Wow, I was really sick last week.
Cold, flu, sinus infection or something after 40 anything
you get seems life threatening. Sore
throat and cough Friday, fever/chills, aches and numbing lack of energy on Saturday,
bounce back a little on Sunday then cough and running nose all week long. I think it’s the plague, but I’m not legally
a doctor.
Being sick has been the best diet plan this year.
-Me, 2012
A summary of the week as far as eating goes, not much. Being sick I didn’t really want to eat, so I skipped
snacks or had the snacks as meals and skipped the full lunch or dinner. Then for Administrative Professionals Day (I
am not particularly either of those things but still it was daytime) the
company lunch was at an upscale Mexican restaurant and I ate chips and guacamole
and cheese and sauce and duck and corn tortillas and banana chocolate chip
cake. Oh my God do I love food.
Also reminds me of my issues and why I don’t generally eat
with other people. I love a conversation
and that is strange, but I hate seeing food not being eaten. Not mine, obviously I eat everything and then
some on my plate. I see a half-eaten
lunch on the plate next to me and I am screaming in my head, “how are you not
finishing your food!” That’s normal
right? And if you order dessert and don’t
eat it, I die a little bit inside. I’m
sure there was or will be a diary of a fat kid going over the various issues I have
with wasting food and eating everything on your plate and not ordering
something you won’t eat.
Good news, I didn’t eat everyone else’s food and I didn’t
even talk about it. You know until right
now.
Now the numbers:
| 2/9/2012 | 4/13/2012 | 4/20/2012 | 4/27/2012 | AdvoVar | LW | |
| Neck | 17.50 | 17.50 | 17.50 | - | ||
| Left Arm | 16.50 | 14.75 | 16.00 | 16.00 | (0.50) | - |
| Shoulders | 58.50 | 55.00 | 54.75 | 53.75 | (4.75) | (1.00) |
| Chest | 56.75 | 53.00 | 52.50 | 52.50 | (4.25) | - |
| Waist | 55.00 | 49.00 | 49.00 | 48.75 | (6.25) | (0.25) |
| Hips | 49.00 | 46.25 | 45.75 | 45.00 | (4.00) | (0.75) |
| Left Thigh | 28.50 | 25.50 | 26.00 | 24.50 | (4.00) | (1.50) |
| Left Calf | 18.50 | 17.75 | 17.50 | 17.75 | (0.75) | 0.25 |
| Left Ankle | 10.50 | 10.25 | 10.25 | 10.25 | (0.25) | - |
| Left Wrist | 7.75 | 7.50 | 7.50 | 7.50 | (0.25) | - |
| BP | 159/104 | 138/89 | 145/91 | 140/86 | - | |
| Pulse | 70.00 | 70.00 | 68.00 | 65.00 | (5.00) | (3.00) |
| Weight | 319.20 | 287.60 | 284.80 | 280.40 | (38.80) | (4.40) |
| Contest | 330.00 | (49.60) |
There’s something to this being violently ill. Over FOUR pounds in a week, and I’m just
going to call it FIFTY pounds on this contest!
All that with lunch yesterday, I am unstoppable. Nothing but pizza and beer from now on.
Seriously though, just to show that making smart choices
over the course of a day or a week you can get results even when you aren’t
hitting all your goals.
Speaking of goals…and not hitting them.
The Exercise Routine:
No, I didn’t forget to post the awesome new spreadsheet of
body moving tracking. There was nothing
to report, starting Friday I was too sick and my energy only came back in small
and easily exhausted intervals all week long.
Wake up coughing and clearing out the lungs and so tired after work that
nothing was going to happen. This led to
the most simple and startling truth of losing weight.
You still have to eat even if you diet, but you can actively
choose what you eat to be healthier and lose weight.
You don’t ever have to exercise, to move more than required
to meet basic needs, and so you have to more than actively choose to
exercise. This is easy for the people
who’ve found the things they love to do; play tennis, dance, golf, even power
shop at the mall, and they are willing to work time into their lives to do
those things they enjoy.
Turns out I have yet to find anything at all that I like to
do, much less need to do, that requires a lot of exercise. So I am trying to take the angle that
exercise is an activity that makes generic activities more enjoyable. I love playing video games, surfing the web,
watching movies and TV on DVD. Shit, all
I need for that is the ability to sit still for hours at a time. What is the exercise for that?
Four weeks to go, imagine four pounds a week, that would be
16 more pounds and 20% for the contest.
Alright so there is an outside chance for that, however if it’s only 8
more pounds down that gets me so close to 270, what I’d say was my 1990s
average weight. My lowest post college
weight was near 250 lbs so that will be an amazing next goal to pass.
It’s going to happen.
Diary of a Fat Kid
The thinnest I ever felt was the first semester of
college. My parents drove me the five
hours from Atlanta to Starkville, MS and the fraternity boys were helping the
freshmen move in. Oh yeah, I was
arriving a week and a half before classes started with the potential pledges,
the band kids and the athletes. I didn’t
have a fridge, a microwave, a toaster oven or even a TV. I did have a roll of quarters for laundry, a
small amount of cash, a small stipend on the MSU charge card (for food and
books and supplies). They did buy me
dinner and bought groceries before abandoning me on campus until Thanksgiving.
Since I couldn’t have anything that required refrigeration I
was left with peanut butter, honey and bread (dinner nearly every day), a
couple of gallons of gummi bears (I think purchased at a Costco like place
because I ate gummi bears when we lived in Germany), crackers and pop tarts
(breakfast natch). Every day I’d have
lunch in the cafeteria and on weekends I’d get pizza from the pizza place on
campus. My roommate was a frat guy and
spent nearly all his time at band practice or at his frat. Pretty sure he wasn’t happy that his roommate
spent all night reading for English Comp. but he moved out next semester so I
guess we’ll never know. (I know we know)
Anyway, somehow that diet mixed with an unhealthy amount of
walking around campus with 6! classes worth of books led me to be incredibly
scrawny by my standards. Then my
grandmother died, we went to MN to settle her estate (ie take whatever we could
from her apartment before they threw it all out). That was Thanksgiving 1989, the most
depressing week or so of my life, and I can be a morose S.O.B. In her apartment grandma had a post card
written out to me that she hadn’t mailed yet where she was telling me how sad
she was that the family wasn’t coming up for Christmas that year. In her room she’d already laid out the gifts
she would have mailed to us in Georgia that she never got around to mailing.
She was more engaged with life at 80-something (to be fair
we were only allowed to say she was 39) than I am now. She traveled to Duluth to visit friends and
family, she traveled to Sweden to see her family, she’d been to Georgia to
visit us. Grandpa Petersen was how I
picture a grandpa should be and Grandma Robinson was more than any grandma I even
imagined. Then she was gone and I got a mini-fridge,
a TV, a VCR and a microwave all thanks to her.
Yeah, so it’s all her fault I got fat after that.
23 years later, I wish she’d seen me graduate way more than
getting a TV that Thanksgiving.
Getting healthy, recovering from whatever this was from last
week and getting back on track with the exercise routine.
Later.
