Filed under: Inspiration, Thoughts and Observations | Tags: biggest, exercise, hurts, loser, when you're fat
Ok, that’s not totally honest. I don’t watch a TV any more – I’m consuming all of my video programming over the internet. Hulu.com – ever heard of it?
Here’s my beef with the Biggest Loser. They edit it.
Well, I don’t really want to watch ALL of the footage, but they cut some pretty crucial information from the show.
Have you noticed that we have no idea what these people are eating? My guess is it’s an astounding amount of calories – if they are working out as much as I think they are working out, and for as big as they are, they might be eating 4,000 – 5,000 calories a day. That’s going to mislead a lot of people, lead to law suits, I get that.
Have you noticed we never have any idea of the lingering pain after the work outs? We see Jillian and Bob just wailing on the poor fat people in the gym, screaming “last chance workout” a lot, and then we cut to non-sweating people talking calmly to the camera. You have to watch very carefully to catch the clues to what’s really happening.
For instance, watch whenever they show a full body shot – like when they are walking to the weigh-ins. They usually do it in slow motion, and cut fast, so look quickly! So many of these people are wearing ice packs. Knees, ankles, elbows, if you watch you can see – these people are in pain.
For a fat guy I consider myself in pretty good shape. My blood pressure is great, no diabetes, none of that scary stuff they have on the BL.
In fact, I can pretty much guarantee I can beat you pretty handily at racquetball. I move pretty good, and I’ve got a great aim.
But after racquetball, it’s days before I can walk right again. Treadmill walking/running is just brutal on my knees and ankles. I wake up and they are swollen, the tendons are tender, it hurts. I wish I had trainers around to ice me down…
So I’m just saying. This process I’m going through hurts. Besides hurting my back lifting incorrectly, my joints that take the beating hurt just about all the time.
Even riding a stationary bike, although much better than a treadmill, will leave my aching and having a hard time going back down the stairs at the gym.
I’ve tried to cut back on the whining on my blog here – realizing that victim mentality I had moved me to a new place mentally about all of this. But at the same time I think it’s important to let you know – this hurts.
Hurts so good. Feels like I’m getting somewhere finally. That rocks.
Filed under: Inspiration, Thoughts and Observations, Weighing In | Tags: belt, holes, losing weight, notches, weight
I dropped by the shoe shop yesterday. For the last three weeks I’ve been living in fear of my pants dropping around my ankles. It was time to upgrade the belt.
I have the guy just put more holes in it, so I can kind of watch the progress.
I mentioned to him that I wasn’t sure if my body was smaller, or the belt had stretched bigger. He asked how many new holes I wanted, I told him five.
He punched the holes, I paid him my dollar and put the belt back on. I cinched it up to the fourth new hole – probably a three inch difference. He asked if I wanted more holes – I decided that I enjoyed the process of coming in to celebrate my body changing.
He mentioned as I left that it’s hard to stretch a piece of leather three inches. Then he grinned at me – I appreciated that.
The scale still is locked at the 392 number, but I am starting to feel different. When I move it seems easier, like I’m lighter. It’s hard to explain, but I’m digging it.
Filed under: Inspiration, Thoughts and Observations | Tags: breaking through, empowered, enough, epiphany, good, holding me back, vicitm mentality
Biggest Loser had a pretty profound effect on my last night.
There’s a girl on there, she’s blue. See how great I am with names? I looked it up, her name is Victoria. The show shows her running sprints one day – she kept grabbing the edge of the treadmill and jumping off. Jillian wasn’t going to let her go until she did it correctly. It took her two hours to finally do it.
Next day. Jillian tells her she’s going to run sprints next to every person there while they run sprints. She has to do 35 sets of sprints where the day before she could barely do five. Know what? She did it! She broke through and did it physically. But after she was done she was almost morose, almost pouting. I couldn’t understand it. Neither could Jillian.
Jillian pulls her aside and says, in essence, “You should be celebrating a huge accomplishment in your life, but you’re acting like you’ve been punished, like you’re in trouble. You’re acting like you’re a victim here”.
