Negative Splits, on a Bloody Mary Morning

After I mentioned to my daughter Kip that I'd been nursing a headache this morning, I joked that "a couple of Bloody Marys and I should be good to go." And there have been mornings that I began with "the hair of the dog," as we say. I would even go so far as to say that I may remember some of them fondly.

It's just that none of them have come in the last 30 years. And that's a good thing.

I didn't drink a drop last night, which means that last night was like most nights for me. I have beer perhaps half a dozen times a month, and once in a blue moon I'll chase it with a second. But the headache that I felt when I woke up about 5:30 this morning after a solid eight hours could have done justice to many a morning from my wayward youth.

Second cup of coffee, third cup, and that bad head was still with me. Ate some breakfast, didn't matter. The time when I should have left to get to the pool for my weekday morning swimming regimen came and went. There would be another adult swim period at 5 pm, and maybe I could manage that.

Then a little after 9, as I was beginning to dip a toe reluctantly into the day's work, I remembered another long-ago antidote to a hangover. When I was 20 there were occasional weekend mornings when I would wake with a throbbing head and go out for a ten-mile run. (Or maybe it was a five-mile run that felt like ten miles). I'm sure there were mornings even back then when I could not have managed it, but when I could, it have a marvelous effect not only on how I felt immediately, but on how I felt all the rest of the day. Suggesting that endorphins may be a better antidote than the hair of any dog, even on that bit you the night before.

Anyway, I was noticing through the day yesterday, after my 24 laps in the morning, that I have been feeling very good, and more limber than usual, the past few days. The swimming is doing its job -- Big Man Getting Smaller is also, for now at least, Old Coot Feeling Younger. And so, in a bit of a nostalgic nod to those mornings when I was 20, I pulled a pair of shorts on, laced up my tennies, and headed out for a run.

I don't want to overstate this. It was a slow run, be sure of that. But the reason I have been swimming in BMGS 2.0 is that I have not been able to get run enough to get sufficient exercise, due to the various joint, bone, and muscle injuries that I acquired over the course of several decades of overdoing the running, including half a dozen marathons, plenty of training, and 6-minute miles and 38-minute 5-milers as a late-40s Clydesdale competitor.

So I ran slowly for half an hour. It felt great. From my house down to the bike trail along Spy Pond and up a few streets to Pleasant Street, and back. All running, no walking, and I was never breathing hard.

And I suspect my friend Ned may be the only reader here who will get the significance of this, but when I got to my house on the way back I had to run another 50 yards to make the "back" of the out-and-back the same time-length as the "out." That means I did "negative splits," which means that I was going faster on the way back than the way out, which means that my creaky legs and knees and ankles and hips were loosening up as I progressed.

I know better than to think I could do this every day. The swimming is still the key. There are no final victories, especially at my age. But there are little tiny victories along the way, and I take great satisfaction in them.

You Getting Up in the Morning, or, in This Case, Me

I'll start with a few basics today:

• Calorie intake yesterday was about 2,000, including a healthy chicken fajita salad with iced team and only moderate chip-picking with my friend and ex-bro-in-law Pete at Jose's for lunch and a two-stop dinner (cottage cheese with apple sauce and Kashi at 6 and a vegan tofu-kielbasa quesadilla when I finished my weekly Kindle Nation newsletter at midnight). (Yes, I occasionally eat at midnight, but I try not to do it without a plan. More on that later).
• The scale is moving in the right direction, down from 257 to 256.2 today. (Yes, I have a scale that measures tenths and I do weigh myself every day. More on that later).
• Probably most important of these three items, in the long run -- I was back in the pool at 7:15 am and moved up from 12 laps to 14 laps, or 300 yards, with a slightly higher and thus more intensive ratio of breaststroke to backstroke.
  

The swimming feels great. It is taxing, and of course since I am already swimming more than I have swam, swimmed, or swum in over 25 years I notice that I am breathing heavily at the end of each two-lap segment. I take a little 60-to-90-second break between each segment and then start flailing my arms again. Each day, for now, I will try to add two laps to what i did the day before. We'll see how that goes.

