The Advantages of Being Broke

Apparently my plan to write on this weight loss blog on a weekly basis was a bit too ambitious as I’ve got another blog to showcase my creative writing project, a vlog, work (which I vlogged about), and various errands that tend to eat up the rest of my day until I pass out somewhere. Then I repeat the entire cycle until one of those things kill me. As you can see, I didn’t list working out or heading to the gym as any of those activities because, let’s face it, I’m either too busy or too exhausted. I’d rather be too busy to workout than exhausted because when you’re too busy, you really don’t notice the passage of time. As I’m about to go to sleep or take a quick nap there’s this biting guilty feeling that makes me feel like I could be using that time to go for a run or lift some weights or something when, in reality, I can barely lift my own head.

Last week was a fairly stressful week for me and not for the usual reasons. Well, the usual reasons were there as they always will be, but in addition to that I got a call from my bank. It seems that someone used my debit card number to have themselves a little shopping spree and log on to some dating websites (Ironically, some of them were Christian dating websites). Clearly the first thing to do was to cancel my card and I had to wait all week to get a new one. I had been staying at work a bit later than usual so by the time I got out the banks were closed leaving me without any easy way to get cash. A few years ago, I would have unconsciously just buy the cheapest food night in and night out, which usually turns out to be the worst kind. But I made a conscious decision to head on over to the grocery store and buy healthier food in bulk, enough to last me the week.

The only disadvantage would be that I had to prepare and wash and cook all my meals, eating away more time out of my day. However, I had forgotten how much I loved to cook. If I ever take the time to actually write down what I’m throwing together, maybe I’ll do a couple of posts where I discuss my recipes. That way those of you who know can tell me how much healthier I’m actually eating if I just make all of my meals. Of course, I’m pretty sure if I hadn’t had prepared my own meals, I would be scarfing down take out burgers and nuking some frozen pizza.  I’m sure we can all agree that that’s not the healthy choice.

While I don’t consider myself a religious person there are plenty of people around me who are pretty devout Catholics. After all, I used to be one of them. Seeing the black smudge on a lot of people’s foreheads could only mean one thing: Ash Wednesday was upon us and subsequently that meant that fish and vegetarian meals would be easy to come by and afford. Meat isn’t unhealthy per se but when one lives in a country where it is all too abundant… Well there is such thing as too much of a good thing and when you’re a chubby blogger like me, a vegetarian or vegan diet isn’t the worst thing in the world. And I managed to eat mostly vegan and vegetarian meals for the better part of a week resulting in losing just under 2 pounds in said week. Go me!

Without going into the details here my week was much more eventful than having to deal with a stolen debit card and not in a good way. Needless to say it was a very stressful week but forcing myself to make my own meals wasn’t just the healthy decision but it also rekindled my love of cooking. That’s right, ladies, I cook. It’s a little more effort than to just go and buy the pre-packaged food in a store or fast food joint or something, but to me it’s worth it. It clears my head and depending on what I’m making my mind is constantly trying to figure out what to do next, how much of something I need, what I need to chop or prep or wash, and on top of that there’s the time factor since no one like burned food.

I’ve commented before on how stress can lead me down a path of self-destruction as far as my own personal weight loss goals are concerned. The way I’ve dealt with it before is to engage myself in an activity that requires all of my focus. It doesn’t have to be a particularly daunting task for it to be enough to take my mind off of things. My brain just has to be preoccupied. Sometimes I’ll do something creative or play a video game but conversely I can get the same result if I find myself doing a repetitive mundane task at work. But the cooking thing not only works perfectly but I can also control my personal intake and monitor exactly what I’m consuming. I’d be lying if I said I never considered looking into making a career out of cooking, but I’m pretty confident I was built to sit in front of a computer in some capacity for a living. It is, however, a great hobby and my inner nerd blames Alton Brown for expanding my horizons. Thus far it’s been a long road to being healthy but it’s the little things like making a meal for myself that lets me know that I’m taking a step in the right direction.

This Thing's Still Here?

