I am starting a new weight loss/exercise cycle. During the five weeks we were on the mainland, we ate every meal out. This meant I was not able to lose any weight, and I fell five pounds behind in my weight loss plan.

The good news is that I didn’t gain any weight. And that overall I’ve already lost 15 pounds.

Instead of trying to catch up to my original weight loss goal and stressing myself out, I decided to start a new cycle. It’s all about feeling good about what you do, right? And since I’m the one making the rules, why not change the rules and be happy?

My new goals: To lose one pound per week for 15 weeks, and to lower my resting heart rate below 50 beats per minute.

One might think that the best measure of success is how I stay on the weight loss schedule. And that is a good measure.

But I think that lowering my resting heart rate below 50 is actually a more meaningful measure of success–I don’t want to be skinny yet out of shape. The heart is just another muscle. To lower your resting heart rate you need to strengthen the heart by doing physical training.

I enjoy reading about training principles and tweaking them to fit my age and situation. And, of course, I need the most modern measuring devices (toys) to accomplish these goals.

A while ago, I told June I needed a compass watch for the farm, in order to be able to track wind and sun direction. I also needed an altimeter to measure the elevation of the spring source for the farm. And a barometer to anticipate change in weather. All for the farm, of course.

But I thought I might as well get the watch that can also measure heart rate, so I could graph my training by transferring the data to the computer via an infrared device. Unfortunately, the watch I bought has capabilities beyond my ability to utilize them. I mainly use the heart rate monitor and read it directly.

I bought the same watch for my son Brian, who is an Apache helicopter pilot in Iraq. He does a lot of physical training and has been using it to its maximum potential.

Last night he sent me a graph of a recent 4.5-mile run he did. It graphed time, heart rate and could have graphed elevation change and other details if he wanted. He has his training sessions filed on his computer.

He’s going to teach me how to do this; he’ll walk me through the whole process. I can’t wait.

I need to know how to do these things for the farm.