Fear of the unknown...

I mentioned in a previous post that our family took a trip to Disney a few years ago.  My son, who was about seven at the time, was apprehensive about some of the "scarier" rides.  Roller coasters were on his immediate veto list.  For some reason, they scared the shit out of him.  Anything that he remotely perceived as a roller coaster was a no, so "Mt. Everest" and the unfortunately titled "Rock 'n Roll Roller Coaster" were out.  I was surprised "Space Mountain" didn't hit his fear factor radar, and figured I may be able to coax him into it, but that's a story for a different post.

Imagine my surprise when he proclaimed that "Tower of Terror" was the ride he was most looking forward to:

arguably the scariest ride in the park.  It was all I could do to not say, "Really dude??  I mean - c'mon - it's got the word 'terror' in its name."

In my previous post, I mentioned how he had a horrible experience on the dinosaur ride he was so excited about.  It was one of the first rides we went on, and I was worried that it might have soured him for the rest of the trip.  However, we explained to him that there was a place at each ride just before you get into the car where you can choose to leave the ride if you don't feel comfortable.  (Everyone calls this the "chicken-out line", but we of course didn't present it to him this way.)  He seemed cool with that, so off we went to "Tower of Terror".

I'm not sure if you've had the opportunity to experience a ride in a Disney park, but one of the things they love to do, especially for their scarier rides, is to try and scare the shit out of you while you are standing in line waiting for the actual ride.

By the time we were ready to belt ourselves into the ride car, we had been given a "tour" of the hotel, whereas it was explained to us that the hotel was really really old, lots of shit was falling apart, a bunch of people had stayed here and had never been heard from again, and now we're going to take an elevator up to the top floor where we can maybe start to figure out why this place is so fucked up.

So just before we belt in, I was positive we were about to exit via the chicken-out line.  My wife gives him one last "Are you sure you still want to go?", and he simply responds with a silent, wide-eyed, slow nod.

Belt in, and up the "elevator" we go.  As we reach the top, you can see that there are some doors that have been opened to the outside, and all you can see is blue sky as we slowly roll towards them.  Just as we are about to reach the doors, he looks over at my wife and I and says, "I want to get off."  I tell him it's too late, that we had to get off before we belted in, and he says "You lied to me!"  At that exact moment, the car jerks to a stop, we're outside the top floor of the hotel, and the bottom drops out.  Free fall.

Well, he loved it.  We ended up going on that thing a bunch more times, and he was quite proud of himself.  When I think back on all of this, I realize his fear stemmed from "the unknown".  In less than a minute, he went from "HOLY SHIT GET ME OFF THIS THING!!!" to "Let's go again!", and it was all because it transformed from an unknown to a known experience for him.

So what does this have to do with anything?  Well, I'm on week five of CT5K, and the third run this week is a 20 minute run, with no walking.  No lie - I'm actually losing sleep over thinking about this run.  Up to this point in the program, the longest I've run with no walk break is five minutes, and that was this week.  I can't believe how anxious I am over this.

But I've got to realize that my fear of this stems mostly from the fear of the unknown.  I was apprehensive about running at three and five minute intervals this week, for a total of 16 minutes per run, and now it seems like a perfectly fine run session.  I've been reading a lot of posts about running where people say it's a lot of "mind over matter", and I'm starting to believe it.

Tune in next week for the result - wish me luck!

Hunger games...

I'm sure this sounds painfully obvious, but I think that how I manage and think about my hunger through all of this is key to my success or failure.  Like I said, obvious, but as I look deeper into the "hunger issue", I believe that it's more than just "I'm hungry now - MUST EAT!", and "not hungry".

When I started this back in January, hunger was my main concern, and the thing that would almost always end up derailing previous efforts; specifically, being hungry at night.  With previous attempts, I would have all my calories for the day, everyone else would go to bed, and I'd stay up a little later.  The pantry and refrigerator would just call my name.  I'd give in and eat, well, whatever we had - leftovers from dinner, peanut butter, ice cream from the tub, chips/nuts/you name it, and boom - I'm 1500 to 2000 calories over my daily budget.  I'd go to bed feeling like a fat loser, promising myself "Ok - we'll start tomorrow".

So, getting through that first week was the hurdle I needed to keep building on.  It's almost like I went through some "stages of hunger", especially with the hunger at night thing.  At first it was just me sitting in a chair and willing myself not to go to the fridge or pantry to get something, but fuckballs, I really wanted to.  Next, it was realizing that I'm hungry, but there's no point in obsessing over it, since the part of my mind that was committed to staying on plan had made the other part who wanted two double cheeseburgers its bitch.  After that, it gets a little hard to explain - it's like I would be hungry, but I really didn't care, being a little bit hungry every now and then seemed almost irrelevant.

That's about where I am now with things - I'm a little hungry every now and again, but it's not like that hunger feeling pushes itself up to the top of my thoughts and says "PAY ATTENTION TO ME FATTY!!!"  Now that's not to say there aren't times when I'm extremely glad it's time to eat, or that I wouldn't slip back into my old eating habits if I fell off the wagon.  But all I can do is take things day by day and adjust if needed.

I think one thing that has helped me keep everything on track is the fact that I'm allowing myself to eat anything I want - I just have to keep to my daily calorie target (about 1850).  So, if I want to consume my entire day's allotment in maple syrup (hold on let me see how much that would be - 1.5 pounds - holy shit), I can.  I just have to accept the hunger and craving consequences that come with it.  For this reason, I've noticed I'm eating a lot more vegetables and "filler" type foods, vs. just the low-volume, high calorie stuff.