Bloggers bless me for I have sinned it has been nearly 2 years since my last post.  I’ll be brutally honest with myself and with anyone else reading: I totally dropped the ball on this blog. It started off as a way to publicly log my progress on the road to a healthier lifestyle and while it worked for a good long while I fell victim to something that anyone doing anything worth doing should never fall victim to: boredom, pure unadulterated boredom. And then my own mental weaknesses saw me fall off the proverbial wagon and instead of powering through to get back on the wagon I kicked my own self when I was down.

I feel like I lose the weight when I’m not thinking about, that the physical aspect of it, while challenging, is the easier aspect of the weight loss. The mental aspect of weight loss is one I continually struggle with. In fact, I contest that if I were much more susceptible to peer pressure in my younger days and took up smoking I would likely be a thinner man today. Sure, in all likelihood my health would not be any better (possibly worse) but I digress. My point is I feel that the biggest reason that it’s so easy for me to gain the weight back is that my overeating is more like an addiction to food. I’ll come out and admit that I eat when I’m stressed, depressed, or just bored. A lot of people eat when they’re those things but to exacerbate problems, I get bored of dieting pretty easily.

I put a lot of effort into eating healthy meals and working out consistently and while past workouts have solved the boredom problem, I still have trouble maintaining my enthusiasm for preparing healthy portions. And I tend to injure myself a lot when I work out intensely (especially in the feet). Then I lose steam and get deflated when I gain the weight back until I hit rock bottom for the hundredth time. The other day I realized I couldn’t tie my shoes without having to groan and struggle on my way down to tie my shoe laces, the buttons on my dress shirt were just barely keeping things together if I sat down a certain way, and I get winded after only three flights of stairs. There was a moment in the three decades I’ve been on this planet that I could go up five flights without breaking a sweat.

While I hate the idea of resolutions, I figure the start of 2013 would be a good place to start taking control of my life. On this blog I intend to keep track of (and be brutally honest about) my progress on the road back to 180 (for realsies, this time). On my other blog, I intend to get my creative juices flowing on a regular basis once again. It should be noted that the last time I engaged in such a project I still consider to be the most rewarding year of my life, despite how exhausted I felt at the end of it. And to up the ante on the creative end (and perhaps as motivation to get my ass moving and out into the real world, ironically) I have decided to start uploading vlogs on a regular basis for an entire year, at least one video per week.

Upon writing this I realized that a good chunk of my life will be propped up for the entire world to see, digitally speaking. That’s not to say that too many people will end up seeing my stuff but it’s all there for the viewing if anyone so chooses to view it and normally that would freak me out. But I actually find myself kind of excited, enthused in fact, that I’m feeling a different kind of vulnerable. It’s a vulnerable that I’m in control of and maybe that means this unfamiliar ground is one I should be treading. Maybe it’s a sign of a change that I need in my otherwise stale life. Whatever the outcome may be, I promise to myself to keep posting honestly and regularly for the following year (at the very least). Here’s to a great year!!!

Dazed and Confused

Current Weight: 209.5 lb

Has it really been a year since my last post on here? Well, I lost a bunch of weight and the gained some of it back in that time. I’ve had quite a year. It’s had some lows and some amazing highs. Unfortunately, a bulk of the lows came in tandem… and at the end of the year. In fact, some of those negative vibes overflowed into the New Year. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say the ongoing theme for 2011, so far, seems to be rejection. Within the course of just a few weeks, I had experienced rejection in my professional life, rejection in my personal life, and rejection in my love life. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve been so incredibly tempted to just crawl back into the cold dark corner of my refrigerator and begrudgingly gain back all my weight. It seemed to be the only thing I was good at.

It would be so easy. Just sit down and scarf down on all the food I want and watch my protruding belly grow exponentially over the next few months or so. But something happened to break that ridiculous cycle. All that had to change was one thing. I could be a giant douche bag and list down the old time cliché, “I told myself I wasn’t going to quit this time.” But no, that wouldn’t be honest to you, nor would it be fair to me. It’s a given that most people, if cornered, wouldn’t quit when they had come this far. This isn’t about quitting. It’s about recognition. I was hurt. In fact, I still am hurting. Years ago, however, I would have tucked that hurt away, wipe away the tears and fight on until I had attained my goal. It was a different story this time. I faced what I was feeling head on. I punched a wall, broke stuff, bawled my eyes out, wrote every little thing that was going on in my head whether it was good, bad, or just plain psychopathic. And it worked.

