It’s time for a change, in so many ways. This chronicle of my quest for several particular kinds of personal change will focus on diet, exercise and lifestyle changes. I will report meaningful things that occur along the way, positive and negative, inner and outer. I’ll deal with the present, the past and my goals, hopes and fears for the future. Feel free to join me and to share your thoughts, the music, and whatever else falls from these branches.
Soundtracks for the Best Days of Any Week
Independence Day - 7.4.08
April 2008
April 26
"He has you at any stage in your life. He has your youthful idealism. He has you when your relationship is splitting up. He has you when you can't face the world and you look for something higher to get you through. He has you at all stages."
I'm mighty pleased today. I started out 40 days and 40 nights ago at the preposterous weight of 273.5, and 10% of me is gone.
I have done this by following the most simple of rules:
1. Cut down my calorie consumption, without starving myself by undereating. 2. Increase my exercise to burn more calories, without wearing myself out by overtraining. 3. Stay accountable to my plan by keeping track of #1 and #2 above by writing 'em down here, rather than subscribing to the stupid belief that either (a) it is not important enough to keep track of; or (b) I can just wing it and not keep track.
I wish there were more steps so I could write a million-dollar diet book, because I will be honest: I do need the dough.
Anyway, if I continue to lose 10% of my body weight every 40 days I will be down to 106 next August, which is about what my Dad weighed when he died of lung cancer at the age of 59 in 1986. I won't go that far, I promise.
But I will celebrate today, with a really huge salad, a great workout, and some of my favorite music. Party on!
Of course, not all 15-year-old kids are dorks, as I was. These guys have it going on. Thanks for the link, Ned!
Total commitment to anything is what makes anything possible, whether it's hitting the high notes on a solo, throwing an unhittable first-pitch circle change with 97-mph arm speed, or getting your weight down. These guys believe in themselves, so they get it done.
In honor of Tarzan (aka Johnny Weissmuller, June 2, 1904 – January 20, 1984) I got up and hit the pool shortly after 7 am for 22 laps. Felt great, and my 59th birthday seemed like all the more reason to stick with my routine.
I don't want to get too far ahead of myself and try to project what I am going to do in honor of the Beaver, aka Jerry Mathers, but I'll find something. After all, I'm a big fan.
Swimming is really working out for me, I'm here to say after two weeks. I'm getting a good workout in 5 days a week, and I have not experienced a single moment of pain. Even back when I was running marathons and training 40+ miles a week in the mid-90s, I invariably finished each day's workout wondering if I was going to be able to work out the next day, or if nagging injuries would keep me from it.
And as a good exercise routine almost always does, it seems to be helping me to rest, to eat in a generally healthy and moderate way, and even to focus more in a more effective and satisfying way on the rest of my life. So I'm being a little bit of a cheerleader for "my program," here, but that's just another part of making it work.
What a terrific birthday I am having, and it's been going on since Saturday! The people who care about me have been taking very sweet care of me, and I am even enjoying this rather remarkable Facebook phenomenon of experiencing lots o' love from long-time friends as well as FB Friends of a more recent variety.
Some of you have known me since the time when that photograph on the left was snapped of me running cross-country at Mount Hermon back in the Fall of 1967. (I don't know who took the photo, but thanks to Keith McCasland for scanning it from the '68 yearbook and emailing it to me). Anyway, that's the guy I am looking for now, my inner 17-year-old, when I jump in the pool each morning these days. I don't have any illusions of being 17 again, but I am feeling more confident each day that this year I am beginning today, my 60th year, will be a year in which I feel younger each day. It's all up to me ... and, in a way, up to Tarzan and the Beaver.
Thanks for checking in, and thanks to many of you for your birthday wishes!
I'm just taking a few minutes to squeeze in a post before my pal and I head over to my sister Deborah's house for a pre-birthday dinner, since I've got nice things to share.
Tuesday will be my 59th birthday and it must be a sign that there are great things going on in my life that I seem to be in the midst of several days of birthday celebrations. Last night my pal took me out for dinner at Pho & I and then to a really fun, high-energy, funny performance of Pirates! at the Huntington Theater. Dinner tonight with Deborah, and on Tuesday we're getting together with Danny, Annie (his Mom, my ex), and Kippy for a double birthday do.