BAM! Tears are running out of my eyes. Victoria is telling Jillian how she never feels like she’s good enough, at anything. That hits a deep chord with me – a huge chunk of what makes me tick right there in one sentence. I never feel like I’ve done it “right”, that I’m good enough to be loved, to be admired, for people to look up to me. It affects my life as a father, my spirituality, my career, as a husband – well, you get it. My whole life I’m fighting this sickening fear, this whispering underneath all the confidence and accomplishment–”you’re not good enough”.
Of course, last night, sitting on my bed with my laptop watching Biggest Loser on Hulu, I don’t really know any of this. I just know I’m crying. Something has hit something deep within me.
I woke up this morning realizing the “why”.
The corollary to this is the realization that I’m going to the gym, that I’m eating every meal in “victim mode”. Like I’m being punished for my past sins of gluttony. Sackcloth and ashes riding a stationary bike, doing penitence for my sins.
I woke up this morning and realized that’s bullshit. Sorry. That’s what I thought.
That coupled with my chat with the skinny/strong lady at the gym, and Bob saying that we find our barriers, we break through, and we set bigger goals feels like my breakthrough.
I started strength training. I’ve been avoiding it because it adds weight when I add muscle. Let it be. I LOVE lifting heavy weight, feeling my muscles screaming as the lactic acid builds. That shaky feeling when you finally drop the weight and blood flow is restored to the muscle. It’s so great!
I love it. I deserve to do stuff I love. I’m doing it.
Then on the bike, every time my legs started aching, instead of shifting to a lower gear to release the pain, I pedaled harder. Listening to Nickelback, pedaling to the beat. Seeing my muscles aching as a barrier to break through, to smash! I kicked my butt! In twenty minutes I went 7 miles – mostly uphill. A new record for sure. I’m breaking it tomorrow.
I’m not a victim. I’m taking back my life! I’m not robbing myself of food that tastes good, punishing myself, I’m eating food that will enable my body to regain that life sooner. I’m doing those things because I CHOOSE. I am in control here.
It’s been a good 12 hours.
And while we’re at it. Screw the scale. If I feel better, if I break through new barriers every day, if I lift heavier weights and feel my body getting stronger–it is enough. The scale will comply to my goals in time.
Filed under: Inspiration, Thoughts and Observations | Tags: advice, friend, gym, lady, skinny, woman, work out, workout
I love riding bikes. In the olden days, back when I thought I was fat but really wasn’t at all, I would ride my real bike many miles everyday because I just loved it. One of my favorite things to do was climb hills. I would ride up Little Cottonwood canyon as far as I could, and then zip down the hill feeling great about my climb. Made it to Snowbird a couple of times…
So at the gym you’ll find me climbing hills on my stationary bike. The one I prefer has a monitor, so I can see fake terrain going by. When I get done my legs almost don’t work, so I know I’ve done it right. I wish there was a hill to coast down at the end while my legs recover.
Yesterday I’m climbing the hill, listening to RadioLab podcasts from WNYC, and in walks this woman that is the picture of fitness. Five foot 7 or 8 inches, slim, strong. Kind of what I’d like to be when I grow up. She gets on the stair stepper in front of me with a People magazine, and starts to climb. She’s flipping through the magazine, reading articles, like she’s waiting in a Dr’s office or something. She made it look easy. According to my time frame, she was there about ten minutes, she assured me it was twenty, but what do I know? I was climbing a mountain…
When I finished the climb I went and found her – I wanted to know what her nutrition habits were like. I was praying that she wouldn’t tell me all she ate was carrots and raw venison. I wasn’t disappointed.
She told me she eats pretty healthy most of the time – it sounded like a great portion of her diet (I don’t mean the “losing weight” kind of diet here, I mean the “here’s what I eat on a regular basis” kind of diet – we really need a new word here) was made from scratch, was whole food kinds of foods – either that or she was very picky about what kinds of food she buys. She mentioned that Subway was a great place for her – she sticks to wheat bread, turkey, and tons of veggies.