Exhausted, puffy eyed, and hoarse, I felt like a weight was off my shoulders. Not completely, seeing as how this had happened within a span of 24 hours, but just enough to make me realize that I was hurt. Once I recognized I was depressed about everything that had happened to me, I was able to start moving on. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still this little part of me that hopes that things will go back the way it was a few months ago, that prays that, on some off chance, the girl that put me in this state of mind will stumble on this site and see what she’s done to me. But I’m not holding my breath. For the first time, I think, I’ve put the past behind me, had hope for a positive future, and lived in the present simultaneously.

I had gone all the way up to 215 lb at one point. But once I recognized how horribly broken my perspective on the situation I found myself in was, I was back to losing weight (slowly, but surely). As you can see, in the course of one year, I had managed to lose about 11 pounds. That’s actually a bit misleading. I had gone up to nearly 230 lb by June of 2010. But it was then that I decided to change things up drastically. My food was now prepared at home as freshly and as simply as possible. Not only has this made me a better cook (yes, I cook too; I’m quite the catch) but it has essentially forced processed foods out of my diet. The best thing about it is I don’t crave as much anymore. Losing weight by totally denying what you really want is just setting yourself up for failure.

And as any fitness guru will tell you, a change in diet alone is not enough to maintain healthy weight loss. In other words, I stepped things up in the exercise department as well. I’m not a stranger to home fitness videos, so I decided to try my hand in one of the newer ones. It wasn’t until I started looking for the infomercials that I realized how many there were. Some of them had fancy gadgets that you’d have to buy. Some of them were designed specifically for women (I research thoroughly). Of course, I wasn’t interested in any add on merchandise that I’d have to buy so I went with one where you didn’t have to buy too much equipment. Fortunately, I already had weights and yoga mats around so I saved a good chunk of change.

While trying to figure out which of these modern programs I wanted to invest in, I realized a good portion of them share the same philosophy: “muscle confusion.” It’s apparently the new thing in the fitness community. It’s explained as a way to combat a plateau effect that some people experience when doing regular workouts. You get to a certain point and it’s difficult, sometimes impossible, to get beyond that point. Purportedly, the idea behind muscle confusion is confuse your muscles so they don’t get used to the workout that you put them through. It makes sense on the surface, especially when you hear stuff about muscle memory. But then the pre-med student inside of me told me to take a step back and look at muscle confusion objectively.

The idea of muscle memory is, at heart, a concept relating to the brain and not that of the muscle tissue itself. That’s where the memory part comes from. So what are the implications for a concept like muscle confusion? Are we really tricking each muscle fiber to think, “Hey, I’m not used to this. I better get stronger?” And that’s where the skepticism grew (i.e. I didn’t have much faith in muscle confusion workouts). After doing some research on people who have had results with regimes using the concept, it’s undeniable that whatever they are doing is working. Inevitably, I had to ask myself just what the frak was going on? Applying the muscle memory concept to muscle confusion, perhaps we were just confusing our own brains in this workout.

That’s not to say that that’s entirely a bad thing. As I mentioned earlier, I’m no stranger to home fitness videos that brag to get you looking like Superman in just a few weeks for less than an hour a day. But I’ve never had those results. Of course, I’ve gotten used to telling myself that while six-packs are nice, kegs are where the parties are at. While the physiology didn’t make much sense, muscle confusion definitely looked like it worked so I relented and gave it a shot. Just three months later and I’m the fittest that I’ve ever been. I don’t want to say which particular workout I did, just to show you that this isn’t some elaborate commercial. So, what’s going on here? If muscle confusion sounds more like voodoo than science, why does it get the results it gets?

Like I said, it confuses your brain. Actually it does two HUGE things and it does it well. The first is confusing your brain. The program doesn’t trick your body into not getting used to the workout. It tricks your brain into not getting used to the workout. It’s a different activity everyday and there’s plenty of opportunity to mix things up however you see fit. In other words, it’s extremely difficult to get bored of a fitness program that changes daily. Before, it was just one workout: the same moves everyday for weeks on end. But this way, you can experience it in a way that you don’t get bored and actually have the need to push yourself more and more in the workout.

