I don't know, the bell rang...

It feels different this time.  It feels like I'm in it for the long haul, and I'm really going to do it.  Of course, that's what I've said every single time in the past where I've made a "run" at this whole weight loss/fitness thing.

So, I'm not really comforted with the feeling I have that this time is "the" time.  In past attempts, I've thought to myself "Why this time?  Why am I sticking to my plan this time after so many false starts?"  The only answer I was ever able to give myself was that something just "clicked".

And this time, like the others, all I can say is that something clicked.  There was an internal bell that sounded, and off I went.  It made me think of the movie "A Christmas Story".  Remember that iconic scene where that kid sticks his tongue to the frozen pole on the playground?

The kid gets his tongue stuck, chaos starts to ensue, and as they're all trying to figure out what to do, the bell rings.  Ralphie starts to head inside, and his friend says "What are we going to do?  We can't just leave him here!", and Ralphie replies with "I don't know, the bell rang."  Both kids just kind of shrug and head inside, leaving their friend stuck to the pole.

As a side note, I find it amazing at how programmed we can be, especially as kids.  Nearly every kid obeys that playground bell like it's an irresistible force.  I remember once in 3rd grade, my buddy and I were building a snow fort.  It was going to be epic.  We had just gotten a shit-ton of snow, and it was packing perfectly.  We planned the fort the entire morning before recess with detailed schematics.  Once we were finally out there, we completely threw ourselves into our work.  We were so engrossed that we didn't even hear the bell when it rang.  At some point, we noticed an eerie stillness, looked up, and realized we were the only 2 souls still out on the playground.  My buddy said "What are we going to do now?"  Neither of us had an answer, we were completely in uncharted territory.  If we had heard the bell, I'm sure we would have dropped everything, and headed back into school like all the other good little zombies.  We came to the conclusion that we would head inside, put our stuff away, and just go sit in our desks like nothing was wrong.  Amazingly, it pretty much worked.  We got a double-take from the teacher, and a couple of kids saying "Didn't you hear the bell ring????", but no further repercussions.

So anyway, if this time is for real, I'm looking for some evidence that sets it apart from all my previous ventures.  Something that goes beyond just "the bell rang".  I'm doing a lot of things that I've done in the past - drinking lots of water, counting calories, exercising (both cardio and strength), keeping a food log...but there is one specific thing I can think of that is different this time.

The plate on the left is a meal that I recently put together for myself the other day:

It consisted of green beans with a little cheddar cheese, corn, and cottage cheese - about 480 calories.  The box on the right contains about the same calorie amount of some leftover boneless wings from BW3 that I had been saving to put on a salad I was planning on making later in the week.  It's not hard to imagine how the plate on the left is going to make me feel more full and satisfied for a much longer period of time.

In the past, I would almost never eat vegetables.  If I were counting calories, I would always choose to have a smaller amount of something really yummy (like the leftover wings) and just power through the hunger that came later.  This time, I'm making sure that I have a decent amount of some type of veggie with any main, sit-down meal I make for myself, and even though the veggies aren't blow-your-mind yummy, I have noticed that I would rather forgo that pleasure hit you get from eating something that tastes really good in order to stay feeling full longer.

I'm down another 2 lbs this week, with another 1/2" off my waist.

When this baby hits 88 mph, you're going to see some serious shit...

I love astronomy.  It's a hobby/passion of mine.  On a clear (and warm enough) night here in the Midwest, you'll more likely than not find me outside looking through a telescope.

Astronomical objects are so far away from us that our distance from them is usually not measured in millions or even billions of miles, but "light years".  Even though this sounds like a unit of time, it's really a distance - specifically the distance light travels in one year (which turns out to be about 6 trillion miles).

One of my favorite things to observe is other galaxies.  They are quite far away from us, pants-shittingly far.  The closest one that's not one of our little "satellites" is about 3 million light years away from us, and many more are billions of light years distant.

Here's one of my favorite galaxies to observe:

it's called "M51" or the "Whirpool Galaxy", and is about 20 million light years distant from us.

Even though the light year is often used as a distance unit, I like to think about the time aspect more often.  When I'm looking at M51, the light that is traveling through my telescope and hitting my eye took 20 million years to get here.  When that light started on its journey 20 million years ago, what was happening on earth?  What did this place that I'm sitting at right now look like then?  A telescope is in many ways a time machine that allows us to look into the past.