We talked about my quest. How I had learned to eat as a young man when I was very active, and then continued to eat the same way while my lifestyle got more and more sedentary. She said she had to work hard after having babies to get back to the shape she was in (just amazing shape, did I mention that? She just looked so healthy), so she could relate to how hard it is to get it to come off.
But she said her secret was to know when she had gone too far. She loves to eat popcorn and have a Coke at the movies. She does that with no guilt, but she knows she needs to scale back on the eating the next day, and go 45 minutes on the stair stepper too. She told me she never really counts it out, kind of knows what she needs to do because her body will tell her.
She told me not to be discouraged. She told me I might not get to 5 foot 8 and 120 pounds, but I could accomplish my goal–just to stick with it. That was cool of her.
So I think about her (nope, didn’t even ask her name) and what she said. Maybe I just need to calm down and stay the course, and learn to listen to my body more…
Although many times my body is certain it needs cookies – a LOT of cookies.
Filed under: Inspiration, Thoughts and Observations | Tags: feeling thin, losing, weight
How do I describe it? I just feel smaller. Nobody can see it, but I’m sure that will come too.
Filed under: Inspiration, Thoughts and Observations | Tags: fear, hope, the ability to choose
Early in my career I had a trade show I was working in New York. My travel agent booked me on a late flight, and my plane landed around midnight. This was in the late 80’s, maybe early 90’s. New York was a scary place, rumors of muggings were still the brunt of many a joke on TV and elsewhere.
There I was, a naive kid, flying into the big city by myself, in the dead of night.
I became aware on my hair raising cab ride to my hotel of how much fear we feel in our culture. I wondered then what New York would feel like without any fear. To simply walk the streets at that time of night with no concern, no worry, that was almost more than I could imagine at the time. I wondered how people would treat each other in that kind of environment.
Over the years I’ve become increasingly aware of it – Fear. It’s a huge sales tactic in our world. Some bubble-headed bleach-blond pops onto our screen and tells us what is in our basement might be killing us, and encourages us to tune in at 10:00…
A guy knocks on our door with a vacuum in one hand and a sales pitch designed to make us fear that we are bad parents because there’s dirt in our carpet…
Radio instills all kinds of subtle fears into us – buy now before interest rates go up is the one that caught my ear this morning…
I have no tolerance for it. Fear is a huge debilitating influence in our lives. I’m almost certain we can’t even imagine life without fear. Think of all the things you have wanted to do in your life, all the great things you were certain were within your grasp, or that you thought you might be capable of if you just focused and tried – all brought to nothing through one fear or another.
So when I put in a CD from a company that I’ve “hired” to help me lose weight, to help me accomplish something in my life, and they start pumping fear. Well, in case you didn’t read yesterday, I don’t react well to it.
So there’s some of the backstory.
I’ve learned that faith and fear can’t exist in the same mind at the same time. Think of the ramifications of that. If you are in fear, your mind is devoid of hope. You become hopeless. That hurts me all the way to my heart. To think of me, and my terrific fellow human family walking around this planet without hope. Breaks my heart. I hope it’s not true. I fear it is to a larger extent than should be.
So let’s keep track. Let’s look inside and see when we are feeling hope, when we know we can do, and make a mental note how that feels.
Then when we lose hope, let’s try to see the fear that has driven it away. I’ll bet if we can isolate that fear, put it in a bottle and turn it around and look at it, we’ll realize that the fear is pretty unrealistic.
Let’s take control…
Filed under: Inspiration, Nutrition | Tags: biggest loser, candy, drug, rules of eating, sugar, too sweet
In the life I’m trying to leave behind, there are a couple of rules that I’ve lived by:
1- Availability of food is reason enough to eat. Hunger has nothing to do with it.
2-There’s no such thing as “too sweet”
3-Any package of cookies on the isle of the grocery store is a single serving.
Wednesday night I watched the latest Biggest Loser. This is the episode where they all got to go home, and there was a giant crate waiting for them. Inside the crate was a stationary bike, and a box of cupcakes. The challenge was they had to ride 26.2 miles on the bike, and they could eat a cupcake to add 5 minutes of time to any other player.