The second thing that this concept does is force you to focus. While the old workouts would have you work out every part of your body in an hour. Muscle confusion programs have you concentrate on certain parts on one day, certain parts on others, so you dedicate an entire workout to certain muscle groups. Essentially, every muscle gets attention and since it changes up from day to day, there’s no monotony to bore you to death.

I wake up sore and exhausted practically every day, but after doing this workout for just under a year now, I can say I’m happy where I am, physically. There are certain things that I can do now that I haven’t been able to do since I was in grade school. In some cases, there are things I can do now that I’ve never been able to do, like a pull up or being okay with not finishing a meal! By no means am I stopping what I’m doing. I’ll just keep on going until I don’t recognize myself in the mirror anymore. Maybe, one day, I can recreate that one Spider-Man scene where Peter Parker wakes up with a new body.

What’s hard about recuperating from weight gain and being dumped is that there’s no sure fire way to gauge how well you’re doing. You just do what you usually do and one day, if you’re lucky, you end the day and realize that you never gave a second thought to whatever caused you to be depressed in the first place. Getting over something/someone, I mean really getting over it to the point where it’s nothing more than a passing thought, is one of those things that just happens. You just know when it happens, and only you can know when that is. I can’t say that I’m completely over being rejected; especially since it’s a daily thing that I get emails and letters informing me of my latest rejection. But the important thing is that I’ve gotten to the point where I can look in the mirror every morning and confidently say, “I’ll get there.”

Learning to be Fat

Current Weight: 220.6 lb

“Like everyone else you want to learn the way to win. But never to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat — to learn to die — is to be liberated from it. Once you accept it, you are free to flow and to harmonize. Fluidity is the way to an empty mind. You must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying.” –Bruce Lee

Maybe I’m going about this all wrong. One school of thought is that overeating is a way to cope for something tucked neatly away in the subconscious mind. Another school of thought is that overeating is simply a negatively reinforced behavior and has to be modified. Yes, I did get that from the show Frasier but stay with me here. Personally, I think it’s both. I do have my issues and tend to eat as a way of coping. Ironically, though, as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve got obsessive compulsive disorder, which definitely qualifies as “negatively reinforced behavior.”

I know the quote seems rather cryptic, doesn’t it? Especially coming from a guy who died before his time. But Bruce Lee does offer a valid point. I remember when I was little, I was asked, nay, forced to sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on stage… by myself. Who does that to five-year-old? So I did what I had to do. I sucked it up and let out the biggest fit in my life and managed to convince my dad to take me home so I wouldn’t have to do it. Fast forward a few years into the future and I decided that the only way to get over looking foolish is to look foolish on purpose. I saw my shortcomings in public speaking and turned it into a strength. Now, I’m actually quite the ham (mmmmmm Ham… okay, that’s not helping my situation).

I could quote everyone from Aristotle to Sharon Osbourne describing the same philosophy. But Bruce Lee just so happens to be at the top of the cool list. Why? Well, I’ll get to that later. As you might have deduced from the title of this post, I want to try and learn to be fat. Bear with me. What Bruce Lee is saying is that once you fully experience failure than there’s nothing left to lose. And as weird as the semantics may contradict: when one has nothing to lose, they’re not afraid to give it their all. But what would they give if they had nothing to lose?--- Well, whatever.

The point is that I want to learn how to be fat with pride. I don’t have to repeat how much the media and popular culture glorifies a specific type, but it bears repeating. After consulting with Google, I was hard pressed to find more than five images of plus-sized male models. I’m not saying there should be anymore; it’s just an observation. And I’m sure many people have noticed the lack of “plus-ness” in plus sized female models, but I digress.

Looking back at my track record, I was depressed when I was fat, depressed when I was not so fat, and still depressed now that I’m in between. In fact, I argue that the reason I yo-yo’ed back to my current state is because I couldn’t cope with the fact that I wrongly associated being thin with being happy. Happiness is a state of mind. Being slender is a physical state. Why would I connect the two dots? The answer is actually quite simple and a bit disheartening: I’m shallow. I said as much in my last blog, but I just hate myself for it.

