Chubby Me, Day 8

So, a week or so into my workout plan has me holding at 259.0 lbs. The modified diet aspect of this is the hardest thing because I have this unfortunate weakness for sweets. And Thai food.

So there's a compromise: granted, the Thai House restaurant near my house isn't home cooking, but it was good in a pinch, and I was careful with what I ate. Vegetarian Pad Thai (rice noodles) gave me the carb fix I needed, and it wasn't a horrifically sized portion. It was the best of bad decisions. The next day, I went back to the grocery store and loaded up on fruits and vegetables. More broccoli salad on the horizon. If it ain't broke, right?

Workouts have been going without a hitch mostly. I work out with a good friend of mine and I tell him that the surest way to know you had a good workout is that you're cussing at the weights. People invent new swear words for the stuff we do. I seriously do believe that Tourette's Syndrome was first diagnosed in the gym. Over the weekend I substituted treadmill running for ten minutes fighting a heavy bag. The heavy bag won. Punching that thing makes your SOUL sore.

Not drinking was made easier by the fact that I accepted a bouncer gig for side work at one of the bars I go to. Seriously, they pay me to party and not drink, and to assist people with leaving when they've had too much. Best. Side job. Ever.

I hear talk about kale, and I saw some in the grocery store, so I put out to the people watching... what the hell is kale and how do I use it???

Chubby Me, Day 3

Ok, so 3 days and 2 workouts into my new fitness, healthy food plan...

My meals have consisted of a much more balanced blend of fruits, vegetables, carbs and protein. Juicing fruits was a good call. I mean, yeah, it feels like eating pre-chewed baby food, but it doesn't taste half bad and it takes up space in the stomach. I started the first two days with a mango/peach/pear/orange/carrot blend. I ran out of mango today, so I replaced it with apples. I don't necessarily count calories, so I may be shooting myself in the foot here on that. On the veggie front, I looked up a simple broccoli salad recipe and have been eating that for the last couple of days. For the people who know me personally, this is a big deal. I mean, two whole days of eating broccoli.

Carbs and protein were handled with a curry chicken recipe I've always liked and a small serving of jasmine rice. Portion was the big thing for me here, and with all the space in my stomach being filled with pre-chewed fruit and broccoli, it didn't take a whole lot for me to be good.

My workout has changed in that I did a bit more cardio in addition to lifting. I have been in the gym two of the last three days (would have been three, but a staff meeting threw a curve ball into my day), and the next few days are going to be revolving around the gym, basketball and softball.

On Monday, on my first post, I weighed in at 266.8 lbs. Today, after the gym I weighed in at 260.8 pounds. Not bad for the first few days.

Chubby Me

Ok, so as we all approach and live in our 30's, we come to the sad realization that we're not teenagers any more, and our collective metabolism ain't what it used to be. Some of us are fine with it, others aren't. I fall somewhere in the middle. Yeah, I work out, but not as consistently as I should. I eat okay, but not nearly right enough. I'm not fat, but I'm no Greek God, either.

I saw a documentary the other night called "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead." It chronicled the journey of two men, one highly overweight, the other morbidly obese, as they sought to better their individual health through better lifestyle choices. They each spent 90 days on a juice fast, initially losing tremendous amounts of weight, and through this action became something of an inspiration to those around them, and presumably anyone who has seen the documentary.

Now I'm not going on a juice fast. I like food too much. But for years, I've been told by people close to me that I lack the discipline to do what was necessary to make my body work for me. That bothers me. Also, on a more personal note, as I've gotten older, my GI tract and I haven't been seeing eye-to-eye as much as I would like. So today, I'm beginning what I'm calling "The Chubby Me Project." I'm going to chronicle in this blog my daily fight with my weight, my body and most importantly, my discipline. This is day 1.

I will post pics every day of what I look like, gambling that I will show some progress and hold myself accountable to anyone who is reading this. In my mind, it'll play out something like a P90X infomercial. Now I already have a pretty stringent workout/exercise routine, and I'm going to add to it the diet. It is by no means groundbreaking, but here's my plan:

Add more fruits and veggies to my diet. I've done a ballpark estimate as to how much "rabbit food" I eat. We're told that the normal diet should include 5 servings of fruits and veggies a day. It should account for about 25% of your daily intake. My intake is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5%. I want to move it up to 33%.

Better portion control. The average American eats simply way too much food. We have this notion that we should clean our plates every time, and our plates are way too full. I am by no means an exception. I'm going to simply eat less.

Goodbye McDonald's. And Wendy's. Burger King. Basically, for the next two months, I will only eat what comes from my kitchen.

Reduce caffeine, eliminate refined sugar, and no more alcohol. This is the hard stuff. I work nights, so coffee is king. I drink 2, sometimes 3 or more cups a night. And who doesn't like coffee dates? No more. I will only drink tea from here on. That will suck, of course. I also have a significant sweet tooth. Cookies, cakes, pastries, goodies like that are always a weakness for me. No mas. As for alcohol... well, this is more general health than anything else. I'm a lightweight to begin with, I get tipsy way too easily, and I just don't like the way a hangover feels.

Anyway, I'm going to start today, along with beefing up my workout schedule. My first order of business... make some juice.

Cheers!

Fanboy-ism... or my blog post pwns your blog post

It's amazing isn't it? Our entire culture has been reduced to fan camps.

