Wednesday Cat Blogging

Weekly Stats

Busy, busy, busy day.  However, I find that it takes exactly 3 minutes and 37 seconds to prepare and drink a shake....so I didn't sacrifice any meals.

Is Running Out of Time Considered an Exercise?

Wow, it's been a while since I've been here.  Even longer since I've actually written anything... just getting by with FitBit updates and cat photos.  The original intent was to document a year long process of becoming physically fit by the time I reached my 55th birthday.  Three hundred sixty-six days to implement changes, lose a bunch of weight, and give myself a better chance of extending my best-if-used-by date.  It seemed like enough time nearly 300 days ago but, alas, life has a tendency to get in the way of any mouse's plan.

One of my biggest lifestyle changes was a promotion to a supervisory position where I am employed.  I've never been what others might call ambitious.  I've always just wanted to have a job I liked and to be the best at doing the job.  This was the setup I had enjoyed for about 15 years.  Loved my job.  Damn good at it too.  Not responsible for anything but my own performance.  Now, however, all of that is gone for me.  Oh...I love my new job and I still try to do my best, but rather than be responsible for myself I'm now responsible for the performance of a whole lot of other people working across three shifts 7 days a week.  Work time really has no meaning anymore.  I might be in my office at anytime day or night, any day, whatever is needed.

Which is not to say that I work around the clock all the time.  I still have gobs of time when I am not actually working.  It's just that I can't plan when those times are going to happen from one day to the next.  That is my snag point.  Exercise is one of those things that I had to plan for or it didn't happen.

Or it use to be.

I had a little bit of a revelation about planning.  There is the old saying that "if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail".  Well, I used that in a little different way.  I would plan to go to the gym and exercise but, if demands of work or whatever preempted that plan, that would be just the excuse I needed to skip that day's exercise and I always jumped on it like a tick to a hound dog.  If I would plan on going to the gym early in the morning but had something come up with work instead, it was "tsk, guess I can't do it today, I'll try again tomorrow".  Same with my eating plan.  "Gosh, I was so busy today I didn't get lunch so I'll be okay to eat this cheeseburger".

My plan was designed to fail because it was designed for a schedule that I no longer have.  So, I've taken a look at what my schedule really is and came up with something a great deal more flexible.  Exercise every day...whenever I have a spare hour...and I have several every day.  Eat proper meals or do not eat at all.  Missing a meal here and there will certainly not starve me and may motivate me more to at least drink a shake every three hours or so rather than try to tide myself over with a candy bar or bag of chips.

I have the time, but I'm running out of time to make a difference in my health.

Wednesday Cat Blogging

I know there hasn't been much lately....weekly stats and these stupid cat photos....but if you look closely at this particular cat photo, you'll see a couple of dumbells and part of a weight bench.  I've increased my exercise substantially these last couple of weeks.  I'll write about what I'm doing tomorrow. 

Weekly Stats

Weekly Stats

weight - 203.6 lbs. neck - 16.5 in. chest - 45 in. belly - 48 in. waist - 42 in. hips - 41 in. biceps - 14.5 in. forearm - 12 in. thigh - 21 in. calf - 15 in.

Weekly Stats

Bit of a slack the past few days.  I dislocated a toe.  Tiny thing to keep me from exercise, but it hurt like the dickens.  I'm hoping to make up for it this week.

Wednesday Cat Blogging

 

Weekly Stats

Hey Bill

Self Absorbed

I have a few friends that have informed me that my desire to lose a bunch of weight and become physically fit is a bit narcissistic....that I have some type of unhealthy love affair with my body image.

 Oh brother....that could not be further from the truth.

 You see, in my house, the only mirror I look at with any regularity is the one in my bathroom...and I only look there for shaving purposes. I don't want to see what is below my neck. But I did something today that I have rarely done; I stood in front of a full length mirror and looked at myself for a good 15 minutes. I mean....really looked. It was painful. I did not like at all what I saw. Gone were the over sized shirts and there was my belly in all of it's sagging glory. This is not me. This is not what I am. I want that fat man in the mirror to go away. Starting Monday....I will begin to transform that image in the mirror and extend my best if used by date.

