Weight Loss Program for People On The Go

A lot of people have asked me to share my secrets to losing about 10% of my body weight in about 3.5 months. When you get to be in your mid-40's, it can creep up on you fast. 

If you're someone like me who is on the road a LOT, and spending the great majority of your day in meetings and appointments, the ability to eat good meals throughout the day is tortuous. But it doesn't have to be. 

Here is a collection of tips that I've gotten from friends, neighbors and relatives. This is meant to be EASY (I hate complicated things and can't possibly "manage" one more thing)

Meals:

I prepare a bunch of hard-boiled eggs and cook up a bunch of bacon and/or chicken on Sunday evenings.

Breakfast:

One hard-boiled egg, one piece of bacon, coffee, low cal/lite orange juice (ie Trop 50).

Lunch:

One hard-boiled egg, one piece of protein (chicken or bacon), vegetables and hummus, bbq sauce for the chicken is fine I have found. Skip fruit until you’ve gone down to your target weight, then add it back in. Buy a lot of Tupperware lunch containers.

No sandwiches, subs, fast food, period. Try to limit how many times you eat out for sit-down lunch or meet clients for lunch. Suggest coffee instead, or meet at your office. There’s really nothing decent on most lunch menus that is sub 500 calories. Salads are even horrible generally. A chicken breast and an egg are 300 calories. 1 tablespoon of bbq sauce is only 35 calories. That’s the perfect number of calories for a meal. Pre-peel the egg and you can eat it all on the go in your car with relatively no mess (less than Taco Bell anyway).

One Jimmy John’s sub has 1600 mg of sodium (!), and the bread equivalent of 3 BIG MACS. Don’t believe me? Cut your sub into 3 pieces and compare it to a Big Mac bun. Even an unwich has the sodium on the meat. Just skip it all. You’re being duped by their marketing teams.

Mid afternoon snack:

Mixed nuts or vegetables like sugar snap peas or cucumber slices. Even a small bag of chips is fine. One SMALL bag. Pickles and peppers are also good.

Dinner:

Meat/fish, potatoes and vegetables. No pasta! Tacos with ground turkey are good, use low carb shells. Say goodbye to pizza for at least three months. If the family wants pizza delivered, order the bbq wings for yourself. After 2 – 3 months of not having pizza, most pizza will gross you out anyway.

Fasting:

When you feel hungry during the day between meals, let it go. Drink a lot of water and in 10 – 15 minutes it will pass. If you don’t feed your body it will switch to burning all the fat that it has stored up. And believe me, we all have plenty. A growling stomach is not a signal that you are dying, it’s just your stomach acid kicking in because it’s expecting to be fed.

Those periods of fasting are actually good for your body. It makes your body stronger because it has to tap into reserve stored energy, i.e. fasting kicks your metabolism into high gear.

Drinking:

No happy hour meetings with clients or friends, especially over beers, at least for a couple of months. A 16oz pint of a 7% ABV craft beer (IPA) is 250 - 260 calories. 2 pints are 520 calories (obviously). Imperial Stouts are even higher at about 400 – 500 calories per pint. A 5 oz glass of wine is better at only 130 calories. Mixed drinks aren’t my cup of tea but I’ve read that Tequila is the best alternative.

Exercise:

Apparently 80% of losing weight is what you eat, and 20% is exercise. But you should schedule time to workout into your calendar. Find workouts you enjoy, they will be much more sustainable. A Y membership is less than $100 a month and they have showers. The downtown Y is especially cool.

I partake in the stair climber, upper body weight lifting (not bench pressing 150 lbs, just high repetition lower weights), yoga, planks, brisk walking, and a lot of road biking and mountain biking (stationary biking in bad weather).

I would try and schedule in at least 5 hours of exercise a week. Workout until you are soaking with sweat at least 5 days a week. If you’re not sweating profusely, you’re not working out hard enough and not getting your heart rate up enough. You can't "walk around the neighborhood" every evening and expect to lose weight. 