I wondered if I would just be bored to death by the likelihood that I couldn't do enough to feel like I had done anything, but 12 laps and 14 laps on the first two days isn't a bad start. Those who've read my Boston Sports by the Numbers blog will not be surprised to learn that in my marathoning and coaching days I used to have a lot of fun paying attention to times, workout stats, interval clockings, and the like. Certainly swimming couldn't offer me that kind of juice. Then I noticed two guys in the lanes to my right this morning, consulting a printout after each segment and telling each other things like "dolphin down, butterfly back" and "19 strokes down, 15 back." So I started to realize that there might even be a future for a guy like me in the pool. They were doing 88 laps this morning, 1100 yards. I know 88 laps is a lot more than 14 laps, but somehow it didn't seem impossibly far away, today.

When I got out of the pool, showered, dressed, shot a couple of baskets at the outdoor hoop and walked to my car at 7:50 am, I felt terrific, maybe better than a heavyset 58-year-old guy has any right to feel before 8 o'clock in the morning. I had an impromptu breakfast with a pal and was doing productive work at my desk before 10.

Over breakfast, my pal and I talked about getting up in the morning. You'd think we would have it down by now. I've done it 21,535 times, and my pal has done it hundreds of times more than me. But my impression is that there is a constant need to re-train ourselves.

When my kids had to be at school at a certain hour, or I had to be at work at a certain hour, or both, it was relatively easy even if it was not always fun. But even then, there is a lot of difference between, say, rolling out of bed just in time to shower and get to work by punch-in time, and getting out of bed on my own time, early, with a plan to do one or two simple things aimed at getting my day and me off to a good start.

Meditation, swimming, running, coffee and a book on the deck, a walk around the neighborhood -- it can be any of a number of things, but for me and most others to whom I have spoken about such things, spontaneity is the enemy of success in such endeavors. Our brains are powerful, and most of us, when in bed, like to stay in bed.

When I have been most successful at using my mornings to get my day off to a great start, the key to success has been to make a plan -- "get up at 6:45 am and be in the pool by 7:15," for instance -- and allow myself no negotiation, or even any thinking, until I am inexorably on the path I have planned. In my own case, I actually pretend that I am being operated externally by remote control. (In my 12-step program, we call that "turning one's will over to a higher power.")

Maybe I am dumbing myself down, but the payoff is huge.

In my next post I'll try to come back to those "more on that laters" about midnight meals and daily weigh-ins.

Have a great day. I will.

(Thanks for the beautiful picture of the sleeping polar bear to my brothers and sisters at http://www.firstpeople.us!)

Fresh Pond - 9.21.2007

By the time I got to the gym today it was over 80 with brilliant sun, just too beautiful a day to stay inside and work out on machines. My new gym is less than half a mile from Fresh Pond, so I got into my gym rat stuff and jogged over there to run the 2.5 mile loop around the pond.

I have run that loop over a hundred times. Every Saturday morning, 52 weeks a year, there is an old-school neighborhood footrace there, a classic event that has no entry fee, no prizes, no sponsors, no numbered bibs and no freeloaders (since everyone is a freeloader). If you think it is hyperbole for me to call it a classic event, I’ll just mention here that several times a year, in addition to its several dozen regulars, it attracts world-class Olympic distance runners. Numerous Olympic medal winners have run there. For several years Lynn Jennings was a semi-regular there, driving down from her home in New Hampshire several times a year trying to break 12:00 in the 2.5 miler. (My memory is fuzzy here, but I think she did not make it, that her best was 12:04).

My own personal best in the Fresh Pond Road Race was 17:02, on May 17, 1997. I remember the date because it happens to be the date on which I last got married. My best man and I ran it, and it was one of the few occasions where I ever kicked Stewart’s ass at any sport. I was in very good shape then. So was Annie, the woman I married that day. She’s still running marathons, and I am proud that she is, even though we are no longer together. As for me, I blew out my ankle two months later trying to keep a commitment I had made to my daughter Moriah to run a road race with her. Oh well, sometimes we make promises with our hearts, and our bodies just can’t keep them. I was on crutches the next day and have never been quite the same.

But it was nice to run the loop today for the first time in years. It was beautiful out, and I was feeling a lot of benefit from what I have accomplished, and chronicled here, over the past 3 weeks. My time was 36:05, a little off my personal best. But I ran the whole way, and it was the perfect workout for today.