I’m not shallow in my perception of other people, but I’m afraid that I’m horribly small-minded when it comes to my own body. In retrospect, it actually makes me seem like a bit of a narcissist. I might be looking too much into this but this is how I see things are working in my head. I don’t judge people on their looks, but constantly think people are judging me by mine. Why? I think I’m better than everyone. Here’s how it sounds in my unconscious mind: “I’m not judging you by your appearance but that’s because I’m more capable of seeing you that way, therefore you must be judging me by my appearance because you, mortal, are inferior to me.” Apparently my unconscious thinks I’m a deity.

Where does this come from? I’m not entirely sure. It could be from the fact that I grew up in a very, very tightly knit family. All that positive reinforcement is good, but I never really received any feedback from outside that very small circle of people. It could be from the fact that when I was a child someone told me that nobody likes to be friends with fat people. Maybe it’s from years of growing up in front of the television in constant exposure to the media’s definition of what a “perfect” body should look like. Ironically, in said situation, I led a sedentary lifestyle while stuffing my face with snacks (I loved my cheese ballz).

I’ve got to admit that this blog is going in a direction that I totally did not expect. I’m not exactly sure what to think of this knew psychological approach, but it is something new. After all, it isn’t until writing this did I realize that my body had gone through some enormous changes in the past few years. But I never recognized the fact that my mental state had declined steadily and didn’t reflect my physical health. Now that I’ve pushed all my emotional baggage in the forefront of my quirky mind, maybe I can get over those issues and actually get my life back on track.

And if you’ve stuck with me this long your reward is the answer as to why Bruce Lee makes the top of the cool list. Well, let’s just say I measured his coolness not in units of Fonzy, but in units of Norris. And everyone known that 100,000 Mega-Fonzy’s is equal to 1 Norris unit. Take a look at the video below… QED (I’m fully aware how many nerdy references I made in this last paragraph).

Dear Journal, This Time It's Personal

Current Weight: 220.1 lb

It’s been four months since my last post and, for better or worse, I’m still within the 220 lb range. I warn you though, numbers can be deceiving. Oh, so deceiving. Between the months of January and April, I have managed to actually get my weight down to a number as low 214.7 lb. That only lasted a day, but I digress. For the past few weeks I have hovered over the 215-217 mark. And then I made the mistake of going to a seafood buffet. That’s when I learned an important lesson: When you put the word “buffet” in front of any food type, it negates the beneficial qualities of said food.

For whoever may be reading this, you may be wondering why I haven’t been posting on a regular basis. Well for the first week of the New Year I managed to gain weight, and I was too bummed to post it up for the world to see. Then when I started to lose weight, I was just too lazy to post anything. Lately it’s been getting harder and harder to lose more weight. I started the year at 220 lb and am currently at 220 lb, not very productive.

I have taken two programs of that diet that I mentioned a few months ago, and managed to lose almost 20 pounds while under their watchful eyes and it has thankfully stayed off. But those programs are expensive, and I have yet to get a job. Here I am, all by my lonesome, trying to lose 35 more pounds. Obviously, I’m no longer putting myself under the time limit of 10 weeks to lose that weight. However, suffice it to say that I don’t want to wait until I retire to reach my weight goal.

To help police my actions, I have gotten myself a journal. Well, let’s put it this way. I got a notepad about a year ago and never really used it. Earlier this week, when I found out that my weight had returned to the 220 mark, I decided to use that notebook to chronicle any huge changes in my eating activity. When I opened to the first page I saw that I had already started to use the notebook. My first entry was on December 2, 2009. The interesting thing that I found in it was the last statement that I made:

Thought for the day: Losing weight is a mental illness, not a physical one. Fat is incidental to chemical dependency.

It was my way of saying that I knew exactly why I’m fat. It’s because I eat! I know, that doesn’t seem all that innovative but I’m telling myself that I know exactly how to lose weight. I’ve done it. I know how to maintain weight. I’ve been doing it. But why do I eat?