Something happened the other day that made me think I've got my mind on the right track.  I was doing the weekly grocery shopping, and came to the candy at the checkout line.  Snickers, Reese's, and Hershey's, oh my.  I though to myself, "Wow, it would take me like forever to eat all of this".  Well, of course it wouldn't take me much actual time at all, I'm fairly certain I could set some sort of speed record that would stand for quite some time.  But my initial thought was about how long it would take me to consume all of those calories based on my daily budget.  It may seem trivial, but I was kind of proud my thought process went there instead of "I WANT THAT FUCKING CANDY!!!!!"

Another thing that has helped is this:

It's a digital kitchen scale that I got off Amazon for around $30.

Whenever I was working on a plan where I'm counting calories, I would often struggle with what I call "calorie creep", where I would either over or underestimate the calories for something I was eating.  Each of these has their own pitfalls.  The problem with underestimating is obvious, but I would often overestimate my items, so I would make sure not to go over budget.  This would lead to me thinking "Well, I'm really hungry now, and that sandwich I made was really closer to 200 than 300, so I'll have a little snack now and call it even".  Quite the slippery slope.  With the scale, I can be confident of the calorie content of everything I eat, and the number is the number, no bullshitting.

I'm down another 3 lbs this week, with another inch off my waist.  As long as I don't try anything stupid like the above mentioned maple syrup experiment, things should keep progressing well.

The only easy day was yesterday...

Well, it's official, I've signed my daughter and I up for the color run.  I was going to wait a few weeks just to make sure that I don't "wash out" of the CT5K program, but I saw that some of the runs in some cities were selling out, so in a moment of insanity I signed us up.

I guess I'm not as worried as I was about washing out.  Some type of injury is what worries me the most.  I'm a little concerned that I started doing this thing while I'm still too heavy, and that's going to put too much stress on my knees and ankles over the next eight weeks.  So far so good, though.  Also, I'm losing at a good rate (down another 4 lbs this week), so the downward trend in weight can only help.

I'm not as worried about the endurance factor of getting through the program, but I've got to admit, this running shit is tough for me.  We've just finished week two, which was alternating between 90 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking.  Week three incorporates intervals of three minutes of jogging.  Oh the humanity.  The three minutes should be doable, though.  During the running intervals today, I thought to myself "Would I be able to keep going for another 90 seconds?", and I'm pretty sure the answer was yes.  It will be tough, but not impossible.

I'm still not close to saying that I "love running", or even like it.  However, my attitude is changing ever so slowly.  I guess you could say that I've moved from "Holy shit does this fucking suck" to "meh".  Each run has sucked a little less than the previous run.

I don't want to misrepresent things here, there are some things I really do like about this whole endeavor so far, such as:

• Exercising outside is pretty cool.   Fresh air, nice weather - it definitely beats staring at a wall for 30 minutes on the elliptical.  Now, if actual running felt like "running" on the elliptical, that would really be something.
• I really like having the 5K out there as the ultimate goal.  Goals like losing a certain amount of weight, fitting into this shirt or those pants are fine, but this feels like (I won't say "better"), but different.
• I absolutely love doing this with my daughter, it's become something really cool for us to share.

So, onward and upward!

Potpourri...

I've got no specific focus this week, so here is a smattering of thoughts I've had recently:

Literally
I'm aware of (and agree with) a current movement regarding the word literally.  People are using it without regard to the actual definition of the word, and just throwing it in a sentence to emphasize a point.  We need to all make an effort not to say things like "That story was so funny, I literally pissed myself!!", unless you actually sealed the deal.

So, that said, my daughter could literally run circles around me while we jog.  We have both started doing the "Couch to 5K" program, and have completed week one.  She is a fit, healthy teenager, and while not a runner by any means, is kicking her Dad's ass six ways to Sunday.

The program has you alternate between walking and running, and when it is time for us to take off running, she zips out in front and has to fall back to stay with me.  It wouldn't be that hard for her to just do a lazy loop around me during the run time.

On our last run though, she made me feel so good.  We had just finished our last stint of running and were cooling down with a five minute walk.  We both took our earbuds out and she said "You're doing a great job, Dad.  I know you feel slow and everything, but I'm so proud of you."  She's such an old soul - god she is so fucking awesome.

Back in the day
In my last post I mentioned that "back in the day" when I would work out, that meant running one mile and calling it all good.  I've done a little mental tallying, and have come to the conclusion that it's been 19 years since I last did any jogging.  Holy shitballs, that's a long time ago, here's a Time magazine cover from that year:

Now, I realize that I've got no right to go all word police here, but since I weighed in about "literally", what the hell.  I recently heard someone refer to something that happened in 2005 as "back in the day".  I propose that if you use "back in the day" to refer to anything that happened in the 2000's, you don't get to say it anymore.  Let's make it a rule.

The numbers game
I'm over 100 days in completely on plan now.  I'm not sure why that number is significant to me, but it just feels like it is.  It's weird how we put these numbers out there as milestones for different things.  With my 2 lb loss this week, I'm poised to dip below 250 in the next week or two, which means I'll be closer to 200 than I am to 300.  I'm not sure why that is overly significant, but I'm looking forward to that milestone nonetheless.  Our brains must be hardwired for mathematics in some way.  There seem to be a lot of things we humans put numbers on to label accomplishments in our endeavors:  the four minute mile, batting .400, a golfer shooting a round of 59, bench pressing 300 lbs, getting through an entire round of "99 bottles of beer"...