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.
Given my schedule with my son Danny and the fact that the pool is open only at limited weekday times, my swimming routine is that I try for four days a week and sometimes only manage three days. I add in other exercise -- walking, running, maybe a little tennis with my pal this weekend? -- as I can, and it is working pretty well.
The structure of my workouts is to include one "long" day each week, with two or three other days on which I am trying to follow an old training principle from distance running, which is to add no more than about 10% to the distance of my workouts, week over week. That's been going great and I've gone from 16 laps my first day in the pool May 19 to half a mile (36 laps) on my regular workout days this week.
Yesterday was my long day. I did 100 laps. 80 laps without a rest, then I had to get out of the pool for a pit stop (and to stretch out a slight cramp in my toes), and then the final 20.
2500 yards.
1.42 miles.
I was in the pool for an hour and 20 minutes. If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would ever in my life spend an hour and 20 minutes swimming laps in an indoor pool I would have laughed out loud and said "you don't know me."
But I am enjoying it, thinking and imagining and ruminating as I swim, feeling better conditioned every day, and the endorphins, have I mentioned the endorphins? I went over to my pal's after my workout and sat on the sofa watching the Sox and she looked at my big silly endorphin-laced grin and said something along the lines of "You so goofy."
Yes indeed.
And that's not all.
You may recall that a few days ago I set a little side-goal alongside my usual cumulative goal of losing a pound a week (on which I am on track). Seeing that I had a shot at reaching it, I decided to make an effort to get "into the 240s" weight-wise by July 1.
So today I stepped aboard and weight in at 249.6, thanks in large part to my nice long workout in the pool yesterday.
It may come as no surprise to you that I like getting various kinds of positive feedback for my efforts. It helps to motivate me. Sometimes the feedback comes from others, and sometimes it comes from writing things down, keeping track, and charting my progress. It makes me feel good. I like to feel good, especially if in some small way I have earned it.
Getting into the 240s is good positive feedback, that will help me continue on this path. So is the progress of what I am able to accomplish in my long workouts over the past 4 weeks:
6/5 - 30 laps 6/11 - 36 laps (1/2 mile!) 6/16 - 48 laps (2/3 mile, no rests) 6/23 - 72 laps - 1 mile! 6/30 - 100 laps - 1.42 miles
And so are the endorphins.
And it's no accident that I got a haircut yesterday and I am going to the dentist this afternoon. You don't want to know how long it has been since I went to the dentist. But there's a trend here, and it's not all bad.
Without putting too fine a point on any of this, I'll just reference one of the section headings from a great book that I am reading on my Kindle thanks to my friend and college classmate Len Edgerly, he of the The Kindle Chronicles podcast. The book is entitled Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You're 80 and Beyond, by Chris Crowley and Harry Lodge. (It's also available in paperback). I don't usually cotton to such books, but this one is intelligent, packed with a lot more interesting information than most fitness tomes, and totally on my wavelength.
The section heading that caught my eye?
"Just Say No to Yasir Arafat"
Just so.
(P.S. - My friend Ned asked me to post the recent photograph above showing the gills that are growing on my body. I couldn't get a profile view which would have been clearer).
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.
Cohen's namesake, my friend, Kindle colleague and long-ago classmate Len Edgerly, mentioned in a very lovely comment yesterday that on [my] "birthday [he'll] be listening to our mutual friend Leonard Cohen at the incomparable Red Rocks outdoor theater in the foothills of Denver." I am a wee bit jealous. If Cohen is magical indoors these days, I am sure that outdoors he will be, well, mystical.
And indeed, it was outdoors that I was first introduced -- a few months after I stayed up all night as a 16-year-old reading Beautiful Losers -- to Cohen the musician (I know, it sounds like a Singer story, and may be). I first saw him in two outdoor Judy Collins concerts in the round at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in the mid-60s, as he began to come out of the shadows from being just -- as if he ever was just -- her pianist and frequent composer.
I can't think of a man who inspires me -- yes, this me, the BMGS at 58.997 -- more than Leonard Cohen. The beauty and power of his golden voice is no less wondrous whether he is singing or writing, music or poetry or fiction, whether he is teaching or observing or being silly, whether he is 75 as he is today or 33 as he was when I first heard him sing, whether he is giving a self-deprecating interview on NPR or the CBC or (as I imagine him) chanting with the other monks or thanking Janis for making an exception at the Chelsea Hotel. And yes, did I mention he is freaking 75? He has lived through experience beautiful and terrible, and among his many lessons the best come as simple observations, and the best of these may be those that tell us that we should hope to be so lucky as to live and love another day.
"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."
