Hot Topic
August 26, 2008
I have a super-busy week at work this week. So I’ll only be making a couple quick posts this week.
First, much like Amerigo Vespucci or Jonas Salk, I have made a wonderful discovery. The other day they were having a Hot Pocket sale at the grocery store near me, so I picked up a few boxes. Some of you are no doubt saying, “How dare you eat Hot Pockets when you’re trying to lose weight! That’s not real food. It’s loaded with chemicals!” To which I say, scram, I don’t need you’re lecture. I mean, come on, when I want a hot meal without a big deal, what am I going to pick? Or, how about this hypothetical question. Suppose a hungry bunch shows up for lunch. Seriously now, what the hell else am I going to pick? That’s right.
Or how about this third verse that I didn’t remember at all.
Anywho, I had some Hot Pockets and I began wondering what they would taste like if I cooked them without the patented “crisping sleeve.” The answer, at least in my opinion, is that they taste ten times better. You get a soft, chewy texture rather than the normal Hot Pockets taste which I would describe as “cheese sauce and Grade Z beef wrapped in a giant communion wafer.” If you have some Hot Pockets around, you might want to give it a shot.
My next experiment is to microwave items that don’t need it, like hotdogs or Gobstoppers in my unused crisping sleeves. We’ll see how that turns out.
I also weighed in last weekend. The weight continues to come off slow and steady.
Murder Weapons – Inspiration, Motivation and Success Gauging
August 21, 2008
[Murder Weapons are items I think someone losing weight, or thinking about losing weight should own.]
What if I told you I had an object that would give you constant feedback on your weight, provide a series of motivational goals, and inspire you to lose more while providing you resistance if you start to gain weight back.
What is it? Some kind of fork that plugs into your iPod or something?
Not at all. In fact, what would you think if I told you that you could buy this item for less than 15 dollars and have it with you all day long without anyone noticing. In fact, you may have this object on you already.
I’d say, “Uh-oh, Andy’s drunk again.”
Well you’re wrong, friend. I’m not drunk again, I haven’t sobered up from the last time I got drunk.
But seriously, what is this miracle object?
A belt.
What you should do is go out and buy a belt — the kind with holes — that just barely fits you. You want to just be able to cinch your fat ass into the belt. Then as you lose weight you’ll notice the belt get looser and looser, providing you positive feedback towards your goal. But just when you’re about to get complacent, you’re able to fit the buckle into the next tightest hole on your belt. Now the belt is tight again, and you have a new goal ahead of you (getting to the next hole).
I know it sounds stupid but I just happened to buy a new belt before starting to lose weight and there is really a nice sense of success when you get to a new hole. For the person losing the weight, it can often be hard to sense your own accomplishment because you’re too close to it. But with a belt you really get to feel your accomplishments inch by inch. Sure, your shirt is going to get looser on you as you lose weight, but your shirt doesn’t have measured increments of tightness or looseness. And with a belt, you can wear the same one when you’re 180 pounds that you did when you were 300 pounds, so you can walk around with that constant reminder of what you’ve achieved. You may even get to the point where you have to start poking your own holes in the belt. That’s a real power move. So buy a belt.
Great Idea
August 18, 2008
As you can probably guess if you’ve read this blog at all, I’ve got a ton of great ideas rattling around in my head. Here’s another one. Have you heard of the Olympics? It’s kind of like American Gladiators except it’s for the whole world. Anyway, I’ve been watching a ton of olympics these past ten days or so and I’ve really been impressed. But not quite as impressed as I feel I should be. I mean, these people have trained for most of their lives to compete in these events and their skill is incredible. But it’s hard to see exactly how amazing it is when we only see them against other incredible atheletes. That’s why I feel like they should just throw some regular schlubby guy in every event and see how he does. That way, in the 100m freestyle swim, instead of having everybody finish within half a second of each other, we’d still have one tubby guy paddling a third of the way along the first length of the pool while the other guys are all getting out of the water. It would be an easy way to see the superior athleticism of the olympic atheletes. Plus it would be hilarious. I’d love to see a fat guy just hugging one of those gymnastics rings with his feet wildly kicking in the air below him, or watch two slobs attempt a synchronized dive and just end up smacking into each other then the water. It would make every even that much more exciting. This idea came to me while watching a beach volleyball match with Misty May and Kerri Walsh and wondering if there was any amount of me that they could put on the other side of the net that would beat those two. In other words, could 15 of me beat the two of them in beach volleyball? I decided the answer was probably no. I don’t know if any amount of “mes” could.