To tell you the truth, I’ve never really given it much thought. I just know that I’ve always been that guy that cleans his plate despite what my stomach might be saying. Fortunately for me, summer is approaching which means there is an abundance of weight loss articles telling people to get in swimsuit shape. Screw them; I just want to be happy in my own skin.

For the past month or so I have been experimenting with my behavior as far as eating is concerned. I’ve been determined to find out why I don’t lose weight, or gain it back when I do manage to lose it. I can’t say that I’ve entirely figured it out, but things are starting to make a little more sense.

I started writing in my new weight control journal this week and tried something different. Instead of writing out sentences and counting out calories, I’ve decided to be as brutal as I could to myself. Sketched out pictures of myself and took pictures of my body (get your mind out of the gutter) and I looked at myself through discriminatory eyes. I took apart everything about my body that I hated and I wrote out exactly why I hated what I saw. It was then that I realized that I didn’t really give a crap about my health. I was obsessed with my own body and how ugly I thought it was.

I’ve got to admit that I was rather disgusted with myself when I came to the realization that I could be so shallow. Don’t get me wrong, I have no obsession with other people’s bodies. When it comes to a girl I’m attracted to, physical appearance has little to do with it. In fact, I made that observation in my journal the other day. I’ve convinced myself that the reason I’m alone is solely because of my weight. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but I suspect that it isn’t.

What’s interesting here is that I forced myself to look at my body and be as unforgiving in any of the observations that I made. All I see is the gut. And that’s it. I feel awful. All these years, that I’ve expressed the horrible way mass media portrays the idea of an “ideal” body type, it turns out that I’ve succumbed to it.

Looking back at all the times that I overeat to the point that it feels like I’m going to have a moment similar to the chest popping scene in Aliens, I realize how I would eat to give me something to do. Keeping the mind preoccupied meant it didn’t have to deal with whatever was right in front of me. Whenever I felt lonely, I stuffed myself. Whenever I was stressed, I stuffed myself. Whenever I was depressed, I stuffed myself.

Everyone has an emotional crutch, and I happen to have two. One healthy, the other… not so much. One of my crutches is a release of tension and a way to get the jumble of a Rubik’s cube that are my thoughts into some semblance of order so that I can think more clearly. That release is writing. I’ve been doing it since about the third grade. In fact, I’ve got another blog that I dedicate to my writing endeavors (QuixoticStories.blogspot.com). I’m a self promoting whore, I know.

My second is retreating into my head by way of eating. I’ll be honest; I get anxious in big crowds where I have to act myself. To be honest, I really don’t think the real me is all that interesting. I don’t do what most people my age do for fun. It’s incredibly hard to relate to somebody and when I find someone that I think I can connect to, I’m scared to death to do anything that would totally screw that up and put me in a different light. But I’ll leave my crippling fear of rejection and failure for another blog.

Of all the times that I cram food into my chubby little cheeks, I can’t ever recall feeling guilty. And yet when I get out of the shower, I go out of my way to avoid looking at my body. I know that when people see me, they don’t see the fat or what I call my “melted nipples” (Alright, I know that sound gross but I think I’ve made it clear that I’ve had some mental issues). But my point is that there are some serious mental issues that I think I have to resolve, or at least bring to light, if I am to consider myself successful as far as getting back to 180.

I started this blog to honestly keep me on track as far as being a healthy person and I’ve come to the realization that mental health is just every bit as important as physical health. I apologize if this isn’t as light hearted as my usual entries but being unemployed for a year has really gotten to me. And that hasn’t helped the diet situation.

To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure why I still keep up with this blog. Only about two or three people actually read it, and I’m pretty sure I had the selfish wish of wanting to become famous when I started (I think my subconscious wants me to be a douche-bag). I suppose it’s the illusion that there are strangers actually paying attention to my doings that keeps me coming back every so often to post.

To wrap things up, I know what I want. I want to be happy. I want to be satisfied with the way things are. A part of me is ecstatic that I’m so obsessed with my body. The only upside to being superficial is that it’s a great motivational tool for losing weight. I hate the way I look and I want to change that. I still intend on getting back to 185 pounds. I’ve lost 20 pounds since I’ve started posting and I have 35 more to go. I’ve been thin before and I know I can get back there again, but with two differences. (1) When I get rid of all that fat, I’m keeping that fat away for good. (2) The second time around, I’m going to be happy.