All of this might be challenging to the plans and programs of the Big Man Getting Smaller 2.0 -- no more than 2500 calories a day, daily swimming, and losing a pound a week -- but I am doing right fine with it. Just keeping my eye on the priorities and the plan, and I'm happy to report that my weekly weigh-in confirmed my progress:
I lost 1.6 this week after losing 2.2 the week before.
1.6 pounds may not seem like much, but it means that for the week my net calorie intake was 5,600 calories less than my maintenance level. The devil is in the details.
I'll keep on. Maybe by Tuesday I will even feel confident enough to enjoy a piece of cake! But the important thing is that, in addition to enjoying my life and the people I love, devoting myself to this effort gives me hope that this 60th year that will begin Tuesday will be one in which I feel younger at the end than at the beginning. That, after all, is what I am here for.
5.28.2009: Maybe it was the big dinner, the good company, or the Dos Equis, but I slept like the most interesting man in the world last night and didn't open my eyes until after 7, well more than an hour later than usual. So instead of getting to the pool around 7:15 as I usually do I took advantage of the fact that there are 10 more days of mid-day swimming hours for adults, and I did my 20 laps at noon. All is well with my exercise, my calorie counts, and the scale, and I'll be back tomorrow. Until then:
Sticky Situations Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 10.1.2007
Did you ever notice how we get ourselves into these situations? I mean, sticky situations? Did you? Or is it just me?
Quite often they begin with the best of intentions. Mine always do.
Sometimes, in my past, they became very, very sticky. I’m not going to write about that now. It is neither the time nor the place.
But this weekend, while the stakes were not nearly so high in the short run, was one of those sticky situations.
One of my several jobs – they all have to do with writing and/or publishing in way or another – involves copywriting, writing web content that is neatly balanced between helpful information and marketing copy, for a variety of business websites. It isn’t bad work, and I like the 5-second commute. It keeps the wolf from the door.
I get to choose my assignments on my employer’s intranet site. Sometimes they are fun. Sometimes they involve decades of research. Sometimes they are short. Sometimes they are way too long.
This weekend I got caught up in an assignment that was way too long, 50 pages all about a little college in San Diego that provides various types of computer training. 50 pages! By yesterday afternoon I never wanted to hear another word about Bioinformatics or an inverted “career first” curriculum. But I had to finish. I did, a little bit late but still in plenty of time for the assignment to be included in third-quarter revenue.
What does any of this have to do with the enduring themes of Big Man Getting Smaller? Plenty.
It’s great not to have a 9 to 5 job, except when I get myself into situations where I have to work 15-hour days. Those were fine when I was in my 20s, but now they stress my body a lot more and create imbalances as far as sleep and exercise are concerned.
I made up my mind that I would not allow this weekend’s work to create an imbalance for me eating-wise, and I stuck to it. My calorie intake was in the 1800-1900 range each day. Having this blog with its built in accountability made a big difference. When I finished last night I was hungry and exhausted and I felt some ill effects from not getting any real exercise the last couple of days. But I knew I would be fine today if I just kept to the basics of my plan. So I had a celebratory dinner of a huge salad and a 400-calorie sub, caught up on a few emails, and went to bed.
I got back to the gym for a nice workout this morning, my weight is right where it should be, and I feel terrific.
There’s plenty more to say, but it can wait until tomorrow.
Among the thoughts I was thinking as I swam 18 laps at the pool this morning after the scale told me ever so sweetly that I was down another pound since Sunday's weekly weigh-in:
From the Fall of 1966 to the late Spring of 1968 (with the aid of a full scholarship which I am too hung up on class issues not to mention here), I attended Mount Hermon, a boys' boarding school set amidst astonishing beauty on the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts. A few year later, happily for its inmates, it was joined with an affiliated girls' boarding school across the river and has been known ever since as Northfield Mount Hermon, or NMH. But while it was just MH, its institutional notion of inter-gender social interaction centered around Saturday night dating events between the school and an extremely active traffic in sometimes perfumed letters between zip codes 01354 and 01360.
While I may not be an expert on normal, I can tell you that this structure of deprivation and brief, intense interaction (and yes, I can assure you that it was intense) was not normal for 16- and 17-year-old boys and girls.
I bring it up now not to launch into any amateur anthropology about teen dating, but because for me it introduces an important discussion about how we motivate ourselves to achieve or maintain higher levels of physical fitness.
