Friday, April 27, 2012

Newnan’s Largest Lessener 12


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.

The Plan:

Getting healthy, recovering from whatever this was from last week and getting back on track with the exercise routine.

Later.

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