Author's Note: the following posts present my opinion and do not generally agree with conventional wisdom. They come from the perspective of fat loss for male, which is completely different, and frankly much easier, than fat loss for a female. You are welcome to disagree with me but that is not the point.
The last time I stepped on a scale (Friday morning), all of my awesomeness weighed in at 276.5lbs. That is a substantial chunk of awesomeness. When it comes up in conversation, people universally say "Surely you don't weigh that much!" While I appreciate that sentiment, gravity doesn't give a damn. Although the severity has varied, I have been perpetually overweight since I was six years old. At my heaviest in the spring of 2003-4, I recall weighing around 330lbs. I have no excuse for that - I like food (and drink), I'll never be tall, and for much of my life I would have climbed a tree to avoid exercise. I have battled this weight with success on occasion: in two different periods in adulthood I have lost north of 40lbs, and in both cases my motivation was a girl. Between June of 2004 and August of 2005 I actually lost about 90lbs to reach 240 - proof of the power of a young man's hormones. After grad school, more eating and less activity saw me generally in the 270s and 280s. Between January and June of 2011 I lost 48 lbs and reached 230 - my lowest weight as an adult. Now I sit here at 276.5 because I like beer, a lot. I like food, a lot. And a girl (or any other person, really) is a shitty reason to do anything.
I write this post, and those that follow, as a method of accountability as I once more head down the path of lifestyle transformation. This time I do it for me; I do it because I'll be 31 in two weeks and for the rest of my life my cells will only do things more reluctantly and less efficiently. I do it because I will never be a world class athlete but I believe that I can be strong, agile, and robust, if I give myself a chance.
The truth of my current weight is that it's actually about 8lbs less than I was about a month ago. An even more important truth is that it's largely irrelevant. Weight, though it measures the "heaviness" of an object, tells you nothing about the "health" of that object. A person purposely starving may lose 20lbs of water and lean tissue, thereby lessening their scale reading while certainly lessening their health. A person deprived of anything in order to decrease that scale reading will most likely return whence they came, eventually. A 140lb marathoner may die of a heart attack at 50 while a 250lb weight lifter may outlive them by 40 years.
I remember my past weights because they have been a siren calling us to the rocks. It's quantifiable, allowing us to see our results and feel good about what we are doing. The problem is that this becomes an obsession, a neurosis. We step on the scale everyday - even multiple times a day - hoping for that affirmation. Yesterday a Facebook acquaintance of mine posted a self-portrait in which they were in a gym wearing sweat pants and a hoodie, captioning it as getting ready to "sweat it out for 30 minutes of HIIT* before a weigh-in", like she was a high school wrestler. This particular person is getting married and has had some great results in the past few months, but photos like this make me worry for their long term success, their health, and their sanity. Weight turns us into raving lunatics.
It is with all of this in mind that I will focus on the harder to quantify in a number but easy to notice metrics of:
- how I look
- how i feel
- how I perform
My goals will focus on habit change, fat loss and muscle gain, not weight loss.
- Prioritize sleep by sleeping and waking at the same time everyday, seven days a week.
- Make wise food choices second nature, "default" selections
- Fit into size 38 jeans (to start with)
- Strength increases on the squat, deadlift, bent-over row, and overhead press.
- Decreased 2,000 meter rowing machine time.
- Be able to do a pull up. Yes. Just one. I've never been able to do one.
If we ignore the factors we cannot change: age, gender, pre-existing health conditions, etc.; there are generally four factors we do control in the fat loss process. In general level of importance they are: food, sleep, exercise, and stress. The subsequent posts will discuss how I plan to tackle each.
*High Intensity Interval Training
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