We are more....

How easily we adapt to the roles other prescribe for us. It is myself - me alone - who has the authority to define who I am and who I am going to be. Special care must be taken to assure that the definition I provide for myself is one that I am willing to live with.

For years, I have defined myself as "the fat guy" or "the overweight guy." Once that definition was made public there arose a vast cadre of individuals who were willing to assure me that my personal definition was accurate. My mother assured me that I was "just filling out."Someone else reminded me of what I was told as a child - that fat would eventually catch up. Still others were willingly complicit in reminding me that I could stand to lose a few pounds.

I am more than a typecast. People expect me to be fat because there are so many like me in the world today. People expect someone in his late 30's to have sore knees, a sore back, flat feet, and a spare tire.

But I've come to realize the opinions and beliefs of others don't matter.  I get to define me.  All others should expect to be ignored, no matter well-intentioned the definition may be.

I am Fabulously Fit at 40.

I am Fabulously Fit at 40.

I am Fabulously Fit at 40.

Little Successes

I have to cheer the little successes that are accomplished, otherwise all of this exercise stuff will just get tiring and I'll find myself wanting to quit it all.

A part of the reason I ended up looking like a pear on a pair of toothpicks is that I've spent the better part of the last 20 years of my life in and out of bowling centers - both working and bowling in them.  For those of you who have been bowling once or twice, you probably know that the food offered in such establishments isn't exactly on the top of the nutritional scale.  Deep fried chicken, fries, hamburgers, soda, salty popcorn - ah, the memories!

Interestingly, bowling is part of the reason that I don't look far worse that I currently do.  Despite beliefs to the contrary, bowling burns a lot of calories.  When I practice (I suppose it's worth mentioning that I am a professional bowler, so this is something I do quite a bit), I might bowl 8-12 games.  Without getting into the details of how the following numbers are reached, over the course of 10 games I will walk 3528 feet carrying a 15 pound weight for half that distance.  I will have lifted 2205 pounds 15 pounds at a time.  I will have performed 147 deep-knee bends while throwing a 15 pound sphere at an average speed of 16 mph.  Do that a couple times a week, and you only gain a marginal amount of weight.

Now, what is that success I was talking about?

Ah, yes.  Yesterday I had the opportunity to bowl a few games (6 to be precise) while my wife was at a meeting.  The last time I bowled (a few weeks ago), I had terrible knee pain, shoulder pain, and I hurt all over the day after.  I was expecting, at the very least, next-day soreness and knee pain when I bowled yesterday.  To my surprise, I felt pretty good for the entire 6-game stretch.  I still sweat bullets while bowling, but my knees gave me no trouble at all and my body felt fine when I woke up this morning.  I also managed to average 203 for the 6 games despite the lanes being pretty used up when I got there (it's a bowling thing, but used up lanes are hard to bowl well on).

The only thing I can attribute this success to is a regular weight training regimen and modified food intake.  I still look overweight, but there are small changes occurring that show up under certain conditions - in this case, 6 games of bowling.  I can only imagine what more of the same will bring.  I do recall that some of my best bowling was done at 176 pounds with about 18% body fat.  By the time I'm 40, I'll be WELL into that range of fitness.

Little successes mean a lot.  I shall celebrate them as they come.

Be well.

Weekends weren't made for weight loss.

I can see I'm going to have to be careful with myself on the weekends.  It's just too darned easy to let it all go and revert to the old ways of living life - the ways that were killing me before.

Chances are this weekend created a zero-sum game for this week as the eating and drinking habits returned to their previous state.  Very little water.  Too much food of the wrong types.  This hasn't been a productive period for me.

There is something to be said, though, about letting yourself go for a short time every so often.  That's the key though - it has to be for a set time of no longer than 24 hours or so.  And even then, some moderation should be observed.  After a week of eating grilled chicken, steak, and fish with veggies and whole carbs, a pepperoni pizza or burger and fried begins to look really enticing.  There's a reason behind the idea of taking a day off from the usual lean menu.  I'll touch on that idea in a sec.

There are multiple ways to work in a free day (or cheat day) when eating to lose fat.  I've heard of some people doing it every Saturday or Sunday - eating what they want on that one day during the week.  Others might have a free day or cheat meal after they achieve some sort of goal - losing 10 pounds, fitting into a certain size pair of pants or dress, or staying clean in their diet for a certain period of time, for example.   I personally like having a certain day of the week that I can make decisions that allow me to splurge a little bit.  That way I've only got to tell myself  when temptation strikes, "You only have to wait until Saturday.  It's almost Saturday."  No matter where I am in the week, it's always 'almost Saturday'.