Afterward I showered and took a quick Jacuzzi at the gym. I usually stay out of the Jacuzzi for hygiene reasons, but I needed it today. Then I got on the scale. I won’t dignify what the scale said by repeating it here. It was a hot day. I’ll just say that, as much as I might be charmed if the scale sweet-talked me into thinking my weight loss was already in the low twenties, the real message is that I have about 5 pounds of re-hydrating to do.

1 comments:

thoughtz said...

I lived on Huron Ave in Cambridge for a while. I loved it there. What a wonderful thing Harvard Square must be this time of year with the students back and things rockin'!
Donna

September 21, 2007 7:54 PM

The arithmetic of losing a pound

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.

Nap and tuck - 9.19.2007

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.

Otherwise, all systems go!

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

Saturday, September 15, 2007

A couple of the comments from the past few days got me thinking, which is precisely, I think, how this blogging thing is supposed to work.

Donna mentioned that this blog was helping her “remember that if I am to be of any help to anyone I must take care of my own desires and needs first.”

It’s the same principle, as any flight attendant can tell you, which leads them to tell us to hook up our own oxygen before we take care of a child’s oxygen mask in the event of an in-flight emergency.

What I am trying to do, with Big Man Getting Smaller, is become more mindful. The main theme, to be sure, is my effort to lose weight, but that occurs in the midst of my daily life where I have many other obligations to myself and to others. By writing down what is going on in this “campaign” of mine, and paying some attention in the process to what goes on in the rest of my life, I hope to achieve greater mindfulness of everything that is important to me, as well as other things that exist around me for better or worse.

All of this helps to make me feel a greater connection with people I care about. I am enjoying my life. I am very focused on doing the things that I need do to lose weight, but also aware that this part of my life does not occur in a vacuum.

Because I am more mindful of the things I do for BMGS, I am better able to plan my days. I do what I need to do for myself and also accommodate the needs and desires of others. I am able to say yes to things, and also to say no.

Nobody else but me in the driver’s seat.

Because I am communicating with people I care about concerning this weighty effort, they are aware and supportive of what I am trying to do. They may also be amused, or think it’s all kind of pathetic, or whatever else, but what the hell? I am kind of amused too, and I would think it was pathetic if, instead, I continued to go to seed.

Today is Saturday. A little rainy outside, so today may be the day I join that gym. Or not. I dropped another half a pound today, to 257. I finished a long, difficult copywriting assignment last night, so it is nice to look forward to this weekend with that deadline behind me.

Today’s soundtrack is provided by the Boss.

Springsteen – No Surrender

We swore blood brothers against the wind
I'm ready to grow young again

1 comments:

thoughtz said...

You are so zen like, Potential Thin Man! Being as mindful as we can only enriches our lives and the lives of those around us. Watching ourselves eating, walking, writing... making love... we gain tremendous insight into our own and human nature in general.
I've just had a wake up call about the dog we got from my daughter... he has gained too much weight and i realized that i overfed him to make myself feel good.
We are interesting creatures.
This is about much more than just losing weight!
Donna
donna

September 15, 2007 5:27 PM

The quinary in the coal mine - 9.12.2007

Well aware of my petty human fixation with the fact that the next half-pound will mean 15, my scale stands firm day after day for the pleasure of mocking me!

That’s gotta be it.

It’s funny how numbers can become fixations, as if there was any significant difference between 15.0 and 14.5.

But I am doing what I should be doing. Eating healthily, eating less, and exercising. Monitoring my progress, writing it down, and “claiming my seat” here at BMGS.

Of course I’d love to see progress on the scale every day, but there is a Zen of doing things the right way, staying on the path and being in the present. And when was the last time you saw a fat Buddhist monk?

One thing I haven’t been writing down in my daily food log are a few supplements I take, based on advice in a terrific book on nutrition by Phyllis Balch. I probably should, since when I look at the labels I see that they add up to about 125 calories a day! Here they are:

· 4000 mg of Vitamin C
· 2400 mg of flaxseed oil
· 2000 mg of fish oil
· 2 multivitamins
· a tablespoon of fennel

Sounds like a witches’ potion. But maybe these things will keep me around a while longer to enjoy life as a 170-pound man. (What? A guy can’t dream?)

