact for next week. I do not believe I truly gained six pounds of fat, and I think this goal, while TOUGH, is not impossible.

2. Take at least three taekwondo classes. – Fail. I’m blaming this one on illness, but it was still a fail. Let’s see if I can do it next week.

3. Write 3,000 words on my novel. – Fail. Yikes. Wrote about 1,000 or so. Not the 3K I was planning on.

4. Drink one gallon of water on at least four days. – Fail. Being sick kicked my tail. This one is really inexcusable since I was sick, and I’m sure I needed the hydration.

5. Track every bite I eat on FitDay at least five days. – Fail. Damn. I didn’t realize ‘til just this moment that I didn’t meet a single goal.

Well, that leaves me with $6 for my purchase of Super Mario Brothers Wii, and you all with $14 for a giveaway, which will pretty much cover a nice item (I’m thinking workout DVD at the moment – any suggestions?) and shipping. I’ll post my second giveaway this Sunday, so stay tuned.

And since I failed across the board last week, I want to have a success across the board next week, so my goals are staying exactly the same.

My $5 Goals for Next Week
1. Reach 330.
2. Take at least three taekwondo classes.
3. Write 3,000 words of fiction.
4. Drink one gallon of water on at least four days.
5. Track every bite of food I eat for at least five days.

I am also posting another entry on IceBlog tonight, which I’ll mention on my Twitter Account when I do.

I had planned to do this tomorrow morning, but thought I should do this separate, since these goals will be different from my Weekly $5 Goals.

Brandon over at So Long Dirty Words, in conjunction with Craig, Incorporated, is suggesting a Weekend Warriors Challenge. A lot of people in the weight loss blogging world are getting onboard, and hey, so am I. You can go to his page to get more details.

But basically, we all want to do better over the weekend, because for most of us, weekends are wonderful, fun times where dieting and fitness take a backseat. This may help change that.

My goals for the weekend are:

1. Complete two full one-hour workouts, one of which must be in the weight room.
2. Track every single morsel of food eaten and not eat over my caloric daily limit.
3. In addition to two workouts, go for a nice, long walk.

That’s what I pledge to do. I’ll update how I did on Monday. And it’s not too late – go sign up!

I know that I won’t make it the entire month of March with a daily post every day, but I’m going to keep riding this train for as long as I can.

Today, I have decided I’m going to write about something that I do that does, at least a little, seem to help. I collect motivational images.

Basically, my motivational images are anything that inspire me to continue working hard at my health.

Some are funny, like this one.

Some people are dead set against self-deprecating humor. I love it, and this cracks me up. And for me, it’s frequently true.

Some of my images don’t make sense to anyone but me, like this one.

Yes, that is the Power Rangers. That is a motivational image to me for a rather odd reason. Power Rangers came out when I was a teenager. I thought it was the stupidest show in the entire world. In the summer of 1995, when I was 17, I took my nephews to see the Power Rangers movie while I was babysitting them. I thought the movie was amazing. It had cool special effects, martial arts, and everybody was fit. At 17, I should point out that I was not fit, I did not know martial arts, and I had no special effects. Power Rangers represented, and I’ll be honest – it still does, a healthy lifestyle for me. I can’t explain it, but there it is.

This image is motivating for fairly obvious reasons.

I want to look like Ryan Reynolds. To make it clear, I do not want to do him; I want to look like him. Still, I can’t deny that I have a man crush on him. And the thing that’s a little amazing and I still sometimes have a bit of trouble getting my head around – with hard work, perseverance, and dedication, I could look like this. Albeit with a few stretch marks, but I’ll still take it.

This image motivates me, but it also makes me a tiny bit sad.

That’s me, about four years ago, at the thinnest I have ever been. I weighed around 270 or so in that photo. Some bad decisions led to me ballooning up to 350 recently. This picture is motivational to me because I know that I can get back down to that weight, and even lower. Granted, there is still a gut that has been cropped out of that photo, but I think I look pretty good there. I want to look that good (and better) again.

This is the last motivational picture I’ll share, and this is the one that kind of got me started in collecting motivational images.

I found this one night while stumbling around the internet. The sentiment in it really rang true for me. I hope to someday have a healthy marriage and healthy children and live in a healthy house with a healthy yard and a healthy white picket fence. The key word for me was someday. It was always “someday.” Well, how can I make that happen, if I don’t start now? Not in the morning, or on Monday, but right now?

I keep these images around to help me stay focused. I don’t deny – I frequently need the push.

I’ll probably post one of my motivational images every time that I post my weight on Fridays.

Do any of you collect motivational images? Which photos speak to you?

As always, video may not embed, view this post on its own page, you know what to do by now.

This is my last video that I am in, but I’ll continue to post the videos until the grand prize winner is announced!

This weigh-in is going to suck. I have not been in the gym since Sunday, and my diet has not really been that great, either. But I’ll just own it and accept whatever the scale gives me Friday morning.

I have no great diet insights to share, so I have decided that I want to do a different post. I’m going to talk a little about the wedding!

As those of you who have been here for a while know, I am getting married to my better half, Tina, this October. Our wedding is going to be a bit nontraditional in some ways and very traditional in others.

We’re getting married by one of my best friends. However, he is not one of those Internet Church of Mammals preachers. He just happens to be a pastor, and since we haven’t found a church here to join yet, we’re going to have him marry us. It’s going to be a pretty standard Protestant service.

In a cave. We’re getting married in Lost River Cave. It’s a local cave with a pretty interesting history. The spot where we are getting married is an old nightclub from the Prohibition Era. It’s beautiful; of course, I’ll post pictures of the wedding as soon as we’re back from the honeymoon.

My best man is a woman. This one isn’t weird to me but apparently it’s different to a lot of people. Fortunately, Tina has no issues with it. My best friend (other than Tina, of course) just happens to be a woman, so who else would I pick to be my best man?

Tina and I are both dorks. I’m a bigger dork than she is, but we’re both pretty dorky. Tina is also a baker. She had planned to do our wedding cake, but pretty much every married woman we know advised her against this, solely for stress reasons. That’s why she decided that instead, she would make the groom’s cake.

I’m a little different, in that I am a fat kid who DOES NOT LIKE CAKE. Frankly, it bores me. Oh, spongy bread… can I just have the icing? Which is why my groom’s cake is going to ROCK, because it’s going to not be a cake!

Tina is making a three-tiered “cake.” The bottom layer is going to be a brownie, the middle layer will be cookies, and the top layer will be Golden Grahams S’mores treats (picture Rice Krispie Treats, but with Golden Grahams and chocolate chips instead of Rice Krispies.) And the entire thing will be covered with icing.

But best yet… she’s doing it Super Mario themed!

It’s a bit of an inside joke. At our engagement party last Halloween, which was also a costume party, we dressed up as Super Mario and Princess Peach.

And we decided that a Super Mario themed wedding cake would be a bit much, but it would be perfect for a groom’s cake! And we found some Super Mario and Princess Peach toys that are going to serve as cake toppers.

Yes, I will be cheating on my diet the day of my wedding.

Now, I’m just trying to use Twitter for… whatever… twitter is used for… I guess…

I kinda feel like someone’s grandfather who is trying to use the internet for the first time.

“Kids today… with their iPods and YouTubes and Borats… Back in my day, we played with rocks and were happy to have them!”

Anyhow, my user name is stellarpath, and you can follow me. Add me, and I’ll add you. Or let me know you have a twitter account, and I’ll add you first. I’m not really sure what Twitter etiquette is. Is it like a “show me yours and I’ll show you mine” kind of thing?