 Actually, I guess I started tonight. It's more than my body I want to work on.

Wednesday Cat Blogging

Weekly Stats

Not much activity the last week due to illness.  Still.....37 flights of stairs isn't too shabby.

Finally!

I've broken through a barrier that I have been aiming at for a very long time.  Of course it's just an arbitrary number set up by myself.  There is nothing magical about going under 200 lbs.  Nothing about my body changed by being under two hundred any more than anything changed when I went over two hundred....oh so many, many years ago.

199.2 Pounds Baby!!!!    Yeah!


I savor little rewards.  Keeps me going.

Wednesday Cat Blogging

Weekly Stats

This week doesn't reflect my true stats because I failed to wear the Fitbit a few days.  At any rate, I am running behind on my goal of getting under 180lbs by my next birthday.  Time is crunched a bit since I'm devoting a lot of myself to the new job.  Hopefully, I'll get settled in and be able to turn some attention back to losing weight.

What I do for a living

Weekly Stats

Wednesday Cat Blogging

Face to Face With Myself

It has been quite a while since I've written anything on this blog.  I admit, fitness has taken a back seat this month...but let me tell ya why.

I was promoted at work.  It's a job that I wanted and I'm very excited about it, but it's almost completely different from what I've been doing for the last 15 plus years.  Kind of like a whole new career.  I'm doing things I've never done in ways I've never done them before.  Instead of being responsible for my own work, I'm now responsible for supervising many others in their work.  It's new.  It's challenging.  It's...terrifying.

They say that it takes about 10,000 hours to become really good at something.  I feel as if I've already spent half that time in the past couple of weeks and sometimes I get the gawd awful feeling that I don't have a clue.  Yet...I'm pondering that putting exercise and diet on the back burner is not such a good idea.  With all the hours, all the demands during the day, stamina is more important than ever before.  I can't afford to feel sluggish, to be tired, to not feel as good as possible.

There's only one way to do that I know of.....be as healthy as possible.

At the beginning of this, I wanted health and fitness mostly for vanity reasons.  Now it has become a necessity if I want to continue pursuing the things in my life I'm aiming for, both professionally and personally.

 I've had a face to face talk with myself.  I'm back.

Weekly Stats

Wednesday Cat Blogging

Weekly Stats

Up another half pound...dang

Tempus Fug It

One of the little things that Einstein forgot to mention in all of his work about relativity is the phenomenon of time passing more quickly as you age.  I mean...jeeeze....here it is already 2012.  It only seems like yesterday everybody was all caught up in Thanksgiving and Christmas; now both are long gone and we are screaming almost half-way through January.  Days seem to fly by turning one week over to the next.  It's almost like, being on the downhill side of a usual lifespan, time keeps gaining momentum the closer you get to the end.

Anyway...that's my excuse for not writing more often.

Weekly Stats

Looks like I gained a half of a pound last week.  That's not too bad considering all the holiday foods and sweets I had consumed.  I don't intent to keep going in that direction though and am getting back on a reasonable eating plan.  This should be a lot easier since all the chocolate in my house is gone.

Texas Caviar

I cannot start my year without eating black-eyed peas.

Bleah

My wife is sort of allergic to alcoholic drinks so there's not much drinking in our house.  Still....New Year's Eve, so I bought a bottle of non-alcohol champagne to whoop in 2012.

Bad mistake.  Horrible stuff.  Now I'm forced to wash my mouth out with ice cream.

Your Cheatin' Heart

There is a particular type of person that always seems to pop up in any group with the goals of getting fit and losing weight, the liar....or as I like to use the more colorful label...the bullshitter.  This person regals one and all with their extreme exercise and diet regimes.  Massive amounts of workouts and super strict eating plans.  These are the guys that claim running hundreds of miles a week, climbing hundreds of stairs daily, and generally completing more workouts before sunrise than top athletes perform in a month.