Toward the end of my junior year I met an interesting, edgy, pretty girl from Flushing named Meredith. Merry and I dated perhaps a dozen times before school broke for the summer, and while I doubt that either of us would have said we were "in love," I for one had certainly achieved a happy state of limmerance. (It would be ungallant for me to speculate as to what Merry has achieved, but she did write to me and speak to me on the phone, and there were kisses).
That summer I had a great job as a fledgling sports writer covering the Cape Cod Baseball League, and I rented a room in Hyannis just a few hundred yards from an old, not very well kept cinder oval track. Although I was working well over 40 hours a week, nearly every day that summer I went to the track with my stop watch for intense, solo track workouts in which I tried to repeat as many 70-second quarter-mile laps as I could each day without any real sense of how to use rest days or even jogging recovery laps. I had no coach, and I would just run until I couldn't run any more.
I was pursuing a regimen with two purposes:
I was working to get my time for running a mile as far under 5 minutes as possible, so as to insure I would be a worthy contributor to the varsity cross-country and track teams at Mount Hermon during my senior year; and
I was doing all of this to please Merry, to impress her, to attract her, and perhaps even to make her want to smile at me and kiss me.
Now, as it happened, Merry could not have cared less about cross-country, track, or my time for the mile. She may have found some appeal in the temporary "sixpack" and muscles that were natural concomitants of the athletic accomplishments for which I was training, but I wouldn't put too fine a point on that. Long story short, her parents did not approve of the age difference between us, or perhaps of me, and they succeeded in putting the kibosh on our romance, as parents sometimes do, often with good cause.
But that didn't matter. The point is that romance led to regimen led to results. My attraction to Merry, and my desire to attract her, played a powerful role in my capacity to get to the track on a daily basis and do what I thought I needed to do there.
What I was doing at 17, although I was far from figuring it out then or in several other times since when I have acted on similar motivations, was tapping into forces older than our species itself. I won't try to offer any finer explanation here, but it would be foolish not to realize the power of these forces or to let them assist us when they are available. My life in this my last week as a 58-year-old -- and specifically the fact that I am what is called "single" -- is not all a walk through an open field. But to the extent that it has put me in a position to experience limmerance again -- and to say any more here, about that, would to get ahead of myself -- is nicely beneficial and even motivating to the ongoing efforts of BMGS 2.0.
I didn't plan it this way. But I'm happy to have it working for me.
The Yardbirds said it all, of course:
Yardbirds - For Your Love Lyrics
(Graham Gouldman) For your love. For your love. For your love. I'd give you everything and more, and that's for sure. For your love. I'd bring you diamond rings and things right to your door. For your love.
To thrill you with delight, I'll give you diamonds bright. There'll be things that will excite, To make you dream of me at night.
For your love. For your love. For your love.
For your love, for your love, I would give the stars above. For your love, for your love, I would give you all I could.
For your love. For your love. For your love. I'd give the moon if it were mine to give. For your love. I'd give the stars and the sun 'fore I live. For your love.
To thrill you with delight, I'll give you diamonds bright. There'll be things that will excite, To make you dream of me at night.
For your love. For your love. For your love. For your love.
Maybe you can tell me that this isn't pathetic, or that pathetic is the new something or other and I should just embrace the pathos.
Or maybe you can tell me what I should do to protect my eyes from the chlorine in the pool. I walked to Walgreen's an hour ago because I didn't trust my ability to drive. But jeesh, this is extreme.
I bought some Naphcon A "Eye Allergy Relief" drops, and I have taken them twice. Er, applied them. (I do know enough not to drink them).
And I also laid out $3.99 for some cheap-o Walgreen's eye goggles. I got blue. I figured that was my size, not pink.
So, anyway, this is going to be a short post. I swam 16 laps today and felt great ... until about 3 hours ago.
When I was having dinner last night at Paparazzi to celebrate two inexplicable checks in a week from Google Books, my good friend told me that my eyes were red. I had noticed they'd been watery earlier in the day but I just thought (time-shifted viewing reference coming up here) that I was being a sap because Jack Bauer's daughter was risking her life for him. My friend asked me if I was wearing goggles in the pool. I hadn't noticed any goggles. Google, goggles, giggles, is it really up to me to notice all this?
This morning I got to the pool a little later, but I had a great swim and ran into an old organizing colleague, Michael Brown. I also noticed that about half of the people were, indeed, wearing goggles. So I figured I would pick some up over the weekend.