Last night I watched a terrific film. I'm not usually much for documentary/tribute films about musicians, but I absolutely loved I'm Your Man, which is about, for, and with Leonard Cohen and a pretty amazing cadre of other musicians including Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Bono, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Beth Orton, Nick Cave and others. Cohen's a remarkable man, has been from his days as a novelist and poet in Montreal to a songwriting and singing career that reaches into and illuminates and gives texture to the most needful moments of so many lives to his own rekindling as a Zen monk at the still point of the turning earth, again and again. The film is a tour de force spiritually, musically, and as a filmed inquiry into the heart of human creativity. So I guess I have to give it a thumbs up.
I spend plenty of time here focusing on how I am undertaking this campaign to reclaim my health and live a longer life, and about the nuts and bolts of what works for me. File this post under why it is so important.
And, oh, by the way, 22 laps at the pool this morning and I feel great!
A little after 5 p.m. yesterday I was headed over to watch the Red Sox’ first playoff game with Danny, and I hadn’t made a plan for dinner.
I don’t know about you, but nothing spells danger for me, in terms of food and eating and weight gain, like a couple of hours of watching a baseball game. If there is food in the house, well … isn’t that why they have those 17 little breaks at the end of each half-inning?
I needed a plan.
I needed dinner, but that was only the beginning.
There’s a Whole Foods Market half-way between my house and my son’s, and I pulled in.
Five minutes later I walked out with vast quantities of fresh fruit (strawberries, blackberries, and bananas) and veggies (celery and carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes and broccoli florets). There was a container of ranch dip, but I took a little of that and mixed it with balsamic vinegar to lighten it up and thin it so it lasted longer.
I had most of the fruit for “dinner” while Danny had mac and cheese. Then half the veggies and my “homemade” dip sustained me quite well during the game. All in all it came to just over 500 calories, and the other half of the veggies are in my fridge.
Was it the greatest game-watching fare I have ever eaten? No, but it wasn’t the worst either.
It cost less, even at Whole Foods, than I would have spent if I had sat at a bar and watched the game with a sandwich and a beer.
And the Sox kicked some backside, which is especially nice.
It’s a good time to mention two very nice extra benefits, in the last few days, from keeping this blog.
First, my 9-year-old son Danny has taken an interest in my progress, and it is having an effect on his own health, too. After I mentioned the other day that my weight loss had reached 20 pounds, he told me that he is working out twice a week on the elliptical machine on the back porch. He also took it on himself to suggest that I give him fewer pretzels in his after-school snack!
Like me, he is a big guy, but he’s learning something about the meaning of calories and exercise and the benefit of keeping the two in balance. He is off the charts in height as well as in weight, so it is never too early to learn how to build a strong, fit body. Good for him! Just one of many ways in which he makes me proud.
The other nice thing I wanted to mention is that, because of the blog and the fact that I emailed Wednesday’s entry to a few old pals with whom I had been out of touch, I’ve had some nice email contact in the past 24 hours or so from some good friends from the past: Ned French, Nick Wyman, John Simon, and Steve Peterman. Nice people all, and I am in the process of being back in touch. I am certainly not alone, among men I have known, in being inconsistent at best in maintaining connection with people I care about. But it is so important, and I am grateful to be connected again with these guys.
Back to Danny for a moment. In honor of the fact that I am proud of him, and also of the fact that he helped me a lot on a recent copywriting assignment about Naruto (a teenage ninja franchise, or saga, from Japan), today’s soundtrack is a video that Danny told me yesterday was his favorite song.
Then there was Thursday's sound track... since I am kind of bridging the 2 days here with an overnight post after returning from my GA meeting in Plainville.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Free Falling" -- Somebody worked pretty hard on this video
I'm not sure, but I suspect it may be a character defect, that I feel compelled to archive each day's soundtrack as if this is somehow the newspaper of record. I'll have to check the list of defects in Step 6 and see if it says anything about YouTube. Meanwhile, I am parking Saturday's soundtrack here, too, since I didnot post that day:
Sox clinch! Steve hits 22.5! I've gotta work like a youngster today to complete a 50-page assignment -- aargh! There must be a theme here somewhere.
I love it when we're cruisin' together.
Gwyneth may not know how to name a child properly, but she has talent. Or presence. Something, definitely something.
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.
Going forward I'll make Sunday my weekly accountability day here at BMGS 2.0, and try to combine that with tying up any loose ends from the previous week's post.
So, first and foremost: I weigh in today at 254.8, down 2.2 pounds from the starting point of 257 in my Basic Calculations and Plan, May 2009 post of May 19. Good start, and one that I am pleased to build on at the rate of a pound a week.
Other loose ends to discuss below:
Eating at night
Daily weigh-ins
Swimming schedule, other exercise, and days off
Eating at Night. As we all know, eating after 9 p.m. is not the straightest path to weight loss. I try to conform my behavior with this notion as much as possible, but occasionally I know in advance that I am going to have a late dinner (as often occurs on Tuesdays when I am extremely focused on getting my Kindle Nation email newsletter out the door) or want to snack or sip a bit (when I am going out with friends or planning to watch a game). The key to success for me in these kinds of situations is to plan ahead in two important ways:
Make the basics of a plan about what and when I am going to eat, which will probably help me to eat something healthier for me than if I just leave it to chance and my late-night appetites, which long-story-short have never been for carrot sticks.