So what does this have to do with weight loss?  Well, I realized while looking at a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of my weight loss (and gains) over the years, is that as I'm getting thinner, in some ways (at least weight-wise), I'm taking my body back through time.

In a couple of months, I'll dip into the 240's.  I haven't been in the 240's since 2009, but the real time-jump will happen when I get below 200.  Except for a brief period in 2003, I haven't been below 200 since 1997 - a time travel of 16 "weight years".  Does that make my elliptical machine basically a Delorean?

I'll see if I can find the flux capacitor on it next time I work out.

I'm down 2 lbs this week, with another 1/2" off my waist.  260's are right around the corner!

Tools of the trade...

Well, I've been sticking with this thing for over 50 days now, completely on plan, balls-out, cheat-free.  (I'm not sure how adding the phrase "balls-out" adds legitimacy to my opening statement, but it just feels right.)  According to my log, this is as long as I've stuck with something in over 4 years.  Results continue to be positive.  I'm down another 5 lbs this week (holy shit, scale fairy).

With this post, I wanted to write about a few tools/techniques that I've found are helping me.

Now, I'm certain you've heard about Pandora, but it has become my go-to app for exercising:

For exercise tunes, in the past I would create a playlist on iTunes, listen to it until I got sick of it, and repeat the process.  With as much as I've been exercising lately, this is starting to get too repetitive.

So, enter Pandora.  If you drill down into some of the station menus, you eventually get to this:

a bunch of tailor-made workout mixes.

It also gives me an excuse in case I'm caught listening to a song that may be considered embarrassing in some social circles.  Witness a recent conversation between my wife and I:

Wife:  "I noticed you were rocking out pretty hard at the end of that workout."
Me:  "Yeah, good workout."
Wife:  "The song coming from your earbuds sounded like 'Flashdance...What a Feeling.'"
Me:  "Yeah, well that was just the 80's cardio mix on Pandora."
Wife:  "Ok, but I see that you also purchased the song on iTunes."
Me:  "Why don't you just shut the fu-"
Wife:  "Easy there, big fella."

With regards to food, I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can eat the same thing for many days on end without getting sick of it.  I'm pretty sure that for every lunch between grades 3 and 5, I had the same bologna and cheese sandwich, packed in a "Space: 1999" lunchbox.

So every Sunday night, I make all of my breakfasts and lunches for the next 5 days.  Breakfasts are made from this layout:

Whole-wheat pitas, meat and cheese of choice (this week it's ham and swiss).  I bag 5 of them up, put them in the fridge, and boom - instant breakfast (450 calories).

One minute in the microwave before I'm out the door in the morning, and it's all good.

For lunch I bag up 500 calorie portions of nuts:

This week it's cinnamon almonds and cashews.  (By the way, I'm aware I have mentioned "balls-out" and "nut bags" in the same post.  I promise it ends here.)

One of the main things I'm focusing right now, if not the main thing, is "calories in".  Obviously, I'm monitoring other things as well - exercise, water, bad/good carbs...but what is really keeping me on plan and motivated is watching calories.  I originally started with a goal of at least 1600 and no more than 2000 calories per day, and I've got a streak of 50+ days going of hitting that target (Cal Ripken doesn't have anything to worry about yet, though).  Paging through my log, I see that I rarely get above 1900, and it looks like most days are averaging right around 1850.

I try to prepare a lot of food myself, so I can control the calories as well as the ingredients.  But when there's nothing on the label to help me, or I eat out at a restaurant, I use this:

It was one of the first (free) apps I found in the app store when I did a search for "calorie counting".  I think many people use and like some tools called "FitDay" and "MyFitnessPal", which I may check out in the future, but for now, this is all I need.

The adult sippy cup...

Well, I've made that seemingly inevitable right of passage that so many successful dieters seem to make at one time or another:  I'm drinking water - lots of water, ounces and ounces and ounces of water per day.  Holy pee, Batman.