Until my eyes started burning like Jack Bauer had just released the canister right here in my home office.
Live and learn. But you know I will be back in the pool tomorrow. Looking like all the other Martians.
In yesterday's post I said that today I would focus on how I am going to go about losing a pound a week, or a total of 30 pounds during the balance of 2009, and how this will fit into my other goals and plans in my effort to improve my personal health and the overall balance in my life. The basic arithmetic of weight loss doesn't change much, and some of what follows is drawn from an ealier post:
As I continue to make progress in reducing my weight, I am struck regularly both by how simple this is and how difficult it can be.
Simple because, regardless of all the other issues that may effect how I feel, how I eat, and what I way, the bottom line is inescapable. I will lose weight steadily if my net calorie consumption is less than the “daily calorie requirement” that would sustain me at my present weight.
It is easy to figure out that “daily calorie requirement,” also known as my basal metabolic rate. The factors are my weight, age, gender and overall level of activity from couch potato to triathlete. At present, based on today’s weight of 256 pounds, my number is 3352 calories a day. When I began Big Man Getting Smaller at 273.5 pounds, my number was 3516 calories a day.
3500 calories avoided, in this framework, means 1 pound lost. Using today’s figure, then, if I consume 2852 calories a day I would lose a pound a week. At 2352 calories a day, 2 pounds a week. At 1852 calories a day, which is about where I have been given my propensity to forget to include my supplements in my daily log, I should be losing about 3 pounds a week. That’s pretty close to where I have been the past couple of weeks, after the predictable, more dramatic weight loss of the first week.
So all that is simple.
What is difficult? Doing it. Even more so, keeping track. Writing it down. Holding ourselves accountable.
That’s why I’m doing this blog. Should everyone who wants to lose a bunch of weight start a blog? Well, you could do worse things, believe me. I know this has been a good experience for me in all kinds of ways that go beyond the obvious immediate goal.
But whatever one does, with any serious goal, it only makes sense to figure out some way to maintain a journal about it. So I am thinking about this, and I will have some more thought about it tomorrow.
I had a terrific breakfast with my daughter Moriah this morning, and she shared some really nice news with me.
So, long story short, as I renew my efforts now in May 2009: I will keep my daily calorie intake under 2500 calories, get at least 20 minutes of regular moderate exercise 5 days a week (walking, swimming, and elliptical), and lose a pound a week.
Most people who know me know that I am a confirmed and enthusiastic daily napper. I usually grab about 20 minutes in the early afternoon, and it tends to make me feel refreshed and productive for the rest of the day.
It’s been a bit of an upside down day today, a good day for catching up after a late night last night, but even a double dose of my usual napping hasn’t quite done the trick.
I finished a copywriting assignment at 1:30 this morning and hit the pillow hard, then got up at 7 to take care of getting my son Danny to school so his Mom could attend an early work meeting. I came back afterward and had a brief nap, then went to the gym for a nice workout and on to Toyota for a belated 10,000-mile service visit for my Prius. By the time I came back and did a little work, I was ready for another nap.
This time I took a solid hour while “All Things Considered” was playing on the radio. Woke up feeling even more tired.
But now I can tell the tired feeling is my whole body standing up and letting me know I’ve been doing a lot, relatively speaking, at the gym the past few days. My muscles don’t feel sore so much as well used.
So I will listen to my body and act on this information. I’m having our weekly dinner with my roommate this evening, but afterward I’ll go to bed early, by 10 at the latest. And tomorrow I will skip the gym and do a little walking, but not as much as I would do ordinarily.
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.
Mark Flanagan is an old and dear friend. All too many years ago we were copy boys together at the Boston Globe, and we built a largely nocturnal friendship exploring the magical, mystical and maudlin haunts of Boston and surrounding environs as we found them many nights after putting in our shifts and leaving the building on Morrissey Boulevard around midnight.
I tried way back then to make Mark a character in some fiction I was attempting to write, but I could never do him justice. It turns out now that he is doing justice himself to many a story: his own and others', in the lyrical songs and poetry (such as his "On Fireflies") he has created for the album Creekside Rhapsody.
"Pheromones" is a new occasional feature of this Blog, in which I will share and share alike from among the reader creations and suggestions that flow back toward me. Feel free to send yours in to me either as comments on the blog or by sending me an email at hppress@gmail.com .
The best book cannot grant self control and discipline.
Donna