Oh...and they have no problems doing all of that.  No wasted time in their lives for things like a job, or sleeping, or apparently even going to the bathroom.  They are damn near perfect and they will take every opportunity to tell you so.  One factor seems prevalent though...you never actually see them doing all these amazing things.  They'll tell you how great they are doing but will not actually document.  You'll also not see any photos of their huge muscle gains.  They'll tell you they lost ten or twenty pounds in a week but you'll just have to take their word for it.

Pisses me off.  It really shouldn't be any concern to me.  After all; their claims are often so off the chain that it almost becomes comical to hear them go on and on.  The bullshitter rarely realizes how obvious their BS is and are mostly deaf to the laughter of others who consider them a joke.  The thing is, though, they are the people that typifies a real problem with a great many folks my age attempting to transform into a more healthy life.  The bullshitters give the impression that anybody can do this and, if you can't, it's just because you're not as dedicated or whatever.  They completely invalidate the premise that obtaining health is not some easily obtained goal that can be accomplished during your spare time over a weekend.  The bullshitter dismisses the real life struggles of the rest of us which makes more than a few feel as if they are just losers and quit their own personal goals.

My goal....my blog....is devoted to the idea that this stuff is not easy.  It takes time to get significant and lasting results.  There are problems along the way and years of ingrained bad habits to change.  There is no magic bullet.  Failure is ever looming but the goal of transformation is possible for anybody, for any age.  I'll never cheat.  I'll never lie.  I'll tell it like it is and let the chips fall where they may.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go run 30 miles and climb a mountain before lunch.

Weekly Stats

This includes Christmas, which wasn't much of an active day nor was I concerned about what I ate (chocolate, mountains of it).

Wednesday Cat Blogging

Stuff I Try Out

Here's the alternative to the crappy GoWear strap I wrote about yesterday.  It's called Fitbit and it's just about the neatest thing since sliced bread and peanut butter.  This thing works great without all the problems associated with Bodymedia and their non-existent customer service.

The Fitbit is about the size of your pinkie which clips to your belt, pants, shirt, or you can just put it in your pocket.  Through the day it measures how many steps you take, your mileage, whether you are just strolling or running, and it even has an altimeter function that can track how many flights of stairs you climb.  You can check the stats on the Fitbit any time by pressing a little button.  Another cool function is that you can take it to bed and track your sleep pattern ....documenting how long it took you to fall asleep and how many times you briefly wake up during the night.

The Fitbit downloads to a website every time you pass within 15 feet of the little docking station that also acts as a re-charger.  On the website you can compile all the data as well as add other things like foods you have eaten, weight, and even what type of mood you are having on any particular day.  Oh...and the website is free.  Buying the Fitbit is all you need, no monthly membership required.  They do have a premium website that gives the data in a lot more detail for about four bucks a month.  I may get it someday but it's truly not necessary to get the stats you need and want.

I love this thing.  I even bought one for my wife who is not all that into fitness tracking and she loves it too.  It's not cheap.  It runs about a hundred dollars but if you're serious about keeping track of all your stats, don't want to spend all your time writing stuff down in journals, and want something that gives instant feedback on your efforts....I highly, highly recommend this product.

Stuff I Try Out

 

One difficulty in trying to keep track of your exercise activity and diet is...well....keeping track of it all.  The little gizmo pictured above is one such handy tracker.  It's called GoWear and it's by a company called Bodymedia. You wear this device around your upper arm and it measures your activity level during the day.  It will even measure your sleeping activity if you wear it to bed.  There is a web site where, for a monthly fee, you can download all the info and put in stuff like what you have eaten, what exercises you do, and your daily weight if you choose.  It actually works pretty well as far as gathering useful data...but it has a couple of major problems.

This first one is, it's really not very comfortable.  As I said, you wear it on your upper arm so you broadcast to everybody that you're fat and trying to monitor every minute of your day.  Since you wear it on the same spot every single day, it starts to chaff and you need to take a vacation from wearing it every so often to keep from developing a really nasty rash.  I found that I could only wear it about three or four days before I had to leave it off for a few days so that my skin could heal.

