Oh dear.
Where I have been?
Living my life. Swimming. Eating 2500 calories a day. Falling in love. Working on the blogs that I must work on because they have hundreds of paid subscribers who will throw me to the curb if I do a disappearing act.
And I can barely pop my head in here even today after 10 days away, so I know that I am being accountable onlyt to myself, but hey, that's something, isn't it.
So, first and foremost, you like apples? Good. How do you like these apples?
I like 'em a lot. This is the best, most gradual and sustained, that I could have hoped for. 25+ pounds since January and 13.4 pounds since I started swimming in mid-May. On track for 225 by my pal's birthday and the end of the year! Way to go! (Question: I know there's some state that still has a law on the books about how many yards of clothing a woman must wear lest she face arrest, but how much gift wrap would I need?)
I swam 3 days last week and felt great, but now the pool is closed for 3 weeks for its annual repairs. Not to worry. Thanks to Annie (Danny's mom and the best ex any guy could have), I have a one-week pass to the pool at the Waltham Y. I'll think about after that after that.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking about Julie Powell. And, of course, Julia Child.
My pal and I saw the movie yesterday. There was lots of butter. I wanted to stop for dinner afterward at Chez Henri. This morning I placed an order for Mastering the Art of French Cooking (as did, apparently, about a gazillion other people, since Amazon has now sold out clear into the Fall). So BMGS may be headed for hell in a handbasket.
But I feel some kinship with Julie. As a personal blogger on a mission, I love her story, and I love the way it has been turning out for her over the past six years.
I'm going to spend some time looking at her original blog and her current efforts over the next few days. And I'll be back.
Monday, August 24
Weekly weigh-in, Julie and Julia, and more
Thursday, August 13
Viva la difference: Messing with perfection
I've lost 24 pounds since the first of the year, and 12 of them at a very consistent pound-a-week since the middle of May when I took out a new membership at the pool and started swimming several times a week. My progress has all been based on the accountability that comes with posting regularly here at BMGS 2.0 and acting reasonably on the knowledge that I will lose a pound a week if I limit my calories to 2500 a day or fewer and get regular exercise. This is not rocket science.
But I suppose it has made an impression on my pal, and in the past couple of days she has kind of asked me if I would help her do the math so that she could get on track herself and maybe drop a pound or two by the time she celebrates what some might consider a big birthday in late December. Although I am not one to mess with perfection, I have agreed to help.
She is 5'8", and that is all you need to know. Although I have recorded other data in the table that follows, I am a wise man who understands the value of the little Google Docs gizmo that blacks out certain fields. If it worked for Bush and Cheney, it can work for me. Some information is best handled on a need-to-know basis.
As you can see from the table, life is not fair or gender-blind when it comes to the arithmetic of weight loss:
My pal's exercise program involves:
- a) a combination of walking and running for 30 to 60 minutes on the bike trail near our home,
- b) the 8-minutes-a-day workout program with weights, and
- c) situps
- c) some yoga.
Now that I am finished with the considerable exercise involved in moving and I am back to swimming with an occasional day of walking and jogging, my exercise program involves:
- a) swimming laps for 60 to 90 minutes without resting;
- b) walking and slow jogging for 20 minutes; and
- c) crunches, pushups, or weights.
It isn't fair that I can lose weight just as quickly as my pal while I consume 1,140 more calories a day, or about 8,000 more calories a week, but, well, viva la difference!
Sources: BMR Calculator, BMR Calculator2, Harris Benedict Equation Calculator.
Afterword: In my 12-step program, this draft post would be called 12th-stepping. But whether I post it will depend, of course, on whether my pal feels her anonymity is protected.
Wednesday, August 12
Weekly Weigh-In: There's More Than One Way to Get My Exercise
The past few weeks have featured an interesting kind of triage in my life:
* I finished moving into my new home and office in Arlington. I suppose moving is always an ordeal, and this took dozens of hours and a lot of hard work, but I am done and it feels wonderful.
* I completed work on a major effort to resolve a very specific financial situation that was threatening to be challenging for a long time without resolution.
* I finished several weeks of hard work on my most recent book and published it -- FREE: How to Get Millions of Free Books, Songs, Podcasts, Periodicals And Free eMail, Facebook, Twitter and Wireless Web With Your Amazon Kindle -- and it is doing great as you can see from this screen shot:
So, long story short, the past 10 days were crunch time and I didn't get much formal exercise into my days. This is not something I can afford to do very often, but the reality over the past few weeks was that I was getting a lot of everyday exercise because of my move, and I was also making a point of eating healthy.
So I am happy to be back here, posting an entry after getting back in the pool for a half-mile (36 laps) swim tonight, flipping back and forth between a couple of pretty good ballgames:
- here in Boston Josh Beckett is one-hitting the Tigers through six on the way to his 14th victory with Jason Bay and Mike Lowell providing all the needed offense by going 5-for-5 between them with two doubles, two home runs, and four RBI; and
- over in Chicago a future Hall of Famer named Pedro Martinez (5' 10" and 175 pounds) has fanned four in three innings and leads the Cubs 4-1 in his first appearance of 2009.
