Okay… results are in for the first month. I’m down 9 pounds.
That’s encouraging.
I’m writing down everything I eat and logging all my exercise on a free site called FitDay. That way, I know exactly when to stop to still lose my hoped for 2 pounds a week. For me, that works out to about 1,600 calories. Take in that much or less, I lose.
I’m shrinking.
I have a whole room filled with health club quality exercise gear.
I vow to use this equipment an hour a day, supplemented or replaced on some days as weather permits, with an equal amount of time bike training outside in preparation for some long-distance tours this summer.
Here’s a video on why I have no excuse… and a handy gizmo I use to keep me from getting bored while putting in all the time on the machines:
There are a lot of reasons people need motorized carts to get around. Age, infirmities, injuries, amputations and… obesity.
You want to see how fat we are as a nation? Go to Walt Disney World. Or your local supermarket. Or a shopping mall. Look at who is riding around on those carts. Behemoths so fat they can barely walk, or so crippled by carrying around all that weight that their joints have been pulverized.
I’ve been so lucky. As a lifetime fatso, that is going to be me, too, if I don’t succeed. AT 62, I still can move pretty good. I don’t have arthritis or joint pain. I’ve kept fairly fit, despite the extra pounds. Fat but fit, as one doctor told me. “But it will catch up with you,” he said. “Your fitness will give you a few years but your fat will eventually cripple you if it doesn’t kill you first.”
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard it all before.
But in February, we met the grandkids in Florida and went to visit the rat up in Orlando. All over Walt’s park were these fatsos on scooters and motorized carts. Hundreds of them. Thousands, actually. I watched them. Is that what our national epidemic has brought us to? Have we become so fat we need a fatsomobile to cart us about?
I figure, God willing, I have 20 years left of activity. I plan long distance bike rides this summer and hope to get better and better at biking as I lose weight.
But one thing that has helped me make this time the last time I will need to lose weight is the sight of those fatso machines. I can’t get the image out of my mind of all these fat people riding around Walt Disney World.
Not me. Please God, not me. May I finally stop the yo-yoing and keep this weight off.
Instead of failing today, I photographed.
Instead of reaching into a bowl of candy, every time I came across temptation, I took a picture of it.
I learned three things:
1) Stopping and thinking before acting on impulse lessens the urge.
2) There’s way too much temptation out there. I found the bowls of candy you see here all over workplaces, desks and offices.
3) Only fat people take them. Seriously. Across from a big bowl in my office, I sat back and watched who took the candy. Skinny people walked right past. Fat people reached right in. The rare non-fatso who indulged took one piece. The fatsos took handfuls and shoved so much candy in their mouths they looked like squirrels preparing for winter.
Then I got mad. At myself for all those handfuls of useless calories I have grabbed over the months and years…. and at the well-meaning colleagues whose misplaced hospitality doesn’t help us fatsos with impulse control.
My wife fumes about candy bowls. “It’s like handing out beer to alcoholics,” she says. “It’s poison.”
Really, though, it’s me. I’m the problem. Me and my fatso friends who are conditioned to reach in and just take what we want. I have to break that conditioning. And stay angry at my lack of self control.
I owe myself better than what I’ve been doing.
One thing this shrinking fatso gig is going to require is for me to get up earlier.
Working out for an hour a day cuts into my work day.
Even with a home gym to save on commute time and health club dues, an hour is 60 minutes and that’s a good chunk of the morning. I need to get up an hour earlier. Which means go to bed an hour earlier, too.
My wife, who teaches exercise classes and is in teenaged rock solid shape, tells me I could break it up in two 30 minute segments. But I know me and if I don’t work out first thing, it won’t happen. Besides, she says, it takes 20 minutes of steady exercise before you even start burning fat. Doing two 30 minute workouts means only 20 minutes of fat buring. One 60-minute session equals 40 minutes.
But maybe that isn’t even enough. In august, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine issued an updatedset of exercise guidelines. They say that to maintain health, we need to do 30 minutes of moderate activity five days per week. I do want to be healthy. But I want to be a shriking fatso so much that… I become a former fatso. Read the rest of this entry »
I have no problem losing weight.
It’s just keeping it off, right?
Every year, I start about February or March and get down to the 210-215 mark by summer. Every fall, it comes back on. Year after year its like this. In 1982, I got down to about 197. That’s the lowest I’ve been since high school.
Yo-yoing is not healthy and it teaches your body to hang on to the fat. My body is a very good fat hanger on-ner.
I am determined this time to keep the weight off. I am not going to diet. I’m going to make good choices about what I eat and how much.
What I am not going to do is graze. Everytime I pass by a dish of candy at work, I grab some. In the employee cafeteria, there always seems to be cookies. My wife has low fat chips in the cupboard. I shake out a handful a couple times a day. I eat an entire bag of buttered popcorn at the movies. Read the rest of this entry »
Oh boy. This is scary. But here I go.
I’m going to use this blog to chronicle my efforts to - once again, but for the last time - lose weight. This time, I’m determined to keep it off. And my hope is, by sharing it all, and I mean all, that I will be to humiliated to quit.
That’s me, this morning, at 243 pounds and 62 years old, in the bathroom mirror. Embarrassed? You better believe it. We fatsos have learned to forget our image, to walk right past mirrors and to studiously avoid fat pictures. But here it is. I am humiliated to see this. But I’m putting it here because - if I’m correct in thinking that keeping this blog will give me a motivation I have never had before - you’re not going to see this picture until I’ve lost a lot of weight.
See, the way the Net works is it takes a long time to get indexed, or noticed by the search engines. And if I keep real quiet, don’t do any promotion, don’t tell anyone about this, by the time anyone stumbles across this blog, I’ll have lost a lot of weight and have a new and slimmer picture to post. Read the rest of this entry »