Water:

Keep a bottle of water on you all day. Keep refilling it. Keep drinking it.

The goal is not to “lose weight,” but to get your body back down to the weight it’s supposed to be before you started filling it with fake food. And the goal is to not feel that "jiggle" when you go over all those potholes in your daily travels. 

You will think that you won't be able to stand eating the same thing every day. But trust me, the feeling you will get by a) not stressing out about where you're going to fit lunch in,  and b) the feeling you will get when your clothes begin to fit again and you actually don't mind when people take pictures of you will far outweigh those perceptions of deprivation. And are you really depriving yourself? Hellz no. Your body is addicted to fake foods.

The first two meals of the day are FUEL to get through the day. Dinner is the reward (still limit the carbs). 

Good luck and keep me posted as to how you do over the first month of this "program." 

Jeff

* Tips for making the perfect hard-boiled egg: bring the water to a boil before putting the eggs in, 13 minutes at a low boil, remove from heat and drain off the boiling water (be careful), add cold tap water. Pour off the water again in 5 minutes and replace with cold water again.

** Tips for easy-to-make bacon: buy thick cut bacon that is stacked (because regular sliced bacon is a slimy joke), use a cookie sheet and cover with aluminum foil with no-stick spray, oven to 400 degrees, lay out as many slices of bacon as possible on the cookie sheet, 18 – 20 minutes depending on whether you like soft or crunchy bacon, lay on a paper towel after cooking, stick it in a freezer bag. No messy frying pan to clean up, just roll up the aluminum foil and into the trash!

Our first rental house

So, Laura and I decided over Easter weekend of 2015 to buy our first rental house. We'd been kicking around the idea of buying an investment property to rent out for a few years, primarily a condo in the city of GR, but kept running into roadblocks. Or the numbers didn't look good enough to make it worthwhile.

But on the way to Saginaw for Easter, Laura was driving and I was searching for listings online on my phone. We decided to look for something in the Forest Hills area, since we figured there'd be less competition in the burbs for rental homes, and a recent national article put Grand Rapids as the #1 rental market in the country, with a 1.6% vacancy rate.

We found this great house on Leffingwell not far from the Knapp's Corner Meijer, along multiple bike paths and walking distance to Celebration Village. We set up a showing to see it the next day, and made an offer on it shortly after going through it. It was a very well kept 1950's vintage brick ranch, 1100 square feet, with hipped roofs and large overhangs, a screened in breezeway, a 2 car attached garage with a second garage in the back, and a ton of flowering shrubs (in the pictures anyway).

We had the home inspected and everything came back great, with only the need for a few electrical upgrades. The previous homeowner (who passed away last Fall), even had the furnace inspected every year by a furnace company. As we've describe it, the home was like a well kept old car that the woman only drove to and from church every Sunday.

Most of the work that needed to be done was cosmetic, so we set our budget at $4500 (exactly my commission on the purchase).

Here's what the place looked like before. Wallpaper everywhere!!

We made a nice discovery after closing on the home, and found hardwood floors in the bedrooms and the hallway, which saved us about $1500 in flooring.

Speaking of closing, the day we closed, we placed the home on Zillow's rental site (Postlets.com) which syndicates to 35 other national rental websites. With just a picture of the outside of the house, we got 15 inquiries, 6 people wanted to see it in the next day or two, and the second person who went through it (in its condition pictured above) wanted to rent it at our asking price.

We were still committed to doing some work on the house, so we had a little less than 30 days to get it all done before the renter took over the house on July 1st.

Neither of us like painting, so we hired that out. We first had to remove all of the wallpaper, which was in every room in some way shape or form. It was even on the wall above the shower in the bathroom. Urrgh.

We enlisted help from the girls and started stripping wallpaper. We tried the fabric softener method, and used multiple kinds of chemical strippers. At the end of the day, it really comes down to hard unending scraping. Luckily there was only one layer!

