(no subject)
On December 25th, before any meals were eaten, before any excuses could be made, I found my way to a scale and boldly stepped forward into discovery. And creaking metal. And a little bit of "You've got to be kidding me..."
Let's take it back a day or two, to begin at the beginning. Which is usually a good place to begin, as I understand. But I'm stalling, because this is kind of a personal entry.
I've never been scrawny, but I've never really been obese, either. I have a lot of lower body muscle mass from my track runner/marching band/drill team/football/soccer/field hockey legs of old, and my chest and shoulders have always been broad enough that I have to buy extra large shirts just to let the fabric reach my waist. I'm built like an Irish dude, I guess. I don't really know how else to describe it. I am equally easy to imagine wearing a kilt and swinging a claymore over my head whilst running toward you, screaming, or slumped over a bar stool with a spiral pattern of slain Guinness around me, enabling you to count how many hours I had been there by how many rings there were. The world's most inebriated tree.
Body image has never been a terrible problem with me, which is probably how I let it get away from me a little. In New York I was walking constantly. I had a five to ten mile a day route mapped out to relieve stress after I got out of work. During the itinerant gypsy phases I bartended, bounced, did odd jobs, stayed active, you know? Even once I settled down for Georgia, Take 1, I ended up as a stocker at a grocery store, which is more physical than you'd realize. Lately though...I mean, the writing is great for stretching the creative muscles, but it tends to involve a lot of consuming vast amounts of soda and sitting still for hours on end, staring at your prey until your eyes bleed and your bladder threatens to explode. Really, if you replaced the soda with beer, you could be a deer hunter. Or Ernest Hemingway.
As a result, the pounds slowly, steadily, quietly snuck up on me. I am reminded of the old story about the frog in a pot of water. You drop a frog straight in after it's already boiling, he's going to hop right back out. You slowly heat the water up once he's already there, he'll think he's found the world's first froggy day spa right up until he croaks. *drum fill* Sorry, sorry, I wouldn't blame you if you stopped reading after that, really I wouldn't.
Anyway, my shirts and pants had been getting a little tight lately. I tried to rationalize it away, starting with vaguely plausible things (this is the first time I've worn it since it was washed, I just need to stretch it back out a bit) and slowly sliding down the spectrum to the sorts of things the Mythbusters wouldn't touch (it's cold outside, fabric isn't as flexible in the cold!). I knew it was crap, but it's easier to explain away than it is to actually do anything about. Then I saw my family's Christmas Eve pictures and was a little...well, terrified. I was starting to get downright fluffy! This shouldn't have been a surprise, and it really wasn't to my subconscious mind, but having my conscious mind drug into the harsh light of reality was a little traumatic. Then, Christmas morning, getting ready to trek over for Christmas 2.0 with my girl's family, my pants, which are the same size I have been wearing essentially since high school, barely buttoned. I mean, I had to do the "suck in and lift and lay down a bit and stretch and hope something doesn't explode out of a seam" maneuver. I knew there'd been less and less real estate inside the waistband for awhile now, but this was absolutely unacceptable. Not having a scale in my own house, I waited until we arrived at her grandmother's place and...well, Da Capo al coda(1).
I weighed 230 pounds. In high school, I capped out around 190, but there was muscle on that frame. And I'm 6'1", with no aspirations to boxing in a featherweight division. I am never going to be a light dude. With a large frame and decent muscle mass, I'm SUPPOSED to weigh about 189. But that was the heaviest I had ever seen myself, and I knew, with my current habits and lifestyle, I was moving nowhere but in the wrong direction. Now there's a chance, because this happened even within my own family, that some of you are going to look at that 230 number and think I'm overreacting. I realize that's not exactly out of hand yet, but the point is that I wanted to hit it now, and KEEP it from GETTING out of hand. I come from a family with a history of heart disease, high blood pressure, adult onset diabetes...weight is not something I need to be messing around with. Plus, lately, my energy levels have been in the crapper and even simple activities had begun seeming taxing. I was, quite simply, carrying too much of me around to be happy.
