Deja vu all over again: Starting Over

First, whether you are just tuning in for the first time or perhaps someone who has been walking this path with me for a while now, hello, nice to see you, and apologies for, just now, a certain mix-and-match aspect here in which I have spruced up the initial 2007 posts from this blog and combined them with a new flow of daily posts beginning today. As always, there is a method to my madness, and here my approach is informed by the following:

• I have been reflecting for a while on the importance of reviving this blog and, with it, I hope, my personal health, and today is the day on which I am moving from reflection to action.
• Unlike some things I might write about, this particular topic is one for which my personal history as I have recorded it here seems important, to the extent that anything that is so personal is important.
• I am also in the process of making this blog and some of my other blogs available in the Kindle store, where it seems appropriate to provide some history as well as a daily post on the current state of things.
• The Kindle blog template allows a reader to see the last 20 posts, so what I am doing here today is combining the first 19 posts from the blog with today's post. On subsequent days I will add 4 additional old posts with a new daily post, until all of the old posts have been posted. And if you wish to go back and read the archival material at any time it is easy: just navigate to the Big Man Getting Smaller page at http://bigmangettingsmaller.blogspot.com/ on your computer (rather than on your Kindle) and you will see a month-by-month pulldown menu under the "Blog Archive" heading in the upper left-hand corner of the page. That menu will deliver you to any post you can't find easily here.

Of course my real purpose in reviving this effort is that i have been doing the yo-yo thing again, and this blog and the accountability that comes with it have provided me with the most successful period of nurturing my personal health -- a good solid year beginning in mid-2007 -- that I have experienced at any time in this 50-something stage of my life. Writing about my goals and my progress has been enormously beneficial for me in the past, and from the feedback I have received I know that it has been helpful for others as well. So, it's good to have you hear with me again.

If you read some of the earlier posts you will see where I began, and where I got to. Today I am about midway, okay maybe a little above midway between those two points, at 254. A big guy, to be sure, but only about 20 pounds above that happy Clydesdale weight at which I ran marathons, a 6-minute mile, and sub-39 10Ks in the mid-90s.

My goal here is overall health rather than specific weight loss alone. I am never going to beat up my ankles and knees running marathons again, but I want to be able to exercise -- and simply to be able to walk around and live an active life with my children, grandson, friends, and loved ones -- without pain.

But there is a weight loss goal, too: a pound a week for the rest of this year and a total of 30 pounds to bring me down under 225 by the end of 2009. I can do it, and in tomorrow's post I will focus on how I am going to do it and how the process will fit in with the other goals and activities in my life as of mid-May 2009. I'll see you then.

Fresh strawberries and cream - Tuesday, September 18, 2007

It’s 9:30 on a gorgeous morning in Cambridge, and I already have a terrific feeling of well-being and accomplishment. That kind of feeling, when you feel like you have already accomplished something of value and you’ve got most of the day ahead of you, is extremely beneficial. It’s worth a lot to do what it takes to get that feeling somewhere near the beginning of the day.

This feeling of worthiness, happiness, and accomplishment makes a big difference in how I will live my life the rest of today. And how I live my life the rest of the day will contribute mightily to how I will feel when I get up tomorrow morning.

This may seem simple-minded, but it is my belief that simple-minded truths are every bit as important as much more complicated postulations in determining, generally, how our lives go. And, specifically, how well we do with a goal such as losing weight.

Several things seem to contribute to this feeling for me today, and I mention them because their variety seems instructive:

· I had a nice dinner last night at a place a few blocks from here called Spirit Bar.
· Afterward I came back home, got some work done which makes me feel like I have a leg up on today’s work, and watched most of a pretty good movie on DVD.
· I slept well and woke up rested at 6:59 am.
· The scale says I have now lost 17 pounds in the 18 days of Big Man Getting Smaller, so I can make the Janis Ian song into today’s soundtrack.
· I had a great early morning workout at the gym, including 3.1 miles on the elliptical with my heart rate around 130 most of the time and over 150 when I kicked a little harder.
· I’ve been in touch with several good friends in the past couple of days and I’m having breakfast with my daughter Moriah Thursday morning.
· I just finished a delicious breakfast of fresh strawberries and cream with raw sugar on top.
· The last three songs playing on my iTunes have been great tunes by Buddy Miller, Sinead O’Connor and Johnny Adams.