I should mention here, because I said I would report back on this, that the burritos I had for lunch the last two days from BoLoco have been terrific. On Monday I had the chicken summer burrito with mango salsa, black beans, rice, melted jack cheese and cilantro. Yesterday the same thing except I had it with baked tofu (thanks, Donna!) rather than chicken. Each was between 550 and 700 calories, very filling, delicious, cheap, and ready in about 90 seconds. So I’ll keep them in my menu rotation.

It was pouring most of the day yesterday and I only got in 10 minutes of walking, when Danny and I took his dog for a walk. I’ll get in my full hour today.

And a little more fruit. Some strawberries on my cereal this morning won’t be a bad way to start.

thoughtz said...

Mmmmmm... baked tofu... Yummy!

How far do you walk/run in an hour?I used to walk at least a mile every day no matter what.. but I've let the desires of others become more important than my own. This blog is helping me remember that if I am to be of any help to anyone I must take care of my own desires and needs first.

Donna

September 14, 2007 6:55 PM

Blueberries - 9.7.2007

Friday morning. Another pound gone, which means 13.5 pounds in the first week of Big Man Getting Smaller. Already 20% more than the most I was able to lose at any point with Atkins back in June and July, and I haven't felt wiped out and plugged up like I did with Atkins. In fact I have been feeling great!

I began today with half a cup of fresh blueberries on top of my cereal. Absolutely delicious.

Thursdays tend to be kind of packed, since I drive an hour every Thursday afternoon to have dinner with a friend and then attend a GA meeting before I head back. No excuses, but one result is that it is the one day when I have trouble scheduling the exercise I would like to have. All I got yesterday was 20 minutes of walking, about a quarter as much as I would have liked. And I had a nice big meal at the Tavern - 1082 calories! - but I'd planned for it and it fit perfectly into my overall plan for the day.

Today I'll make a point of getting some good exercise, starting with a nice walk through Danehy Park to Starbucks and back this morning.

The last 5 days, I have averaged 1 pound a day of weight loss, after my big initial loss the first 2 days. 5 days isn't really much to use as a basis for trying to figure anything out, but it might be enough to make an interesting point about my metabolism. In the past, I've always assumed that my metabolism was a bit on the slow side, and that the slow metabolism was a significant part of the reason for my weight gain.

But for the past 5 days I have averaged about 1600 calories a day, and lost a pound a day. The specific exercise I've gotten has burned off an average of about 400 calories a day. Rough that out and my net calorie intake has been about 1200 a day.

The arithmetic of calories and weight says that 3500 calories equals 1 pound of weight. Doesn't matter if it is weight gained or weight lost, a pound tallies out to 3500 calories. So, if 5 days was enough to go on, I think all of this arithmetic would tell me that my daily calorie requirement to maintain the same weight over the past 5 days was 4700, which would mean a bit faster metabolism and lot more active life than I had thought.

Who knows? Dr. Phil? Dr. Atkins? Dr. Caligari? Dr. Frankenstein? All I know is that I need to keep track of what I eat, what I exercise, and what I weigh, and keep coming back to report in here, because it's definitely working.

What's up with the shredded wheat for dinner? - 9.6.2007

Another pound has disappeared, for a total of 12.5 in 6 days.

The hunger from the previous day was gone yesterday, and I made a point of getting a little closer to the 1750 calorie a day target that I set when I began this. I had been hovering around 1550, and the mild hunger may have just been a residual effect of that deficit. As if I really know.

The other thing I made a point of yesterday was ratcheting up the exercise to 70 minutes, since the back pain I’d experienced the previous day was gone. I’m trying to ratchet up my walking by 5 minutes a day, at least for now. Later, as my weight declines, I will try to include more jogging in the same amount of time.

I did a funny thing yesterday. I forgot that I was nearly out of cash and that I left my bank card/credit card in an out-of-town restaurant a few days ago and won’t get it back until today. So I failed to make a stop at my bank to replenish my cash. I had intended to go out in the evening for a chicken fajita salad at Jose’s, but instead, given my bare cupboard and short cash, my main dinner course was a double serving of shredded wheat and milk. It was fine.