On December 26th, I woke up with a plan. I quit sodas, cold turkey. I didn't realize that Coke I had the previous evening was going to be the last one for a good long while, but maybe it's better that way. Rip it off fast, like a band-aid. I had been drinking about four a day for...um...ever. That's about 800 empty calories a day, plus ungodly amounts of acids and, of course, the great Satan of high fructose corn syrup. I may as well have kept smoking, right? Seriously, look into HFCS sometime(2). Your body doesn't know what to do with it, it screws with insulin, contributes directly to diabetes in almost every credible study on the subject, and the only defense, the only defense that the corn industry can come up with in their commercials is, "It's fine in moderation!"
It's fine in moderation?! Christ, opium is technically fine in moderation! Absinthe is fine in moderation! You don't see me dumping either into my nephew's breakfast cereals(3)! You're really going to have to do better than, "Well, it probably won't kill you right away!" I hate that we live in one of the only developed countries in the world where the corn industry ended up being more powerful and more subsidized than the sugar industry. I mean, I'm sure the latter comes with certain evils, too, like the all-powerful dentist lobby or...something. But seriously, the studies are there, the knowledge is there, the corn people just have enough money and lobbyists to keep throwing at lawmakers to prevent anything from being done about it. And since the last vote we truly have left is with our wallets, and these are still multi-billion dollar industries, nothing is going to change anytime soon. So it's down to personal choice. I chose to replace soda with water and real fruit juices, and use Crystal Light to offset my "I really can't take how bland water is oh god please kill me now" reflex.
I also woke up that morning determined to use the power of one of my Christmas presents for awesome. My family gave me a new XBox 360 with a Kinect, the new super-creepy yet really quite fun motion sensor attachment dealie. The first two games I acquired for it? The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout and Dance Central. Goodbye sedentary lifestyle, hello clinging to the side of my computer chair trying to remember how to breathe! Seriously, I was skeptical of the former at first, seeing as I hate all forms of reality TV and have never watched an episode of the actual show in my life. But the reviews were positive, with several sign-offs from nutritionists and fitness specialists. I gave it a try, and it proceeded to beat the everloving piss out of me.
Not only was I getting fluffy, my body had forgotten what this whole "movement" thing was like. Curse you, occupation that rewards sitting in a chair all day! Even on the moderate workout setting, after 20 minutes, I was doing my best Fred Sanford impression and fogging my glasses up from sweat and exuded body heat alone. I was literally steaming in my own juices. The next morning, I honestly wondered if I had somehow transferred my brain into the body of James Caan in the movie Misery, right after Kathy Bates did her best Gallagher impression on his ankles. My legs were sore to the point that I had to completely waive off my second day's exercise routine, along with anything that involved moving with any more urgency than a recently unearthed mummy. I was losing foot races with glaciers. It was horrible. And they were still sore the third day, but I decided at that point the best thing to do was to push onward and work through it.
Amazingly, that helped. My muscles, realizing I wasn't listening to reason, ended their 48 hour hostage standoff with my calves and relaxed a bit. Then a little more. After the first five routines, my breathing was becoming more regular. Exercises that had been death sentences early on were becoming a little more natural. And between the lack of soda and the return to physical activity, I dropped 11 pounds in seven days. In the next seven, I threw another 5 pounds on the pile. From December 26th to January 9th, I've gone from 230 and heading in all the wrong directions to 214 and really enjoying myself. I set the game up as an 8 week program(4) with a target weight of 198 pounds. Getting back below 200 would be a major psychological victory, and I can build on it from there. I can't even really begin to describe how much better I feel, too. Energy levels are up, fitness levels are higher than they've probably been since I was actively participating in sports, it's just...yeah. I'm feeling good about this.
Dietary changes have got to be contributing somewhat to that as well. I used to eat one meal a day, carb load at that meal, then snack right before bed, and wonder why my metabolism was shot all to hell. That's not entirely true, I KNEW why my metabolism was shot all to hell, I just didn't care. Self-preservation has never been my strong suit. Now I'm eating three meals a day, healthy stuff, there's lots of Newman's Own brand finding its way into the house, and I'm trying to be conscious of calories. That's difficult, because nutritional value labels use more spin than your average Fox News broadcast. I really wish we would regulate serving sizes to a more realistic standard. One can of soda is not two servings. I have no way, on the fly, of knowing how many chips weigh 23 grams. And one oven-bake pizza is not six servings. I can put that away, by myself, in one sitting. Again, built like an Irishman, eat like an Irishman.
