Oh Boy

The quit smoking drive continues, but now it has started to hit the hard parts. Like ramping down to only 1 cigarette every two hours or more, which effectively cuts me back to half a pack per day. Oy, that's been really tough the past two days. Same with not smoking in my house. And today I committed to May 17 as my quit day so long as the patch supply arrives by then. I decided against the Zyban or Chantix approach for now. The potential side effects scared me off.

I'm feeling an increase in my appetite with just two days of sticking to a schedule. So far I'm mostly quenching that with fruits and raw veggies as needed, but I have to admit that I'm back to three meals per day already. I usually just eat lunch and dinner. The good news though, is that the exercise regimen is still in place after three weeks and I've fallen into a routine that feels good. That should turn any weight gain into muscle instead of fat, though I expect my BMI will go up from its current 22.4. Woe unto the health care professional who gives me crap for that.

The current routine:

• Five minutes of stretches and calisthenics, including toe touches(yes, I can touch my toes)/deep knee bends. I'm at 40 sit-ups in a minute and a half. My goal is 60 in 60 seconds, my basic training(1983) level.
• Went from 12 to 15lb. dumbbells today for the following(25 reps each): bicep curl, tricep extension, bench press, floor clean and jerk. I would rather have a barbell for these, but right now I don't have access to one.
• Went from 10 to 11 minutes today on the bike machine at 60 RPM(at least) with increasing resistance. The routine I'm using is called "Pike's Peak" and if I can power through this next stage then it goes down from there to complete 20 minutes. This is the exercise I've been most careful about as it gets my heart rate up to about 120 and it's still a grind just to get through 10 minutes. I'm breathing pretty hard at that point too, and since a heart attack would be something of a setback at this stage, I'm trying not to push things too hard.
• Finally, five routines on the weight machine at 50 lbs./20 reps for pecs, biceps, triceps, delts, and abs.

That's it for now. It's a little less than 30 minutes, but it should go over that in the next few weeks as the bike routine creeps towards a full 20 minutes. At some point I'm going to need to refine a few things with the weights and calisthenics as this is probably not an optimal long-term routine. It seems pretty good as a start though.