Lean, Mean...Softserve Machine?

Two sixty-eight.

For the past two or three years I have been in a rut. On the high end of the rut is 270, the low end 260. I work out and diet and sweat and run away from ice cream, and I slowly and painful drop to 260. I relax, even a little, eat a second (or third or fourth) slice of pizza, break off half a cannoli (and then a quarter and then an eighth, before repeating the process with a second or third cannoli) and before I know it I am once again knocking on the door of 270.

I've been lifting (see "Pumping Iron -- The Musical") which, in addition to a constantly aching right shoulder, has given me a little of my musculature back, but the fact remains: some guys have a six-pack, but I've still got a pony keg.

I have to bite the bullet and go cardio. Walking is actually very effective for me. I walk 30 or more minutes a day, and the number on the digital scale starts to fall. Eliptical, treadmill and other gym machine cardio is good, but it bores me out of my freakin' mind. I like jumping rope -- and have a zillion different kinds -- so that's good. I love P90x, but can't find the DVDs. (They're somewhere, I know it.) I like working outside, and I have always been fond of good, old-fashioned, Marine Corps calisthenics. So I have a lot of options.

What I need is a plan.

Okay, then. Here's the plan that begins from this moment on:

• 30 min. morning roadwork (walk/run) or ropework AND/OR



• 30 min. lunchtime cardio (eliptical/class/etc.) AND/OR



• 30 min. evening walk/run/calistenics.

At minimum, I will do 30 min. of SOMETHING everyday. If I miss the morning, I shoot for lunch. If lunch doesn't materialize, then it has to happen when I get home. In short, I can't go to sleep until I've done my 30 min. NO EXCEPTIONS.

It is June 20, so I will shoot to weigh 250 (loss of 18 pounds) by August 30.

Motivational comments welcomed!

Blogging and jogging for bucks

Okay, so let's make this interesting for my homies in Corporate America. It is not enough that I am slogging through the early morning fog, knees throbbing and sweat raining down, in an effort to shed unwanted pounds. (If the slow, steady tedium of diet and daily exercise is agonizing on the participant, how much more so must it be for the spectator.) To keep readers, I need to spice up this blog, add some hard numbers and inject massive doses of motivation, to make it more engaging for you -- and potentially more lucrative for me.

So I've added stats. I've started with the birth of this blog, and I am tracking the following figures:

• How many days the blog has been up


• How many posts I've published in that time


• How much weight I've lost


• How much money I've earned from people clicking on the ads


• The rate in lbs./wk I'm losing


• How much money I've earned in $/lb.

Goal-setting

My goals for this little experiment are as follows:

• Lose 60 lbs.


• Maintain a rate of 1.5 lbs/wk


• Earn, via ads, $10/lb.

The last goal seems the most ambitious, but that's where you come in. Everytime you check out my latest, ever-more-motivating entry, click on all four ads in the upper righthand corner. (You have to use the down arrow each time to get to new ads -- a usability faux pas, if you ask me.) Then send a link to the blog to everyone you know who is even remotely interested in losing weight and getting in shape -- and remind them to click on the ads. You can explain to them that it is an experiment in grassroots e-commerce.

I know $10/lb. sounds tough. But together we can do this. :-)

The night before

A quick update on "my friend's" weight bet. It ends tomorrow. If he has lost 18 pounds, dropping from 275 to 257, he wins. (At least half the cash.) That means he's had to lose 10 pounds in the past four days. What it really means, is that he will have sweated off a bunch tomorrow morning.

His plan for the morning: many cotton sweats and roadwork. If it stays hot, like it is tonight, he stands an okay chance. Maybe.

Anyway, once this madness is over, he can go back to slow, steady, Point-counting weight loss.

Wish him luck. He's gonna need it.

Two Days till Weigh-In

It is Saturday morning, and my friend -- the one with the weight bet -- is sweating. Not literally yet. He had 10 pounds to lose and four days to do it. Now he has two days and no scale. (He keeps it at work.)

So what's the plan? Starve himself? No way. That'll backfire. Saturday or Sunday night will come around, and he'll snap and pizza, beer and chips will fly into his mouth like planets, stars and asteroids getting sucked into a black hole. So he's just gonna to eat light, avoiding sodium. And he's going to drink. A lot. NOT beer. Water. Probably not diet soda, either. That somehow seems to make him hungrier than drinking water. Maybe that's just psychological. Maybe it's all just psychological.

So the keys are these:

• Eat light, lots of fruits and vegies.
• Avoid sodium.
• Drink water like a big, thirsty sponge.
• Move. Walk, work around the house, jumping jacks. Anything.
• Don the sweats at 4:30 Monday morning and SWEAT.

Every bullet is key, but the last will be the clincher. He'll be going to the weigh-in pretty much blind, not knowing if he made it or not, so the morning sweatshop session will be key.

And if he loses, it's not the end of the world. He actually likes his competition and would be happy to see her succeed. But he would be even happier for her to lose all but .5 pounds of her goal and for him to exceed his by the same amount.

Either way, he's going for it.

Can't Lose Weight? Wanna Bet?

Losing weight and getting in shape can improve your health, increase your lifespan, reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. It can improve your relationships, let you live a fuller, more satisfying life. It can increase your confidence and, as a result, allow you to earn more and progress more quickly in your field.

And yet somehow, while all these benefits may fail to motivate us, bet someone $100 you can do it, and, BAM, you are all over it!

I am the greatest transgressor when it comes to this. I made my first of countless diet bets while I was in high school at Choate. When my plans to become a football hero were dashed by a nasty broken leg -- one of those twisting, shattering, full-cast-for-six-months kind of breaks -- I managed to pack on some extra pounds. When the piano player in my band, Caruso and the Busboys, said there was no way I could get back in shape for our big gig at the end of the month, I bet him a bass guitar I'd lose 20 pounds in 4 weeks.

And I did.

"So what's wrong with that?" you ask. Nothing. Except that I gained it right back. This has been a theme ever since. Gain weight. Get fed up. Make a bet. Loss the weight, collect the prize, and start the upward climb almost immediately.

But I have learned something in the process. With that first bet for the bass guitar, I lost 20 pounds in 4 weeks and gained it back in...five? I don't remember exactly, but it came back fast. The last bet I made was a couple of years ago. I lost about 30 in 3 months, and it took me a whole year and a half to get back to square one.

So what's the significance of this? "It's still a yo-yo," you say, "just a slow yo-yo." The significance is that you have to slow down before you stop. And what I have finally learned is that the thing you have to slow down is the rate at which you lose the weight.

This is America. We are the land of instant gratification. The land of silver bullets. The land of no payments till 2009. Unfortunately, this is not how the body works. Millions of years of evolution have hardwired various survival mechanisms into our DNA. One such mechanism is the "don't starve" mechanism. That's the scientific name, I believe. Simply put, our bodies will do what they can to prevent us from starving to death. That means, at the first sign of starvation, the body turns down the furnace. In other words, our metabolism slows so we need fewer calories. That is how prisoners of war are able to survive for years on bowls of gruel. The body slows down when we cut our intake dramatically.

The only way to circumvent this is to lose weight slowly. The slower the better. One to two pounds a week max.

There is a lot more to all of this, but it'll have to wait. I've got to get something to eat.

To be continued...