So...why? I mean, other than the clichéd need to lose weight as a New Year's Resolution, why would I suddenly make this many changes to a lifestyle plan that has been in place for nigh on a decade and a half? It's really quite simple. I have a future I can really see now. A plan in place, things I definitively want to accomplish, and someone I want to spend as much time with as I can. I see all the problems other members of my family have had to wade through because they didn't get on this while there was still time, saw how many quality years it really robbed a few people of, and decided I didn't want that to be me. I can be a burden on myself now, or a burden on everyone else later. I choose the former. Although I promise to try really, really hard to never become one of those super smug and pretentious people in the really tight jogging shorts that act like they are god's gift to fitness and everyone else just isn't trying hard enough. I'm never going to tell anyone else how to live their lives, period.
If hearing about me doing this or seeing me do this helps you convince yourself that you can make some changes, too, that's great, I'm here if you need anything. If hearing about me doing this or seeing me do this convinces you I'm a ponce who needs to fall into a pit of broken glass and die, then...well, maybe you have some anger issues, but you're entitled to it. I just knew that I wanted my own life to go in a different direction, a healthier direction, because the road traveled longer that way, and gave me more time to see the sights.
I'd say this must be me growing up, except I'm about to make a peanut butter sandwich then spend a few hours playing video games in my boxer shorts. You pick your battles.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 - Which is pretentious music speak for "read that thing at the beginning, then carry it forward but keep going past this point next time," but that was may more letters, and I'm tired(P1).
P1 - And yes, I'm aware that I spent even more time and letters explaining that fact than I would have just typing that in the first place. I don't feel the need to explain my art to you, Warren.
2 - Oh, excuse me corn growers' associations, "corn sugar."
3 - Although I have to be honest, that would be endlessly entertaining.
4 - The game really makes regular exercise palatable, especially if you have a hyper-competitive streak like I do. It basically drops you INTO the show. You have to do regular exercise routines, along with seven other NPCs (it's probably higher if you opt for the 12 week program), and at the end of each week there is an exercise challenge that you get points for winning, and a weigh in, at which you get points for percentage of total body mass lost. Once the scores are tallied, the two contestants who had the least successful week are put up for elimination, and you and the other safe contestants vote on who deserves to go home. I just finished week 2, have won both physical challenges, and have been the biggest loser both weeks. Take that, imaginary peers!
Let's take it back a day or two, to begin at the beginning. Which is usually a good place to begin, as I understand. But I'm stalling, because this is kind of a personal entry.
I've never been scrawny, but I've never really been obese, either. I have a lot of lower body muscle mass from my track runner/marching band/drill team/football/soccer/field hockey legs of old, and my chest and shoulders have always been broad enough that I have to buy extra large shirts just to let the fabric reach my waist. I'm built like an Irish dude, I guess. I don't really know how else to describe it. I am equally easy to imagine wearing a kilt and swinging a claymore over my head whilst running toward you, screaming, or slumped over a bar stool with a spiral pattern of slain Guinness around me, enabling you to count how many hours I had been there by how many rings there were. The world's most inebriated tree.
Body image has never been a terrible problem with me, which is probably how I let it get away from me a little. In New York I was walking constantly. I had a five to ten mile a day route mapped out to relieve stress after I got out of work. During the itinerant gypsy phases I bartended, bounced, did odd jobs, stayed active, you know? Even once I settled down for Georgia, Take 1, I ended up as a stocker at a grocery store, which is more physical than you'd realize. Lately though...I mean, the writing is great for stretching the creative muscles, but it tends to involve a lot of consuming vast amounts of soda and sitting still for hours on end, staring at your prey until your eyes bleed and your bladder threatens to explode. Really, if you replaced the soda with beer, you could be a deer hunter. Or Ernest Hemingway.
As a result, the pounds slowly, steadily, quietly snuck up on me. I am reminded of the old story about the frog in a pot of water. You drop a frog straight in after it's already boiling, he's going to hop right back out. You slowly heat the water up once he's already there, he'll think he's found the world's first froggy day spa right up until he croaks. *drum fill* Sorry, sorry, I wouldn't blame you if you stopped reading after that, really I wouldn't.