100 calories a cupcake, 5 minutes added to the other players time. $10,000 to the winner. Sounds fun.
Many of the players opted out of eating any cupcakes. But several ate 6 or more to add time to other people’s scores…
Here’s what I thought was interesting. They all had a hard time eating a cupcake, let alone 5 or 6. They all took a their first bite of the cupcake and grimaced, kind of gagging the thing down. They all complained about how sweet it was, how it was too much, how they weren’t enjoying having to do this.
Given my rule two, I thought that was interesting. As far fetched as that sounded (based on my rule 2) I believed them, and I wondered if that kind of thing could ever happen to me…
Yesterday my boss came out of her office. One of our vendors had sent a selection of toffees. She borrowed my scissors, opened it, ate a piece, and left them on the desk next to me.
Ok, so according to rule 1, food is available so I eat. I can do that.
There were three kinds of toffee open, so I had a piece of each – I was quite proud of myself for only eating one each. But that third one was delicious, so I had two more.
It’s not that I even love toffee, it’s just that it was there. You know? I didn’t pound all of this down in 15 seconds, it took me an hour or so, but they were in me.
The first thing I noticed is my mouth was almost burning – hmmm, that’s not really how to describe it. The sweet taste in my mouth was so strong it was almost more than I could bear. I started drinking water to try to dilute it, to make it bearable.
Then came the head rush. I joked with my boss that I thought there was cocaine in the candy, she agreed since she was having the same symptoms. I got really light-headed, then it started turning into a headache. Not pleasant.
Then the crash. I was SO tired. I could barely keep my eyes open. I thought about eating another piece just to get me to dinner – but my mouth couldn’t bear the thought (yes my mouth thinks, doesn’t yours?) of that taste again…
I was sitting through a meeting (conference call) and all I could hear was “platform” and “leveraging”. I know they were saying other things, but those were the only two words that stuck out to me. I’m telling you, it was like being on a drug, and it was a bad trip.
I’m at work now, the toffee is on the desk next to me. All I can feel when I think about it is that headache. I swear, just thinking about it gives me a headache. How’s that for motivation to stay away from it?
I’ve been giving yesterday’s post a lot of thought. I’m really tempted to delete it, but I’ll leave it. Maybe there’s others out there that can relate. I hope I’m not the only one…
My thinking as I drove home and back to work this morning revolved around this basic concept – it’s in my mind, it’s in my head, why do I think I can’t control this?
It occurred to me that maybe I’ve given my body too much control over my mind for too long, and my mind actually thinks my body is the boss of it! Maybe by drinking the shakes, by overcoming those setbacks that I do have, maybe I’m strengthening the mind and subjecting the body back to my will.
This brought up another thought – I’ve learned that faith and fear cannot reside in the same mind. When I learned that it was in a spiritual context, but I think it has universal application.
I sit here now, at the same desk, same keyboard, but with faith that I can do this, I feel so different. I can only describe it as personal power. I can write about the fear I was feeling yesterday, but the actual feeling is far from me. I have faith. Fear is gone.
Yesterday I had fear. Faith was nowhere to be seen.
So faith it is. I’ll picture it in my mind until my heart can feel it, then move forward with faith that my talent and initiative will find a way to make this happen. The circumstances that surround me will move together for my good. Today I can feel it…
…stepping forward into the light…
Filed under: Inspiration | Tags: clothes, different, feel, losing, pants, shirt, weight, weight loss
Pulled on my jeans this morning, fresh from the laundry (thanks LeeAnn for doing that for me, I am grateful) and they just buttoned.
I pulled them up, braced for the stress of pulling the button and the button hole together around my waist, and there was no exertion needed. They just buttoned.
Sitting in my car on the drive to work, my shirt hangs around me differently. I can’t really put it into words, it just feels different.
I’ve been here before, the front end when the weight starts coming off. Where you feel the difference but nobody can really see a difference yet. This time I’m celebrating them. I’m counting them as signs that I’m getting where I need to be.
Doug Losing Weight 