In this day and age, we are sorted and ordered into our preferences like good little sheep, and our formerly intelligent discourse has been brought to the level of "U n00b5 can't t0uc% th!$!!!" Every aspect of our lives, from videogames to sports to religion and even politics has become this rabid gang mentality of "we're better 'cuz we say so." Imagine that: 350 million Americans screaming at the top of their lungs about who is better. Our day-to-day lives has become a "Call of Duty" game lobby.

Sad, isn't it?

The Grindstone/DJ3K

I've been way out of the game for way too long. I'm sorry.

I've been dealing with personal stuff that has simply gotten in the way of the things I've wanted to do, like writing. Who needs that noise?

The idea in place is to put my nose to the grindstone and do what I like to do, which is this.

***

Props to my boy, Derek Jeter. Number 2 on the scorecards, the Yankee shortstop has been my favorite ballplayer for almost half my life. Yesterday in the midst of a career day, he reached a milestone that is the benchmark for consistent excellence -- 3000 hits. Considering that the Home Run King Barry Bonds, with 762 steroid pumped homers doesn't have 3000 hits, this is a big deal.

Instead, You Get This

Just as an FYI, this week's blog was going to be a humorous look at my long-standing crush on Gloria Estefan.

Vancouver has become, by proxy, my adopted home. True, I'm an American. True, I live in Washington State. But considering the closest big city to me is Vancouver, it's what I identify with.

I rooted against the Canucks, as a joke mostly, because of the passion of my Canadian friends for hockey. The truth is, I don't follow hockey all that much. I just liked seeing Canadians get pissed off. Until tonight.

I've seen two riots played out in the news in my lifetime. The first was in LA around 1990, when the cops beat the snot out of one Rodney King on video and were subsequently acquitted, and the public outrage led to several days of senseless violence, senseless looting, pointless destruction, and stuff being set on fire. In 1992, a young Caribbean child was accidentally hit by a driven by a Hasidic Jew, bringing long-simmering (and utterly pointless) racial tension in Crown Heights, Brooklyn to a flashpoint, and leading to senseless violence, senseless looting, and inexplicably, things being set on fire. Both Los Angeles and New York had to bear the stigma of being cities filled with barbarians for more than a decade following. People to this day ask me how I managed to survive New York without getting shot.

What i'm seeing on the news is even more appalling. This isn't public outrage at a great wrong being done. This is violence for the sake of violence; sore losers and bullies taking their drunken frustration out on a hapless city, and a cruel misrepresentation of one of the most beautiful cities on the continent to the rest of the world, and all so soon after being so well-behaved during a much bigger Olympic deal. I do understand the passion for the game, the disappointment. To compare, I always say the closest thing I ever get to religion is being a Yankee fan. But in the end, it's just a G*d damn game. These players who represent your city, your actions do NOT honor them.

I was going to talk about a Latina woman who has remained beautiful under the radar for my entire adult life. Instead you get this.

Hero Worship

I've been obsessed with super heroes since I was old enough to read.

To be honest, I'm surprised, even at my age, that something like that is far-fetched, or somehow counter-culture, or unacceptable. This notion that comic book love equals nerd never quite computed with me.

Super heroes -- Spider-Man, Batman, the X-Men -- give us the opportunity to fantasize and experiment with people and concepts that simply don't exist in the real world. We are exposed to a concept of absolute justice -- the good guys win, the bad guys go to jail. we are given the opportunity to experiment with power and the consequences of its use. Through these heroic figures, we learn about tolerance and acceptance, about the greater good, and such.

I got beat up a lot as a kid. I have many less than fond memories of running as fast as I could with a 30 pound knapsack on my back, trying to get on a bus and away from tormentors. It's a story many of us can relate to on some level. Comic books were an escape for me, a way for to witness -- safely witness, from the infinite distance of fiction -- justice being done to villains very similar (in my head, at least) to the ones that were in my own life. Spider-Man swung in and kicked guys in the face. Batman did his scary, bad-ass voice. Superman did the laser vision thing. And the bad guys fried. It was all kinds of awesome.

As I got older and puberty set in, I saw myself in a lot of these characters. In my mind, Spider-Man was me, except caucasian and older than 13. It gave me hope because he was married to Mary Jane, an impossibly hot model/actress with gravity-defying body parts and a thing for nerdy guys. Come on, how do you not see the appeal? Batman was, you guessed it, me, billionaire playboy by day, psychotic badass by night. I mean, I'm still working on my first billion, and haven't quite developed my psychotic bad-assery yet, but still. Superman? Right again, me! Mild-mannered writer until the call came in, a plane fell out of the sky, or Timmy got stuck in a well or something, and there I would be, looking to save the day.

People have this appreciation now for these heroes as this massive marketing deal, or this huge movie-making force or what have you. I sincerely hope that we as a people haven't gotten so cynical so as to only reference these cultural icons by their ability to sell tickets and popcirn, because these stories represent much more than that. Super heroes are our Greek Pantheon. Comic books are our American mythology, the tall tales that will define our culture long after we are dust. These stories represent an ideal that is prevalent in the myths and legends of all great civilizations; that the powerful protect the not-so-powerful, shield them from harm, seek justice in their name. It is a noble ideal, that I would pass down to my own children.