Anyway, my shirts and pants had been getting a little tight lately. I tried to rationalize it away, starting with vaguely plausible things (this is the first time I've worn it since it was washed, I just need to stretch it back out a bit) and slowly sliding down the spectrum to the sorts of things the Mythbusters wouldn't touch (it's cold outside, fabric isn't as flexible in the cold!). I knew it was crap, but it's easier to explain away than it is to actually do anything about. Then I saw my family's Christmas Eve pictures and was a little...well, terrified. I was starting to get downright fluffy! This shouldn't have been a surprise, and it really wasn't to my subconscious mind, but having my conscious mind drug into the harsh light of reality was a little traumatic. Then, Christmas morning, getting ready to trek over for Christmas 2.0 with my girl's family, my pants, which are the same size I have been wearing essentially since high school, barely buttoned. I mean, I had to do the "suck in and lift and lay down a bit and stretch and hope something doesn't explode out of a seam" maneuver. I knew there'd been less and less real estate inside the waistband for awhile now, but this was absolutely unacceptable. Not having a scale in my own house, I waited until we arrived at her grandmother's place and...well, Da Capo al coda(1).
I weighed 230 pounds. In high school, I capped out around 190, but there was muscle on that frame. And I'm 6'1", with no aspirations to boxing in a featherweight division. I am never going to be a light dude. With a large frame and decent muscle mass, I'm SUPPOSED to weigh about 189. But that was the heaviest I had ever seen myself, and I knew, with my current habits and lifestyle, I was moving nowhere but in the wrong direction. Now there's a chance, because this happened even within my own family, that some of you are going to look at that 230 number and think I'm overreacting. I realize that's not exactly out of hand yet, but the point is that I wanted to hit it now, and KEEP it from GETTING out of hand. I come from a family with a history of heart disease, high blood pressure, adult onset diabetes...weight is not something I need to be messing around with. Plus, lately, my energy levels have been in the crapper and even simple activities had begun seeming taxing. I was, quite simply, carrying too much of me around to be happy.
On December 26th, I woke up with a plan. I quit sodas, cold turkey. I didn't realize that Coke I had the previous evening was going to be the last one for a good long while, but maybe it's better that way. Rip it off fast, like a band-aid. I had been drinking about four a day for...um...ever. That's about 800 empty calories a day, plus ungodly amounts of acids and, of course, the great Satan of high fructose corn syrup. I may as well have kept smoking, right? Seriously, look into HFCS sometime(2). Your body doesn't know what to do with it, it screws with insulin, contributes directly to diabetes in almost every credible study on the subject, and the only defense, the only defense that the corn industry can come up with in their commercials is, "It's fine in moderation!"
It's fine in moderation?! Christ, opium is technically fine in moderation! Absinthe is fine in moderation! You don't see me dumping either into my nephew's breakfast cereals(3)! You're really going to have to do better than, "Well, it probably won't kill you right away!" I hate that we live in one of the only developed countries in the world where the corn industry ended up being more powerful and more subsidized than the sugar industry. I mean, I'm sure the latter comes with certain evils, too, like the all-powerful dentist lobby or...something. But seriously, the studies are there, the knowledge is there, the corn people just have enough money and lobbyists to keep throwing at lawmakers to prevent anything from being done about it. And since the last vote we truly have left is with our wallets, and these are still multi-billion dollar industries, nothing is going to change anytime soon. So it's down to personal choice. I chose to replace soda with water and real fruit juices, and use Crystal Light to offset my "I really can't take how bland water is oh god please kill me now" reflex.
I also woke up that morning determined to use the power of one of my Christmas presents for awesome. My family gave me a new XBox 360 with a Kinect, the new super-creepy yet really quite fun motion sensor attachment dealie. The first two games I acquired for it? The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout and Dance Central. Goodbye sedentary lifestyle, hello clinging to the side of my computer chair trying to remember how to breathe! Seriously, I was skeptical of the former at first, seeing as I hate all forms of reality TV and have never watched an episode of the actual show in my life. But the reviews were positive, with several sign-offs from nutritionists and fitness specialists. I gave it a try, and it proceeded to beat the everloving piss out of me.
Not only was I getting fluffy, my body had forgotten what this whole "movement" thing was like. Curse you, occupation that rewards sitting in a chair all day! Even on the moderate workout setting, after 20 minutes, I was doing my best Fred Sanford impression and fogging my glasses up from sweat and exuded body heat alone. I was literally steaming in my own juices. The next morning, I honestly wondered if I had somehow transferred my brain into the body of James Caan in the movie Misery, right after Kathy Bates did her best Gallagher impression on his ankles. My legs were sore to the point that I had to completely waive off my second day's exercise routine, along with anything that involved moving with any more urgency than a recently unearthed mummy. I was losing foot races with glaciers. It was horrible. And they were still sore the third day, but I decided at that point the best thing to do was to push onward and work through it.