The Resolution Deception

Day: ??????
Current Weight: 220(ish) lb

It has been three months since I have posted anything on here. The truth is, that I gained a whole lot of weight (5 or so pounds) and was afraid to come back on here until I, at the very least, broke even. Then, I did reach my original weight and lost even more. Then the holidays kicked off. That's when I realized the odd thing about resolutions: the whole "I want to lose X pounds by the next year" is not only cliche but an excuse for not thinking up a better resolution.

Losing weight as a resolution is more like a reaction to all the food that we stuff ourselves with over the holiday season. Halloween candy,Thanksgiving turkey, and Christmas cookies are just padded weight and not to mention a collective, tangible manifestation of our guilt over pigging out when we've been raised to believe that it's the season of giving.... Sorry I got all "college" just then.

The bottom line is, my goal to get back to 180 pounds has not changed, but I will not alter it into a New Year's Resolution, as that is just another set up for failure. Putting a hard time limit will just stress me out. I have got to go at my own pace if I expect to get to that "ideal weight" whilst maintaining my sanity.

Now that I got yet another rant out of my system let's take a look back at the year. Since I've started on this kooky experiment, I have lost a net amount of 18+ pounds. Hooray for me! And what makes this so different is the fact that I'm doing it on my own terms. I turned on the T.V. the other day and saw all the weird "reality" shows that emphasize the so-called "ideal" body. Seriously, how frakking stupid is the idea of one body type?

If you want to lose weight, you should do it because you want to be a healthier person. Or at the very least, lose the weight because you yourself would like to lose the weight. You can't shed the pounds for someone else otherwise it all comes back with a vengeance... and with a whole lot of other pounds. I suppose that's why I've been successful thus far. Firs and foremost, I learned to be comfortable in my own skin. And then, I decided it would be in my best interest to change my eating habits. That way if whoever I was trying to impress loses interest, I don't gain the weight back since I'm doing it for my own personal pleasure.

So with that being said, this will be my final blog for the year 2009. (But not for the decade as the true beginning of the millennium was in 2001 and not 2000... Sorry for the extra rant) Have a Happy New Year and cherish the one day that it is appropriate to celebrate the dropping of balls.

Cereal Killer

Day: 27
Current Weight: 224.3 lb

So I’ve teetered and tottered between 224 and 225 for the past week. I went to the grocery store today to restock on the healthy ingredients that have helped get this far. Imagine yourself walking down the aisle of the supermarket looking for cereal. Chances are that you’ve already got a brand in your head, or at the very least, you know what kind of cereal you’re looking for. I’m usually the same way, but not this time. Why? I don’t know, I felt like something different.

Once you train your body to start eating healthily (and more importantly not hating yourself for doing so), it’s very easy to get bored. And when you get bored, you use that as an excuse to splurge on the naughty food. So, in order to get out of that rut, I committed myself to buying a different cereal to start the mornings of with. I went down the aisle and actually felt intimidated by all the different kind of cereal there is to buy out there.

Most of the time I just walk in and say, “Cheerios, there it is!” Then, I take a box that hasn’t had the crap beaten out of it (Why do they even put those boxes on the shelf?) and move on down my grocery list. Instead I looked wide-eyed and stupefied at the wall of breakfast foods staring back at me. It seriously looked like I was trying to learn how to read in the middle of the store. Suffice it to say, I’m going back to grocery lists.

The bike seems to be helping a lot. It’s quiet, doesn’t require any electricity to operate, and is really low-impact. The last bit is really important if, like me, you’ve got horrible weak arches on your feet. I think it can be technically called a line if there is no arch in it at all. But I digress.

Even though I’m not losing as rapidly as I was a few weeks ago I’m happy with the progress I’ve been making. I’m still losing weight, albeit the bare minimum to be considered weight loss, but still I’m going the opposite direction that I fear to go. I think that’s another thing that’s essential to weight loss: Optimism. Times are tight and it’s comforting to know that we still have control over some things in life.