So now I'm carrying this with me nearly everywhere I go:

It's like my own 32 oz. adult sippy cup.  I ordered it from Amazon about 2 weeks ago for less than $10 shipped.  My wife gave me the eye roll when it arrived, much like the one she gave me when I ordered my kettlebell.  I will say though, the eye roll was deserved.  I'm notoriously bad for trying to start on a "water kick", getting my special bottle/container/whatever, and then 5 weeks later it's sitting in the back seat of my car, half-filled with tepid tap water while I'm sucking down my 5th diet Pepsi of the day.

It's somewhat of an ironic twist that I now have my own sippy cup, because I was kind of anti-sippy cup when my kids were little.  I wouldn't say I was completely anti-sippy cup, I just don't get this constant obsession we seem to have of making sure that a kid is carrying around a container of liquid to drink from every waking minute.

Here's my crotchety old man take on the issue:  when I was a kid, we had this great system.  We would have cups next to the bathroom and kitchen faucets.  When you got thirsty, you made a trip to the faucet of your choice, filled the cup with water, and drank the water (repeat as needed).  I grew up in the country, so we also had a back-up system in case the faucet method should fail, called a hose.

In some of my more pessimistic moments, I sometimes think if I were to write a parenting book (and this is probably evidence that I should definitely not), the title would be:  "There's Water in the F#cking Faucet".

Anyway, the whole water thing was started in an attempt to get myself off the copious amounts of diet Pepsi I was drinking each day.  It was a lot, a real lot.  Here's the number (wait for it...):  8 cans a day.  And that's at least 8 cans a day, some days even more.  Just under a gallon of diet Pepsi every day.  Ugh.

I'm surprised at how much I don't miss it.  I was planning on allowing myself 2 cans a day - one in the morning and one at dinner.  But the 2 cans turned in to just one in the morning, which turned into "meh, I guess I don't feel like one right now".

Good progress this week - I'm down 2 lbs and another inch around my waist.  Even though the 2 lbs is a slower pace than my previous pace of 3 lbs/week, I had only been losing a quarter to a half inch around my waist each week until this one.  I'll take inches over pounds any day.

The doing things...

I'm not sure how much "Seinfeld" you've watched, but he does a bit I always liked about gym class.  I'm paraphrasing, but it goes something like, "Any day you had gym, things were a little bit off.  It starts out normal:  math, history, lunch, but then all of a sudden you're in shorts and a t-shirt, you're climbing ropes, other kids are throwing balls at you.  It's like you're suddenly in 'Lord of the Flies' for 50 minutes."

Ah yes, that childhood icon, the kick ball:

and the mother of all kick ball games of course - dodgeball.

In my school we called it "battleball".  I'm not sure why, maybe because it gave it that "Lord of the Flies" flavor the gym teachers were looking for.  We loved it, we begged to play it.

So fast forward to about 6 or so years ago.  My wife and some of her coworkers wanted to enter a dodgeball tournament (spouses welcome and needed).  I had no idea such things existed, and even though I was nothing close to fit, thought it would be fun.  I wasn't in very good shape, but I wasn't as far gone as I am now.  My goal was to basically not embarrass myself.

When we got to the "arena", we registered and went to check out some of the other teams who were warming up.  The teams were full of mostly 20-something "kids" who were ultra-organized, and could whip that ball.  I had no idea a kick ball could make that noise when it hit a human body.  My goal had changed from making sure I didn't embarrass myself to making sure I didn't lose a testicle.

Well, we got our asses summarily kicked, but boy was it fun.  As the years progressed, and my fitness/weight spiraled out of control, I never really felt like doing things like this anymore.  In fact, I felt more like this:

That is, until recently.  Over the past month and a half, working out has gone from something I would dread, to something I tolerate, to something that I'm finding myself actually kind of looking forward to.  In fact, the workout I had this past Friday was that workout.  The one where you feel like you're running on air right out of the gate, and you feel like you could go for hours.  When I was finished, that feeling lasted for the rest of the evening.

So, I'm kind of looking forward to doing "things" again.  My wife loves to bike, and in the past has had little, if any, success in getting me to accompany her on bike rides.  But now, it seems like that might be a lot of fun and a great way to get a workout in.  Both of us enjoy racquetball, and I find myself pricing summer memberships at local health clubs.  Another dodgeball tournament?  Count me in - it was kind of cool sporting those post-tournament welts.

The plan is moving along fine as ever.  I'm down another 3 lbs this week, and I'm averaging about 1800 cals/day with some hunger, but no real intense "craving".