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'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.
Based on her numbers, my take is that, if she does (a) and (b) 4 times a week each and does (c) and (d) once a week, her BMR based on the "moderately active" calculation would be 2087 calories a day, or 14,609 calories a week. That is the rate of calorie intake that would keep her weight at its current level. In order to lose a pound a week, she would have to consume 3,500 calories less than 14,609 each week. In other words, her target rate for daily calorie intake is 1,587 calories.
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.
Based on my numbers, if I do (a) three times a week and (b) and (c) once a week each, my BMR based on the "moderately active" calculation would be 3227 calories a day, or 22,589 calories a week. That is the rate of calorie intake that would keep my weight at its current level. In order to lose a pound a week, I have to consume 3,500 calories less than 22,589each week. In other words, my target rate for daily calorie intake is 2,727 calories.
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!
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.
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.
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 .
