Friday, August 23, 2013

The making of an action Hero pt26

Entry #25 Wednesday a coworker asked me if I had lost weight. It was one of those moments, like when I found I could wrap a towel around my middle after a shower and tuck it in or when the engagement ring the Brunette gave me years ago started to fit again--. Little victories. A long way to go still, but it’s good to know that the progress is getting me places. Speaking of the Brunette, that worthy walked into the middle of my steel club workout on Wednesday. She was a little put out that I told her to go go go, when she needed to get through. I had the soundtrack to the 2007 transformers movie on my laptop and was rocking the clubs so I was a little worked up at the time. I have to get into the zone to exercise. Some people seem to do it as a thing. It doesn’t require any special mental effort for them. I have to be driving towards something, even if that something is the end of a song. I don’t do casual workouts. I remember running into my philosophy professor in college at the gym. He was grading papers while riding the stationary bike. I still don’t get that. I’m envisioning myself at the climactic moment of a movie, in a pitched battle with Dolph Lundgren and 300 ninjas riding robot sharks. I have an inspiring sound track or one of Megadeth’s albums playing to get the blood pumping. Grading papers? Not so much. I missed the drive to exceed that exercise creates. When you have three minutes left in a sprint, you push yourself toward the goal. The world falls away. It’s just you and “not good enough” in a steel cage match. When NGE goes down your body is vibrating from the effort. Everything is right with the world. Your blood is pumping, the adrenalin is going, and you own that moment. I imagine it’s like sky diving out of a plain before the shoot opens. It’s good to get that rush back after all this time. Today makes six straight days with the workout and 3 days this week getting up a half hour earlier at 5am to swing the clubs. This program really works. I’m just doing the two warm-up segments in sets and I can already feel a difference. This probably has less to do with the weight loss and more to do with the circular training practice of stretching and loosening joints. Walking is just—easier, lighter, more free than before. It’s my goal by the end of August to be working out continuously. I’m going to amend my original choice to work out every morning though. You need to give your body time to heal and I need time to break in the 5am wake up call. I’ll alternate evenings and mornings, checking weight after the morning segments. That brings me to my goal for August—averaging less than 290 pounds for next week. Frankly, that’s going to be tuff. I could starve myself, but that’s not what I set out to do with this plan. On the other hand, I really, really, really want to get under that threshold by the end of the week. So what I’m going to do is push myself. I’m going to exercise smart but push myself within the limits of safety. I’m going to go for shakes as much as possible for breakfast and dinner. I’ll have a low carb, high energy lunch for all of next week, probably tuna salad or the like. The goal is to cut the weight, but do it intelligently and in a sustainable way. It will also help me to shrink the stomach a bit, making it so that eating less fills me up faster. The driving motivation will be my Doctor’s response when he checks my vitals on Friday’s physical. After my last visit, the nurse read me back my vital stats and said in a board voice that I should try and eat a low fat low cholesterol diet. You could tell she didn’t expect any action on that item—a fair assumption given my previous track record. The thing is that now I have something to look forward to so it gives me something to shoot for, something to drive toward as the month plays out. Weight today was 293 pounds with an average weight this week of 293.48 pounds. The lowest I’ve managed is 292.4 pounds. Today’s intake: Breakfast=A health shake with blueberries, oatmeal, strawberries, banana, spinach, and almond milk. Work lunch=a turkey wrap, an apple, and Greek yogurt. Dinner will be whatever WMTrainguy’s wife puts on the table, rumored to be chicken fajita pot pie, dirty rice, and strawberry short cake for dessert. I’ll be playing Flames of War with WMTrainguy, so will have a drink or two as well. This probably looks like a counterproductive meal to have before trying to get the weight down. The issue being that I’m losing weight while still living life. The cook in question makes food that haunts me in dreams it’s so good. I can count the number of drinks I’ve had this month on the fingers of one hand. Getting the weight down in such a way that living life would have made it impossible isn’t an accomplishment in my book—it becomes a sacrifice that will need to be balanced at some future date. That’s not an accomplishment; it’s a personal excuse to binge later—not going to happen.

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