Now, why the cheat meal or day off?  The way I've always thought of it is to think about a campfire.  When you first build the campfire, you have to put little pieces of kindling and leaves on it to build it up.  If you take a slow burning fire and drop a huge log on it, the fire just gets crushed out and can't burn the fuel being provided for it.  It's too much of a good thing.  Think of the body's metabolism in the same way.  When I just sat on my butt all day and ate crap, my metabolism was like an unattended fire that had died to a few glowing embers.  Every time I dropped a fast food meal or bag of chip

s on my stomach, my already dull metabolism barely had the ability to consume the meal and ended just storing most of it on my butt and belly.  However, after working out for a week, my metabolism is amped up and burning like a fire that's been fed to grow.  Now on my cheat day, when I drop a big meal on my stomach, my body has the ability to burn up that heavy meal and not just store the overage as fat.

The second good reason for the cheat day is it fools the body into believing it's not starving.  The body has this funny self-preservation mechanism - a feast or famine instinct if you will.  When food is plentiful, the body doesn't have a problem giving up stored body fat for fuel whenever it's called for.  So a week's worth of exercise is tolerated fairly well when at the end of that week there's a period of abundance which alerts the body to the fact that it's not a time of famine.  If one were to attempt a starvation-style diet with severely limited calories, the body would eventually go into preservation mode and desperately cling to stored fat - the opposite of what the dieter really wants.

Finally, there's the psychology of it all.  If I had started this lifestyle change knowing that I would never again have a cheeseburger, fries, or soda, I would have quit long before I ever began.  It's just too impossible to conceive that I would go for an entire year without foods that I've come to love but are not so good for me.  Knowing that I only have to get to Saturday before I can let myself go a little makes Sunday through Friday a lot easier to endure.

As it is, I actually had 2 off days this weekend.  I can't let that happen every weekend or I will undo a whole week's work in two days of oblivious consumption.  There's a 6-pack set of abs at the end of this rainbow, and I don't want to sacrifice progress with a lack of self-discipline.

When Life gets in the Way

As should be expected, I am all geared up to get started with a new nutrition and exercise program when life decides to rear its ugly head.

You know how life can be sometimes.  Unexpected.  Unpredictable.  Just plain annoying.  I don't have a whole lot of these kinds of times, but when they come their arrival is usually with the worst possible sense of timing.  One thing I don't need right now is distractions.  Changing a lifestyle is not an easy thing to do, and distractions just take my focus from where I need it to be (on making a dramatic life change) to where I would rather not have to go.

What are the distractions, you might ask.  Let me tell you.

First, I have a vehicle that needs new tires.  4 of them, to be precise.  This morning I went to get some estimates on how much it would cost to replace 4 tires.  The first total I got came in at nearly $800.  Now, I seldom buy full sets of tires (in fact, this is the first time ever), so I did not realize that 4 pieces of steel-belted rubber would cut so deeply into my wallet.  When the counter guy saw my pallid face and shaking hands, he played with the numbers a bit to bring the price down to just shy of $700.  Still a bit out of my budget.  He finally, did some digging and found a set of import tires that had a higher durability rating that might be good for me.  The price: $505.  Better, but overspending a budget is something that my wife and I talk about before I do it.

I later learned that my tire size is an odd one, making the availability of a full set a little more difficult (and more expensive) to come by.  Lucky me.  I'll work it out, but since I want a gym membership to go with my new tires, it might take 2 trips to the tire store rather than just one to get a full set of tires.

That incident pales in comparison to my other life issue.  After discovering that the tires I want cost several useful body parts, I drove out to a rental unit that I have.  My tenant there has been kind of iffy for the past several weeks, and since it's the early in the month I want to make an appearance at the front door earlier rather than later for my rent.  When I got there, I found it to be quite - disturbing.  Yes, that's the word I need.

My tenant is gone - moved out without notice.  Before leaving, she kindly ripped out my carpet and destroyed the shoe molding around the entire living room.  She replaced the carpet with some kind of vinyl flooring that looks like it came right out of the 70's.  There are holes in walls in every room (not big ones, just big enough to be a pain in the butt) and mismatched carpet in the hallway that she put over the new floor I installed before she moved in.  An entire part of the wall is missing in a bedroom, as is the closet door it was attached to.  She destroyed the door to the second bedroom and threw out the access panel to the HVAC unit, leaving a gaping hole in the wall where none should exist.  There's enough trash and junk around the house to fill a small dump truck.  Then there's the bugs.  Lots and lots of bugs.

She also vacated the premises with a window AC unit and three space heaters - about $300 worth of appliances.

All of that means simply this: getting another tenant in there is going to be expensive.  No one would want to live there as it is.  Just cleaning it isn't going to be enough.  It needs a lots of repair-some of it major, heating and cooling, a LOT of cleaning, and a good bit of yard work.  $1000 might get me out of it, but who has $1000 just laying around?  It's also going to require a lot of my time - time that I would rather spend writing this blog or working out or something more productive than cleaning up someone else's mess.

Distractions, distractions, distractions.

They happen.  I just have to make sure they don't take away from the real goal here - to look like a million bucks on my 40th birthday.

Be well.