In addition to hiring out the painting, we also hired out carpet installation in the Living Room. The Dining Room had previously been carpeted, but we decided to do laminate floors in the DR and Kitchen, and install them ourselves. We were going to put laminate over the existing vinyl floors in the kitchen, but with some logistic issues (being able to get the dishwasher out if it needed to be serviced, for instance) we decided to just do the Dining Room and save the kitchen for later. The tenant was okay with that.

Our first go with installing a cheaper laminate floor in the dining room was a disaster. After putting in and cutting about 4 boxes of it, we realized it was chipping too easily and breaking and gapping in spots, and would never hold up to people walking on it. We ripped it all out and thankfully Lowe's took all of it back for us.

Lastly, we changed most of the light fixtures, added knobs to the kitchen cabinets (kept the original oak cabinets that are in good shape), changed out the ceiling fan in the master bedroom, and had a cleaner scrub the place.

So in essence, we:

) Pulled all the carpet and pad out
) Took out the wallpaper
) Had the walls repainted, two-tone in the kitchen/eating area
) Installed Pergo floors in the Dining Room
) Had new carpet installed in the Living Room
) Cleaned the discovered hardwood in the bedrooms
) Changed multiple light fixtures and a fan
) Added new knobs

Total investment about $4300, which was $200 less than our $4500 budget.

Between what we are getting for rent and the mortgage payment (PITI, non-homestead taxes), we'll net about $400/month.

 

We think the home is lighter, brighter, and best of all, RENTED!

If you would like help finding a similar opportunity, let me know and I'd be happy to help.

- Jeff

Employment levels in GR - Wyoming keep breaking records

The Grand Rapids - Wyoming MSA employment levels and unemployment rates continued to improve tremendously, putting Grand Rapids in a league of metro areas in the U.S. that can only be described as "boom towns" like Austin, Raleigh and Denver. November's labor force in the area grew at a healthy 4.3% over this time last year, while the unemployment rate plunged to 3.7%, or about 15,000 people unemployed (the lowest level since before 9/11/2001).

Only Ann Arbor in Michigan had a lower unemployment rate at 3.5%. Holland stood at 3.8%, Muskegon at 5.0%, and Lansing - East Lansing at 4.0%.

With mortgage rates at historic lows, U.S. auto sales reaching decade highs, and gasoline prices in Grand Rapids as one of the cheapest in the U.S., 2015 bodes well for those of us living in one of the fastest growing economies in the country. How times change.

Happy New Year!

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Detroit Slowly Returns to the Earth

A lot of discussion has occurred recently about closing schools in Grand Rapids, and GRPS's Transformation Plan. And recently I got into a discussion online with someone who is looking at moving here, and whether Grand Rapids was as "rough" as Detroit. And then on top of it all, I stumbled on a blog about Detroit's "urban prairies" and that about 40 square miles of Detroit and Highland Park are now vacant, due to their populations dropping more than half since the 1950's and 1960's.

I'm not making this a blog to beat up on Detroit, or make comparisons between Grand Rapids and Detroit (we are very fortunate in this area compared to a lot of Midwestern cities and metro areas), or perpetuate the "ruin porn" movement; I just think it's fascinating. How would it feel to be the last house standing on a block? Or for a square mile? Do you feel safe, because there's no one else around? Or totally isolated?

I noticed in one of the abandoned Detroit photos there was a picture of an abandoned school with what looked like a fairly new piece of playground equipment; as if their last thrust to try and keep kids and families there was to buy a new swingset.

So I zoomed in on an interactive census map of Detroit, figured out which census tracts were some of the hardest hit in population losses in the last 10 years (40 - 60% loss) then hopped on Google Street View to get a closer look at the schools in these areas. Definitely many of the homes are gone, but churches and schools seem to be some of the last holdouts in those abandoned areas. 

What a bizarre world I found.