Milestone
August 13, 2008
I passed a big milestone recently when I dipped below 294 pounds. If you calculate my BMI you will find that I am no longer morbidly obese. Now I’m just regularly obese. Hooray for me!!
This is great news I think. I mean, I’m no biologist or dietician or anything like that, but I’m pretty sure that any time you can drop the adverb “morbidly” from a description of yourself, that’s probably a good thing.
Sadly, I am still morbidly charming and morbidly well-hung.
Assorted Limbs
August 12, 2008
It’s been a while since I’ve had a weigh-in. Last time we
checked-in I had a gained a couple pounds over my vacation. After that
I had a friend from Paris staying with me and then a mini
family-reunion, so I wasn’t doing much dieting during that period, in
fact I probably gained another couple pounds at some point in the interim between my
last weigh-in and this weigh-in. I didn’t bother stepping on a scale
during that time-period. I just couldn’t bear to see those numbers not
go down as I knew I would see the face of Ricky Carter staring up at
me. Ricky used to make fun of me in elementary school. He’d call me
fatty fatpants and push me down when we walked through the hall. If it
wasn’t Ricky staring up at me then it would have been Wanda Clark who
– during our sophomore year in college — told me she’d sooner fuck a
tree-stump than a “fat slob” like me.
Ok. Those incidents never happened. I don’t remember having any
of those types of incidents in my life. I wish I had. I’d love that
type of motivation. I don’t remember anyone ever making fun of me for being overweight. I
suppose this is in part due to me having a wide frame and being able to
carry it well and in part to the fact that talking shit is the one
thing I’m good at so people don’t start with me. Even romantically my
weight hasn’t stood in the way of me having relationships with smart,
fun, and beautiful women. My boyish charms and rakish good looks have
more than made up for any extra pounds. My humility has always been
very attractive to women too.
But seriously, I wish I had a person or people in my life
who teased me or put me down because of my weight. I’d like to have
that sort of antagonism. When all your motivation to lose weight is
internal it becomes very easy to become unmotivated.
That’s why I’m envious of these posts I read by women on diet message
boards where they say their husbands refuse to have sex with them and
make pig noises when they open the refrigerator. Oh sure, they’re
caught in loveless marriages with retarded boors, but at least they can
give their enemy a face. And they can look forward to getting a divorce
and banging his best friends after they lose the weight.
If you’re someone who has people standing between you and
your goals — whether they’re actively battling you or just being
unsupportive or disbelieving – I think it helps to keep in mind the
sentiment in this quote by the author Tibor Fischer in his short story,
Portrait of the Artist as a Foaming Deathmonger:
When your enemies line up in opposition to you, you
should thank them sincerely and lengthily, because they’re helping to
make your imminent victory all the more splendid as you hack through
their assorted limbs.
Ah, yes.
As for the weigh-in:
Starting weight: 316
Current weight: 292
Pounds lost since last weigh-in: 4
Eat The Foods That Made You Fat
August 6, 2008
I don’t know what the exact percentage is but I’ve seen it quoted that anywhere from 80-98% of the people who lose a significant amount of weight end up gaining it back. Now, this is probably just one of those made-up percentages, but I think it’s a made-up percentage that is probably pretty accurate. (Unlike when people say, “You know, humans only use 10% of their brain.” And I think, “Well, you do.”)