But the biggest problem is the web site.  You have to download software in order to sync up the device to the tracking website.  I recently obtained a new computer and....guess what?.....I could not download the software.  I tried customer service FAQ; they told me to download the software.  I tried customer service email; they told me to download the software.  I called the customer service; they told me to download the software.  I could not make them understand that downloading the software was the damn problem.

So....after over a year of paying monthly dues...I canceled the service.  I still have the device and it's a hundred dollar piece of junk with absolutely no use to myself or anybody else.  I would definitely NOT recommend that anybody try this thing out.  Once Bodymedia has your money, they could not care less about you.  I found something much, much better......and I'll talk about that tomorrow.

Christmas Eve

Wednesday Cat Blogging

 

Weekly Stats

Something to celebrate this week. I'm no longer technically obese ....just fat.

Wednesday Cat Blogging

Cold War

I hate being sick.  That's no big revelation, I doubt that there is anybody who enjoys being sick.   I'm not sick very often but it seems like, every year about this time, I get clobbered with some type of bug which just makes my life miserable for a few days.  In an effort to find a bit of relief, I'll drag myself to the store in search of some miracle concoction that will instantly cure all my aches and pains as well as make me handsome and happy...just like the teevee ads claim.

So anyway, I shuffle into the store looking like the walking dead not having shaved or bathed in a couple of days searching for the cold medicine aisle.  Mothers clutch their children as I lurch past them and security is following me whispering in their walkie talkies for backup.  I turn a corner and see cold medicine.  Lots of it.  Not just for cold; for flu, for sneezing, for coughing, for sneezing and coughing, decongestant, expectorant, headache, fever, daytime, nighttime...the friggen list goes on and on.  I'm standing there trying to match my symptoms with some particular product and the whole ordeal is making my head spin more than it is already.  Security is grabbing their pepper spray.  I need to make a decision, a purchase, and get out of there.

Then I remember when I was a little boy and caught a bad cold.  My Dad use to fix me up with some really vile concoction of sugar and whiskey.  Or maybe it was honey.  Whatever, it was absolutely horrible and my Dad had to threaten me with a whuppin in order to get me to drink it down.  I now understand that it's primary purpose was to knock me out so I would sleep and he could get some relief from a hacking kid through the night.  It worked.  I slept like a log and woke up feeling much better.

That's basically what all cold/flu remedies try to do.  They don't cure, just mask the symptoms so that you sleep, so that your body can concentrate on healing itself.  With that thought in mind I just grabbed a bottle of NyQuil (generic, of course).

 Today I feel almost human.

Weekly Stats

Not too bad, especially considering that I've been deathly sick and in bed for most of the last three days.

Editorial: Valeo continues to serve | CJOnline.com

Editorial: Valeo continues to serve | CJOnline.com

Of course, any views that I express on this blog are entirely my own....but I'm quite proud to work for this agency.

Too Many Grains of Salt

Salt in my diet is something that I use to never worry about.  Of course I never worried about sugar and fat either, hence why I'm dealing with weight problems now.  I've become more aware of how much sodium I use every day primarily because of my wife.  She has a tendency toward high blood pressure and is able to manage it by watching her sodium intake like a hawk.  Since my wife is the primary cook and grocery shopper in my house, that means I get to be on a low sodium diet with her....which is fine with me.  My taste buds have now adapted to where I can't really tolerate any dishes loaded with salt, which leaves out many restaurants and all fast food joints.  I've learned to use other seasonings (Mrs. Dash is great stuff) and we don't even have a salt shaker in our house. You would think that just not adding salt to food would be enough...but nooooooo.

Trouble is, there is salt in EVERYTHING!  Not just a little either.  The recommended daily limit for sodium is 2300 mg. or about a teaspoon of salt.  I've been tracking my sodium intake for the last few days and have discovered that I'm eating about twice that amount.  I get a lot of it through eating cheese, which I'm very fond of, and anything else that is even slightly processed.  I'm not sure how to lower my sodium intake other than to eat more vegetables and fruit....especially for snacks.  Somewhat difficult since the employee break room at work was recently outfitted with a super deluxe popcorn machine.

I wonder what popcorn tastes like with Mrs. Dash sprinkled on?

Wednesday Cat Blogging