Amazingly, that helped. My muscles, realizing I wasn't listening to reason, ended their 48 hour hostage standoff with my calves and relaxed a bit. Then a little more. After the first five routines, my breathing was becoming more regular. Exercises that had been death sentences early on were becoming a little more natural. And between the lack of soda and the return to physical activity, I dropped 11 pounds in seven days. In the next seven, I threw another 5 pounds on the pile. From December 26th to January 9th, I've gone from 230 and heading in all the wrong directions to 214 and really enjoying myself. I set the game up as an 8 week program(4) with a target weight of 198 pounds. Getting back below 200 would be a major psychological victory, and I can build on it from there. I can't even really begin to describe how much better I feel, too. Energy levels are up, fitness levels are higher than they've probably been since I was actively participating in sports, it's just...yeah. I'm feeling good about this.
Dietary changes have got to be contributing somewhat to that as well. I used to eat one meal a day, carb load at that meal, then snack right before bed, and wonder why my metabolism was shot all to hell. That's not entirely true, I KNEW why my metabolism was shot all to hell, I just didn't care. Self-preservation has never been my strong suit. Now I'm eating three meals a day, healthy stuff, there's lots of Newman's Own brand finding its way into the house, and I'm trying to be conscious of calories. That's difficult, because nutritional value labels use more spin than your average Fox News broadcast. I really wish we would regulate serving sizes to a more realistic standard. One can of soda is not two servings. I have no way, on the fly, of knowing how many chips weigh 23 grams. And one oven-bake pizza is not six servings. I can put that away, by myself, in one sitting. Again, built like an Irishman, eat like an Irishman.
So...why? I mean, other than the clichéd need to lose weight as a New Year's Resolution, why would I suddenly make this many changes to a lifestyle plan that has been in place for nigh on a decade and a half? It's really quite simple. I have a future I can really see now. A plan in place, things I definitively want to accomplish, and someone I want to spend as much time with as I can. I see all the problems other members of my family have had to wade through because they didn't get on this while there was still time, saw how many quality years it really robbed a few people of, and decided I didn't want that to be me. I can be a burden on myself now, or a burden on everyone else later. I choose the former. Although I promise to try really, really hard to never become one of those super smug and pretentious people in the really tight jogging shorts that act like they are god's gift to fitness and everyone else just isn't trying hard enough. I'm never going to tell anyone else how to live their lives, period.
If hearing about me doing this or seeing me do this helps you convince yourself that you can make some changes, too, that's great, I'm here if you need anything. If hearing about me doing this or seeing me do this convinces you I'm a ponce who needs to fall into a pit of broken glass and die, then...well, maybe you have some anger issues, but you're entitled to it. I just knew that I wanted my own life to go in a different direction, a healthier direction, because the road traveled longer that way, and gave me more time to see the sights.
I'd say this must be me growing up, except I'm about to make a peanut butter sandwich then spend a few hours playing video games in my boxer shorts. You pick your battles.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 - Which is pretentious music speak for "read that thing at the beginning, then carry it forward but keep going past this point next time," but that was may more letters, and I'm tired(P1).
P1 - And yes, I'm aware that I spent even more time and letters explaining that fact than I would have just typing that in the first place. I don't feel the need to explain my art to you, Warren.
2 - Oh, excuse me corn growers' associations, "corn sugar."
3 - Although I have to be honest, that would be endlessly entertaining.
4 - The game really makes regular exercise palatable, especially if you have a hyper-competitive streak like I do. It basically drops you INTO the show. You have to do regular exercise routines, along with seven other NPCs (it's probably higher if you opt for the 12 week program), and at the end of each week there is an exercise challenge that you get points for winning, and a weigh in, at which you get points for percentage of total body mass lost. Once the scores are tallied, the two contestants who had the least successful week are put up for elimination, and you and the other safe contestants vote on who deserves to go home. I just finished week 2, have won both physical challenges, and have been the biggest loser both weeks. Take that, imaginary peers!