I apologize if this seems like self-absorption, but my point is that things like this make a huge difference. We don’t live in a vacuum. We are connected to people, to the planet, to our bodies (duh!), to what we just did and to what we are about to do. We have a lot of influence over whether all of these connections are things that make us feel good or make us feel bad. When we do things that make us feel good, we are more likely to keep doing things that make us feel good.

And let me, without getting too pedantic, make an important distinction. There are things that make us feel good, like the things I mentioned above, which work wonderfully for me.

Then there are other things that we do, usually not in moderation, to try to feel good when we feel bad. We all know what they are, generally speaking, but like the other things they vary from person to person. Maybe they are jelly donuts or ice cream or drugs or gambling or … the list could go on and on. They don’t work very often, or for very long.

Usually quick fixes like that are more a matter of going back to the problem for the solution.

It takes a little more time and an occasional effort to fill our lives with things that truly make us feel good, but I like the results much better.

Another simple-minded truth from the Big Man Getting Smaller.

Enjoy a little Janis Ian with me now.

2 comments:

Random Harvest Collector said...

Living with simplicity and in the present moment are wise lessons. Thanks for passing them along. I don't know a better prescription for the well-lived life. And if that life includes fresh strawberries and cream, it rocks!
Raven

September 18, 2007 12:38 PM

thoughtz said...

I think that when one is following one's bliss one naturally attracts abundance in all forms to oneself.
If that bliss includes strawberries and creme and one's feeling about the stawberries and creme do not include guilt, I think it's probably ok.
We all have little comforting things we do when we're out of sorts... the trick is to change your perspective so that cleaning, and laundry whilst munching on some healthy snack become part of those comforting actions.

September 19, 2007 6:33 PM

On the run - Monday, September 17, 2007

Just a couple of quick things today.

· The coffee strategy seems to be working. I haven’t said to myself, “I am going to limit myself to x amount of coffee a day.” Instead, I’ve committed to going without sweeteners, and the result the last few days is that I am drinking significantly less. Coffee, that is. For instance, the venti breakfast coffee that I picked up on the way to the gym this morning? I am still sipping from it. Room-temperature coffee. Yum.

· In a comment I was asked how far I run when I run. The answer is not far. But it can usually be extrapolated from the info in the daily food and exercise log in the sidebar at the right. These days “running” for me tends to be at a leisurely 12 minute per mile clip, so if I say I ran 20 min at a 12:00 clip, that is 1 2/3 miles. Today I did 3 miles on the elliptical at the gym. 11 years ago I used to run 50 miles a week. Then I blew out my ankle and haven’t come anywhere near that since. Think it might have to do with my weight gain?

Well, that is all. Got to go pick up Danny and head to (his) karate class.

Monday's soundtrack -- an amazing anthem by Lindsey Buckingham:



"Countdown" by Lindsey Buckingham ... I'm off to the gym and will post later on today

Kindly step outside the vehicle, sir - Sunday, September 16

I just returned from a morning sojourn to Starbucks and Whole Foods. Deborah made a great suggestion when we had breakfast a while back. She simply said that a great way to get the exercise we need is to leave the car alone when we can and build the exercise into our daily lives.

Like most of her suggestions, it works.

For me, the car is a bit like the coffee. I always have a million excuses why I need to drive. Just like I do with drinking coffee, I have a tendency to build my life around deadlines. I must finish so-and-so by noon or by midnight, or whatever time, and so I must drink another cup o’ Joe, and I must take the car when I go to the library.

I celebrated a couple of transitions in my life a little less than a year ago by buying myself a new 2007 Prius. I love it. I love to drive it. It gets to the point where it’s almost like I believe the goofy notion that the more I drive it, the more gas I will save. Silly me.

But the point is that it’s no way to live. We need exercise. We were born to exercise. We were not born to sit in automobiles. We were born to walk. We were ….

Okay, I’m sure you could see today’s soundtrack coming.

But it’s true.

Yesterday was a drizzly morning, and I went over to Mike’s Gym, joined, and got in my first gym workout since last Spring.

But today is a beautiful end-of-summer New England day, and I will be outside for exercise several times. Thanks, Deborah!

Posted by Steve at 11:20 AM