So, for the time being, let’s just say that losing the weight is a given. Let’s operate under the theory that regardless of what diet plan you go on and stick to you’re going to lose the weight eventually. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we try and choose a diet that prepares us for maintenance and the overwhelming likelihood that we’ll gain the weight back? Most diets tell you about all the bad foods that you love so much that you have to give up in order to lose weight. I’m suggesting just the opposite. I’m suggesting that if there’s a certain food you love that is bad for you, that is exactly the type of food that you should include in your diet. Here’s the thing, you need to retrain your body to be satisfied with smaller amounts of the food you love. If you can’t lose weight while eating the foods you enjoy, you’re not going to be able to maintain your new weight and eat the foods you enjoy. So, you have two options, you can either completely give up any foods that may be “bad” for you for the rest of your life, or you can learn to eat them and be satisfied with them in some measure of moderation.
So here’s your homework. Make a list of 5-10 of your favorite foods — or types of food – that aren’t very diet-friendly, and that you know you would be unhappy if you had to give up for the rest of your life. Your categories can be fairly broad. At least 5, but no more than 10. If you’ve got more than 10 on your list you’re getting into foods you enjoy, not just foods you love, and for this to work we just need the foods we love (the foods we enjoy will then take care of themselves).
My list looks like this:
1. Candy
2. McDonald’s
3. Coca-Cola
4. French-fries
5. Pizza
6. Cake
So what I do is I try and consume at least one thing off this list every day of my diet. It’s not that my diet is focused solely on these foods, the important thing is just that I include these foods. If you’re saying:
But, Andy, you could lose weight a lot faster if you cut these foods out altogether.
then you’re missing the point.
Think of it this way. Imagine I introduce two women to you. Both of them have lost 100 pounds. “This woman,” I say, “lost the weight by eating fruits and vegetables mainly. For dinner she had a steamed chicken breast on a multigrain crispbread.” That’s impressive. “This other woman lost the weight by eating the foods that made her fat.” That’s more impressive. Which is more likely to keep the weight off? I believe it’s the one who has had all that practice eating her favorite foods in moderation.
Before You Wreck Yourself, Spellcheck Yourself
August 4, 2008
I’ve had family visiting recently and just got to usher them out of the city this weekend. I think that officially puts an end to anything vacation/hosting related this summer. That’s good because now I can devote myself to the goal of this site, at least until the holiday season when I will probably take another couple weeks off of actively thinking about it.
I like to check out weight-loss blogs and message boards and other sites for inspiration in regards to what to write about here. I don’t naturally talk about myself a lot in real life so it’s not an easy thing to do on a blog either, but if I have a subject to riff on that normally helps. So, as I mentioned, I check out some other sites to see what people are saying. There’s something I read over and over again that drives me batty. There is very little in life that bothers me, but there’s something I see on diet sites all the time that gets under my skin for some reason.
Maybe this has become so ubiquitous that it doesn’t bother people. Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine a person whose favorite possession is his rifle. He shoots his rifle everyday. He subscribes to rifle magazine and buys rifle DVDs. He spends many hours a week thinking about his rifle and the rifle’s impact on his life. He often thinks about buying another rifle. He tries to make friends with other rifle owners. He takes dates target shooting. And he visits rifle blogs and rifle websites and goes to riflefun.com and participates actively in their message boards. He has over 500 posts. The most recent one says:
I like to shoot my ryphel. When I shoot it my ryphel goes BANG!
If you read that you would think, “Oh, this person is disabled in some way. How can they possibly devote this much time to an activity and not know how to spell it?”
This is how I feel when I read blogs and message board posts about people who feel they need to “loose weight.” Loose it? You mean, set it free?
Seriously, how can you spend so much of your time thinking about something and not knowing how to spell it. I’m an awful speller but I don’t continually make the same mistakes in a word that is the crux of the subject that I’m writing about. I could understand if it was rare to come across that word or if it was just a diet-specific word, but don’t these people come across the word “lose” all their lives? They certainly read it in all the diet-related sites their perusing, right? Does it just not register with them? Or do they just think, “These loosers don’t even know how to spell the word loose.”
Are you one of these people? Not someone who occasionally adds an extra O, but someone who does it habitually. Explain yourself.