Leave room in my daily calorie allotment for what I am likely to consume, since, after all, a key part of my plan and accountability involves calorie counting.
Daily weigh-ins. I've never totally understood the caveat against daily weigh-ins beyond the basic ideas that (1) we should never get too obsessive about anything; and (2) people who don't understand the basic arithmetic of weight loss, water retention, exercise, sweat, time-of-day fluctuations, etc., may misread their progress or lack of it. But my approach here is focused on daily arithmetic and accountability, and I almost always know what to expect from the scale before I get on it, based on all these things. Seeing the 254.8 this morning confirms my progress and tells me I am where I expect and want to be today.
Swimming schedule, other exercise, and days off. I didn't even notice when I ponied up my $280 for a year's membership at the Arlington Boys and Girls Club the other day that there is no adult swimming time on weekends. No problem. I was going to swim 6 days a week, which might have been excessive anyway. So for now the plan will be to swim Monday through Friday, walk or elliptical on the weekends, and take a day off per week as needed.
I think that catches us up, I've got phone calls and emails to return, and I'll see you here tomorrow. Have a great day, and get outside.
All is well in the land of BMGS today, Saturday, May 23, 2009. A busy Saturday with Danny, and we're off to see A Night at the Museum 2 -- I love Bunuel! -- but we leave you with this post from 9.23.2007.
The key to the plan is the plan - Originally posted Sunday, September 23, 2007
Sunday morning, and all is right with the world.
Well, that’s not true by a longshot. But in my personal world there is a lot that is good. Threw some batting practice to Danny yesterday and he was hitting line drives over “the fence” in his yard. Got on the scale this morning and it said I have lost 20 pounds in 23 days. Took in the Red Sox last night eking out a nice, fairly dramatic 9th inning finish to a victory to clinch a playoff spot and cut their division magic number to 6. Got an email from Diane mentioning she has lost 4 pounds on her way to 125 by January. When I saw Danny he was very pleased with some really cool personally autographed Hannah Montana cast photos that an old college friend and classmate, Steve Peterman, had sent. (Steve was an amazing person when he arrived at the little college on the Charles almost 40 years ago and he is every bit as generous, funny and real today). All it takes are little things to make my day.
I got home at 5:30 yesterday afternoon and knew I had 90 minutes before the Sox game. I could easily have just kicked back for an hour but I knew how much better I would feel if I got to the gym. By 5:45 I was stepping on to the elliptical machine. I only did a little over 35 minutes, but I did a lot of climbing and resistance and had my heart rate over 150 for over half the time and really felt limbered up and good afterward. I had been a little stiff yesterday morning after my Fresh Pond run Friday, so it was really nice to loosen up, and I slept like a baby last night.
A little thing like getting to the gym one time made a big difference.
Two stupid little tips here, geeky ideas on the weight loss front:
In Diane’s email she mentioned the following: “I did this really nerdy thing. I gathered all my "take out" menus and highlighted all the foods I could order. Example, Chinese, 4 shrimp boiled and wrapped in rice & sea weed... Sub Shop, small side salad topped with seafood salad and a half pita pocket... you get the idea. I'm such a GEEK!!”
Well, you can call it nerdy, Diane, but in my book (or my blog) it is exactly the kind of thing that makes the difference between success and failure. Being prepared, so that you don’t get stuck making a hasty bad menu choice, can keep you within your daily target and make you feel confident in how you are doing overall. That kind of day-to-day confidence is as important as anything in being successful, whether it is a weight loss plan or something else.
The key to the plan is the plan.
Now here’s my own stupid little tip. As you may have noticed, my breakfast most days consists of some combination of cereal, fresh fruit, cream, and soy milk. Meanwhile, I have been trying to save calories, avoid artificial sweeteners and reduce my coffee intake by drinking my coffee as close to black as possible.
Ever notice how there’s usually a fair amount of cream or milk left in the bowl after you finish the fruit or cereal? The natural thing to do is to lift up the bowl and guzzle it down. But I do something slightly different. I pour it into my coffee cup. I’ve already counted the calories, and the result is a better cup of coffee, even if the last sips of coffee may be a little crunchier than usual.
Like I said, it is a stupid little tip. But it works for me.
In today’s soundtrack, The Robert Cray Band’s “Twenty” is a beautiful song about a terrible subject. 3,797 American dead. Roughly 10 times that many casualties, and who knows how many Iraqi dead? And for what? Don’t get me started, but did you notice Cheney admitted the other day that it’s all about the oil?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
· 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
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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 .
Our personal worlds are really the only ones that matter. They are the only ones we MAY have any control over!
Donna