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.”