I'll be back soon.
Monday, August 3
Weighing in after a way too busy week
There have been some great weeks in my life -- and most of them have in one way or another involved my three children and my grandson -- but this past week, in spite of the fact that moving is much more of a challenge than it was when I was younger, has been a thoroughly wonderful week. Perhaps at some point I'll have more to say here about my pal, but it's good to maintain some privacy here for all concerned, so I will just say, again, this has been a wonderful week and I am very grateful for the blessings in my life.
What with moving, finishing another book, and several other serious challenges, I will have to acknowledge that most of the exercise I have gotten the past 10 days has been moving related. But I did get to the pool twice last week for, each time, a nonstop mile of swimming. And I have been eating healthy and moderately, and when I stepped on the scale this morning for my weekly weigh-in I liked the reading: 246.6, down almost 2 pounds from my last weigh-in 10 days ago.
There's no time to say more, now, except Thank You, Great Spirits.
Tuesday, July 28
A good man - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 Saturday, November 24, 2007
Stephen Windwalker is staying balanced in spite of all: moving Friday, writing the best stuff I have done yet on the Kindle, swam a mile last night, eating healthy, spending great time with friends family and VG friends, making some decent biz/financial decisions, and even caught the last three innings of the Sox' win last night -- all is well, and I am putting Kindle Nation back to Thursdays
I first met Stewart Acuff in a friend's backyard in Little Rock on the 4th of July in 1978. Stewart was 22 and had just graduated from a little Baptist college across the state of Missouri from where he grew up. He was coming to work for me as a community organizer-trainee in Texas that week.
I invited Stewart to grab a plate of picnic food and sit down on the grass and chat. We hit it off from the start, but he asked me if I could let him off from his prior commitment to start that week so he could go back home for a week to honor a commitment he apparently had made to his father, a Baptist preacher, to go home and teach Sunday School one last time.
I'm sure Stewart expected me to be okay with that. After all, who could stand in the way of a young man teaching Sunday School one last time, let alone honoring his commitment to his Dad?
I could. Problem was, I didn't know his father and mother. (Eventually I got to know them both a little. Once that happened it was clear to me how Stewart had turned out to be such a good person and a great friend.) It wasn't easy back then to hire and train talented organizers. I was a little concerned that if he went home for another week to his Mom and Dad and told them again how he was about to run off to a faraway state and help poor people get organized to fight the power for a salary of $4,000 a year, he would never make it to Texas. Mom and Dad might talk some sense into him.
I didn't tell him flat-out "No." Instead I appealed to his obvious spirituality and said something about the commitment he had made to come to organizing being something between him and God, that I had no personal power to let him out of. I said it without stuttering. He came to Texas without going back home.
We've been the best of friends pretty much ever since. Every day with the work he does he makes me proud. He spent some good time training with me as an organizer in Texas, and then he came to work with me again years later when I running something called the New Hampshire People's Alliance. Later he went into union organizing and is now the National Director of Field Organizing for the AFL-CIO.
As long as I continued to do organizing work, he always made me better at what I did. We also have shared a lot with each other about the trials and tribulations we each have faced trying to balance the desire to live a good life as a man with the frailties and challenges that being a man has thrown in each of our paths.
Along the way, as you can see from a video or two here, he's never gotten too far away from teaching Sunday School.
Keep up the preachin' and the teachin', Stewart.
After Thanksgiving Soundtrack
Bob Dylan - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
Shawn Colvin - Sunny Came Home
I also have to thank Ned for this. In his email he mentioned, and correctly remembered the title of "The Book of Ezra," my quirky but unfinished novel from sophomore year. Now that is a friend. Thanks, buddy. I love you for that.
PS - I just discovered the Bernadette Peters cover in my collection of purchased iTunes songs, so I am happy to report you can get it from Mr. Jobs for less than a buck.
So, I Take Five days off, and here's our soundtrack, of course.
1 comments:
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he's my uncle yayayayay!!!!!!!!!!i love him so much he is a great guy!!!!!
Thursday, July 23
Balance and another weekly weigh-in
Lots going on here in the land of BMGS:
- a wonderful visit with Zach and Mary who came for blueberry pancakes and years of catching up on my pal's deck Tuesday morning,
- preparing to move home and office the end of next week,
- a mile in the pool last night,
- nibbles from a traditional publisher on my Worried Citizen financial crisis book,
- some serious work (and expenditure) to arrange my own financial life more beneficially for all concerned for the long haul,
- daily life, which never lets up, and
- Leonard Cohen reciting the sound and textual track of my life in the background.
Balance is not always at the top of my list in such times, but it should be, because it makes everything else possible.
And so, three days late, I have administered my weekly weigh-in, down from 249.2 to 248.4 in the 10 days since my last weigh-in, moving in the right direction even if I am 6 ounces behind schedule, and firm, at the very least, in my resolve to continue the BMGS 2.0 campaign's regimen of several days a week of swimming or other exercise and 2500 or fewer calories a day.