This is a school on Leland Street in the triangle between Gratiot, I-75 and I-94. Not sure when it was abandoned, but take a look at it on Street View. Swing the camera shots around in a circle, or move around the block if you want. To turn the Google Streetview, click on the arrows in the upper left corner or click and drag the picture around. I particularly noticed how the sidewalks and curbs are virtually disappearing, being reclaimed back to the earth. All of that empty land used to contain tightly packed homes built in the early 1900's, now long gone.

This is a school on Georgia Street and Concord near City Airport and Mt Olivet Cemetary.

It was that playset that caught my attention. In the satellite shot, the school is now gone. Google Street View.

There's still a nice fire station in the area. That shot reminds me more of rural up north towns than a large midwestern city.

This one was identified as Communities in Schools of Detroit. I took Google Streetview around the block and didn't find one window in the place, although it looks like it's being used.

The next one is Highland Park Community High School on Woodward Avenue. The place resembles a minimum security prison, complete with security patrol car caught in the Streetview camera.

Go here to check out the Birds-Eye View. One thing you notice is the tennis courts that have been reclaimed by mother nature out behind the school.

The next is a school on Brush Street. I can't "exactly" tell if it's closed or not, but it appears to be the only standing structure left on this block. Google Streetview and take a peak around the neighborhood.

The next shot isn't a school. It's the Department of Human Services outside the famed epically vacant Packard Plant, an area that has seen a 70 - 80% drop in population. Imagine having to report to work there, or to receive HHS services. Even the trees don't like being there... (by the sidewalk in front)

Google Streetview

George W Ferris Elementary. I'm not sure who George was, but I would imagine he's not thrilled about having his name still on the building. Google Streetview.

School in Highland Park. "Do Not Enter" says the sign. Ya think? Google Streetview.

McNichols Road always fascinated me. Beautiful homes that back up to the Detroit Country Club on one side of the street, crumbling curbs, sidewalks and abandoned apartments across the street. Streetview.

The area around the old State Fairgrounds site has been hit particularly hard. Since it was closed down in 2009, the blocks around it seem to have given up the fight.

This is a school across the street and in view of the fairgrounds on Bauman. I don't know that the school is closed, but the fact that all the windows are boarded over doesn't leave much guesswork. Streetview.

At least there's a nice playset...

There's still a cool water/landscaping feature in the shape of Michigan that you can still see from the air (seen above). Word is they're looking at putting the Fairgrounds back into use...

This was an interesting find in the same area. Ives Field looks like a football practice field, surrounded by abandoned buildings but still in use. Am I the only one who thinks kids shouldn't have to live like this? Streetview.

The Detroit Aerospace Technical School near City Airport. Great concept, but yikes. Streetview.

Holmes School, which doesn't look too bad despite the surrounding blocks virtually abandoned for wildlife. New homes are going up in the immediate vicinity. Let's hope they make it. Streetview. (and check out the difference in sidewalks in front of the new homes vs the abandoned lots).

Crockett High School on the city's North side. All those streets to the left used to have homes on them. Streetview will take your breath away.

I don't know if this is a school, but it is (was) an interesting building on Harper. Aerial views show that it's gone now (torn down or burned down). It contains a connected theater...  Streetview.

This is called the Lodge Playground with Crockett High School way off in the distance. Streetview.

Moving over toward the Northwest, Sanders School on Byron Street. Streetview.

It's hard to make out in the picture, but the school sign out front has a large A+ on it. You can zoom in on the Streetview and see it.

Huchins School is hanging on, with decay creeping in around it. Streetview.

And lastly I found little Doty School. A gorgeous little school not far from the Cathedral on Woodward. Looks to be up and running, hope it makes it. Streetview.

There's definitely a lot of rebuilding to do, on a mammoth scale. Hopefully the momentum of the downtown revitalization and the Woodward corridor will slowly permeate back into these neighborhoods. It has to, right?