Today, the credit card. And I’ll be having dinner out before my GA meeting this evening. Planning on the “ultimate salad” topped with blackened chicken at the Tavern.

ps - Call me lazy, but a good pal of mine makes a grocery run for me each week, and I am happy to have the help. I give her a list. Okay, call me a lazy leech. Anyway, a few weeks ago I was trying unsuccessfully to follow the Atkins diet, so my list was all about meat, eggs, cheese, tunafish, etc. Here's my list today:

Fresh strawberries

Fresh blueberries

Fresh grapefruit

Raisin bran

Dark rye or pumpernickel bread

Chicken

Canned pineapple chunks

Potatoes (for baking/microwaving)

A burger a month?

Saturday, September 1, 2007 - Day 2 - net loss to date: 4 pounds

Weighing a lot more than we want to way is tough to handle for any of us. There's even a portion of shame involved sometimes. After all, shouldn't I be able to eat normally?

One thing that has always amazed me is how gradual the process of gaining way too much weight can be. I've told people from time to time that my weight gain, since high school, amounted to less than a burger a month. I can even do the math that seems to prove the point:

Weight on 8/31/2007 273

Weight on 8/30/1967 162

Weight Gain in Pounds 111

Weight Gain in Ounces 1776

Period of Gain, in Months 480

Ounces gained per month 3.7

What can I do about a burger a month, after all? 29 days every month I eat healthy and take care of myself, and 1 day I have an extra burger, and look at what happens! I wake up 40 years later and weigh over 270 pounds! Come on! How can this be fair?

Of course, that isn't really how it happens. There have been a lot of peaks and valleys in the graph.

I got off to a good start yesterday, of course. Today the scale showed a 4-pound loss.

I'm not silly enough to think that I really lost the equivalent of 16 burgers yesterday. A pound or so of that is real weight loss, and the rest is a matter of normal day-to-day fluctuations. My weight was especially high yesterday morning, due in part to the fact that it was Friday morning and I generally have a long drive home after a GA meeting on Thursday evenings, during which I ordinarily consume an extra coffee or soda and, often in the past, a snack as well.

But I ate healthy and got my exercise yesterday. I wasn't hungry when I went to bed, and I'm not hungry now at 7:55 on Saturday morning. I walked down the street for dinner at Jose's last night and had their very healthy, nutritious and yummy chicken fajita salad while I sat at the bar and watched a couple innings of the Sox game. But I had an iced tea instead a Corona or a Sam Adams, and I asked the bartender not to bring me the usual complimentary chips and salsa.

More of the same today. That's the ticket, for me.

When I was just 17, if you know what I mean....

August 31, 2007 - 1st post

Good morning.

I’m Steve, and I’ve got to get my weight under control.

I’m 57. I am 5 foot 11 inches tall, and this morning the scale said 273.5.

When I was 17, I weighed 162. I had a 30-inch waist then and I could run a mile in well under 5 minutes. I don’t expect to see any of those numbers again, but I have to get this problem in hand.

At this point, I would be very happy to get to 220 and stay there. In the 90s I used to run marathons. I was a big guy then, around 230 most of the time, but healthy as a horse.

Then I blew out my ankle, overdoing it in a couple of road races in a 6-day period. I couldn’t run for over 2 years, and I was never the same. The weight started piling on. By early 2003 I was up to 281, but I fought bravely back and got down to 209 that November. Here I am again now, like a yo-yo.

I have a lot to be grateful for in my life, and I try to focus on those things each day. But it is very important to me to whip this body into something resembling good shape again, and to maintain that. For myself, because I feel better, enjoy life more, and move around much more easily when I am in better shape. Also for my 9-year-old son, because it would be better for our ability to do things together and for his own future if he could look up to a dad who was not a fat tub o’ lard.

Not to mention the very important fact that I would like to be around, and healthy enough to enjoy life, for another 25 or 30 years.

I’ve done every sort of diet. I’ve probably lost a half a ton in my life while dieting, but gained back a little more than that while not on diets. So I hit on the idea of writing about my progress, of trying to be an open book about it all. It might, I am thinking, help me stick to my plans and my goals if I am transparent about them and write things down every day. I am an active member of a 12-step program for recovering gamblers, and living the principles of that program in a supportive surrounding program has worked wonders for me.

Once I thought about writing about my quest for health and fitness, it seemed natural to blog about it. I am hoping that over time I can share enough of my experience and hope that it might help give strength to others. God knows it isn’t easy to lose weight, get healthier, and keep it off.

I am going to commit myself to writing about this every day. We’ll see how it goes.

Have a good day,

Steve