Wednesday, July 22
Don't you wish everybody did? - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 Nov. 19, 2007
(Please accept my apologies for having gone six days without a post here -- I am in the process of preparing to move at the end of next week, and it is a bit of a curve ball for my routines, but, well, I've been swinging a bat long enough that I ought to be able to hit Uncle Charlie by now. I'm off to the pool in a moment with a resolve to do better here).
One of my best friends wrote me an email last night, and I just called him and asked if I could quote him. He said I could.
"I am totally envious of what you're accomplishing--both with the weight loss and the blog," Larry wrote. "I don't know how you have time to write it. I am getting more and more afraid to write stuff down, and I can't actually figure out why. I can't write anything, and I mean anything. I wrote 2 pages for Randy's daughters after he died, but that was the first time in a long while. I used to do it fairly often, but just can seem to now."
I think there were about 20 years when I was afraid to write things down myself. I could write memoranda, speeches, press releases, and organizing plans, but nothing personal. And that was for a guy, me, who self-identified as a writer. I had written hundreds of pages of fiction in college, been the fiction editor of the college literary magazine, and studied with Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, and the best writing teacher at Harvard, a guy named Monroe Engel.
But I swore it off for 20 years. I thought it was because I was committed to doing organizing work instead, but there were other weird things going on. Part of it was that I was afraid if I started writing I wouldn't stop, and I was afraid I would never get anything else done. Part of it was that I had unconsciously tried to conform myself into a certain person to make my first marriage work, and either writing did not fit with that or maybe I feared that if I wrote down too much it would expose me as a fraud to myself. Part of it was that I probably resented the idea that anyone else, ever, might judge what I wrote. I am reasonably arrogant, after all.
It was all pretty weird, but it's not like I understood any of that then.
The bottom line is that I paid a heavy price for not writing, and for not writing things down, and without ever intending it this way I extracted a heavy price from others. I'm not really prepared to go into detail about all that just now, but the point is that when we are meant to do something, we damned well better do it, or eventually there will be hell to pay.
So, understanding myself a little bit more now than I did then, I can observe this: that I am afraid not to write things down.
In the past 8 years I've published four books and written several others that are in various states of readiness for publication. Some are better than others. I've written hundreds of pages of "web content" to keep soup in the cupboard.
But it has been very good for me, these past 80 days, to have this blog. It never takes me more than an hour a day between writing my posts and posting my music and tweaking this or that. It provides me with a fairly informal way of writing regularly somewhere near the "spine" of my life, of my personal story, although quite frequently it is only after I have written it that I can relate it much to my life. It keeps me relatively honest and, of course, it keeps me accountable to a very specific goal, which is to whip my ass into a little better shape than I have been in lo these many years. It is just one thing, but this one thing is working.
It helps, a lot, that writing per se does not intimidate me the way it intimidates a lot of people. Larry is a mensch, and an extremely interesting and creative guy, so it is hard for me to see that writing things down should be intimidating to him, or to understand why he might feel, as he says, "afraid to write things down." But given how weird and mystifying my own agraphia was, I shouldn't necessarily expect to understand anyone else's, should I?
Blogging makes my life much more livable. It helps me make myself who I want to be, not that I always succeed. It has helped me drop a little over 35 pounds, although I am a little displeased that I cannot yet run a 6-minute mile the way I could in 1996, let alone a 4:38 mile the way I could in 1968. It will lead me to do a fair amount of other writing, and some of that may add chowder to the soup in the cupboard.
I recommend it. It is easier than people think. I honestly believe that if more people wrote things down about their lives, the world would be a more civilized place.
It makes me think of those old commercials for Dial soap:
"Aren't you glad you blog? Don't you wish everybody did?"
I know what you are thinking. Who would read it all, right?
That's where the music would come in:
Here's a favorite of mine
Alison Krauss & John Waite - Missing You
How about a real get to work song for a Monday morning?
Because you don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde, right?
Desmond Dekker - The Israelites
Happy Thanksgiving, friends, loved ones, and countrymen.
1 comments:
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I write like I breathe. I cannot not write. Once when working in a factory, I figured out how to get the piece work done qhickly so as to give me a 10 minute breadk each hour... I would go into the ladies room and write poetry. This kept me from going bananas!
I wonder what your friend would write if he wrote on a piece of paper, which he would burn when done, how the thought of writing things down makes him feel? No one would ever read it and it might give him some interesting internal insights.
Donna
Posts
The post below is about my -- it seems, now -- lifelong pal and comrade, Stewart Acuff. We've been together through thick and thin and love each other like brothers. In my most recent telephone conversation with Stewart, on Saturday evening, we caught up for an hour about life, work, getting old but staying young, love, lust, and hard times. He was back in Little Rock where we first met, but this time calling me from the Little Rock Airport after spending some time trying to crowbar Arkansas' moderate Dem senators into line on card check, an issue of importance to him, me, the labor movement, and all of us if we have any sense at all. Great conversation, and I'd love to go on, but as is clear from my Facebook status line above, it will have to wait a spell.