The Dead Weight

Oh my god…. I’m so full.

So, I spent the last month eating damn near anything and everything that I wanted. I ate cookies and candy. Turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy. Went out to parties and had things wrapped in bacon and punch that was loaded with booze and empty calories. I ate one of those cakes that’s rolled up to look like a log. Or maybe it was an actual log. I don’t know. That’s just how out of control I was. How much damage did I do? We’ll find out Wednesday.

Here’s an announcement about the future of this blog. I’m going to be posting here somewhat regularly for the next month or so. Then I will be making a minor announcement sometime in February that will change the direction of this site. That sounds unnecessarily cryptic, I know, but there’s really no point in getting into it any further at this point in time. You’ll see. It’s all fun stuff, don’t worry.

I hope you all had a great holiday season and that 2009 is off to a great start for you.

So I fast-forwarded through the Biggest Loser finale the other night. Somehow they managed to fit 14 minutes of compelling programming into a scant two-hour time-slot. This season was won by the woman of ambiguous ethnicity (the younger one).

I enjoy the show and I enjoy the idea of people making positive changes in their life but there’s certainly something a bit depressing (or hilarious, depending on my mood) when you read or hear of the “winners” gaining back some or all of the weight.

For example, Ryan, the guy who won the first year ended up gaining all the weight back. Here’s what he wrote about his preparations for the last show in his season:

I wanted to win so bad that the last ten days before the final weigh-in I didn’t eat one piece of solid food! If you’ve heard of “The Master Cleanse” that’s what I did. Its basically drinking lemonade made with water, fresh squeezed lemon juice, pure maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. The rules of the show said we couldn’t use any weight-loss drugs, well I didn’t take any drugs, I just starved myself! Twenty-four hours before the final weigh-in I stopped putting ANYTHING in my body, liquid or solid, then I started using some old high school wrestling tricks. I wore a rubber suit while jogging on the treadmill, and then spent a lot of time in the steam room. In the final 24 hours I probably dropped 10-13 lbs in just pure water weight. By the time of the final weigh-in I was peeing blood.

Fun!

Dear Oprah,

Hey there, sweetheart, what’s going on? I hope you’re enjoying this holiday season. I picked up a recent issue of O magazine (I’m not sure which month it was but I’m pretty sure you were on the cover) and it has some great advice on where to get the best cashmere socks and a very compelling interview with Blair Underwood. I don’t know how you do it, girlfriend!

Listen, I hear you’ve been having trouble with your weight recently – you’ve slipped back into some old habits and packed on a few of the pounds. Sounds like you could use a visit from hunky home-improvement guru Ty Pennington to renovate your big fat rear-end! Right, girlfriend? What? Oh, I’m sorry, I was just kidding around. I apologize.

You’ve been struggling with your weight for over 30 years and I know you think the answer has to be difficult or mandated by some expert you’ve brought on your show. But you yourself are living proof that even with the best advice available and your own personal chef, it’s still very easy to gain the weight back. One big problem that you need to get over is your belief in magic; your belief in books like The Secret, or putting pictures on your Vision Board, or “sending your desires out into the universe” and all that shit. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist. If that stuff did exist, we wouldn’t be talking about your fat ass again because you would have willed it into the ether already. The universe doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t give people yachts and it doesn’t give them pediatric AIDS. The universe is indifferent. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t have the capacity to care.

But I do, and I’ve got a bit of a heads-up for you. Remember in the 80’s when you went on that liquid diet and then you carted out that wagon with the fat in it? You looked real skinny but you ended up gaining the weight back super-quick, so that kind of sucked. And then, in more recent years, you went on a “sensible” diet where you did a lot of power-walking with Bob Greene and ate poached chicken breasts and wild-rice and things like that. And, although it took longer, you ended up gaining that weight back too. Well, here’s something Dr. Oz isn’t going to tell you: eating “healthy” to lose weight is just as flawed a long term strategy as going on a liquid diet to lose weight is, because neither strategy has anything to do with your relationship with the foods you naturally crave and enjoy. You never learn to eat them in moderation, you only learn to avoid them. Oh sure, you told all of us that after cutting out the sugar and the grease you learned to love the taste of carrots or whatever, that’s what everyone says, but in the long run look what has happened. Or, as Dr. Phil says, “How’s that working for you?”

So I’ve got some different ideas for you about how to lose the weight. You can read about them on this blog. I hope you’ll check them out.

And hey, how about this Barack Obama fella? Am I right, girlfriend?!

I’m in the midst of celebrating Christmonth, which is a month long holiday I’ve created between my birthday at the end of November and Christmas. But you can celebrate it too, even if your birthday isn’t at the end of November, just use Thanksgiving as the start of your Christmonth.

Christmonth (pronounced criss-month) is a time when we should all try to live two attitudes to their fullest. The first is “good will towards men,” which is a fairly common sentiment this time of year. The second is “aww, fuck it.” For example, “I really shouldn’t sit here eating a pan of brownies and watching ancient, Tivo’d episodes of Scott Baio is 45…and Single when I told myself I would wallpaper the guest-bathroom today. Aww, fuck it, it’s Christmonth!” In fact, the spirit of Christmonth is all about extending the idea of good will towards men to include yourself too. You get to be hard on yourself and disappointed in yourself the other 11 months out of the year. For this month just relax and do the things you want as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.

I realize a lot of my advice comes down to “Hey, just chill out,” but I think that’s a valid bit of advice in a lot of ways. It might not be useful for everything in your life, but I think the things we obsess about can sometimes be helped by taking a step back rather than being more vigilant.

Well, I’m taking a week off to go celebrate my birthday then Thanksgiving with family and friends. That means a lot of cake and pie and mashed potatoes and late-night Turkey sandwiches and everything that’s not conducive to losing weight. But there are times when losing weight isn’t my #1 priority. There are times when my #1 priority is gravy. Yum.

Hope everyone reading this has a great Thanksgiving and I will be back with some new stuff at the beginning of December.

There are very few people I have a whole lot of respect for in the fitness business. But one person who I could not possibly feel more affinity and affection for is Jack Lalanne. A few years ago I was on my couch at home and I was either sick or just exhausted from a late night, I can’t remember now. As I was flipping around the channels looking for something to zone out or fall asleep to and I came across ESPN Classic which was doing a marathon of Jack Lalanne’s daily TV show from the 50s and 60′s. I was completely captivated by him. Part of it was because I enjoy almost anything from the that time period, but beyond that I loved his attitude and his philosophy and his boundless energy. It’s not so much that I agree with everything he says, but he embodies an enthusiasm and “can-do” spirit that I really admire. He talks a lot about vim and vigor and intestinal fortitude and a lot of other words your rarealy hear these days. Even when losing weight wasn’t a concern of mine I used to love to watch the show which I would tivo every morning.

Here are some Jack highlights.

Jack’s 10 Steps for self-improvement:

Jack shows you how to lift 1000 pounds (or accomplish any impossible task):

Jack’s dog Happy who meanders in and out of the set during filming:

Sadly, ESPN Classic stopped showing the show in the morning, I guess to make room for some Shamwow commercials or something. The good news is there have been a few DVD releases that you can find at Jack’s site. I highly recommend his “Collector’s Edition” DVD’s Vol. 1-4. If you buy them as a package they’re dirt cheap. They’re probably the only exercise videos I’ll ever watch because they’re the only ones I enjoy watching. The exercises are scored by an organ player right in the studio! The shows seem a little bizarre compared to what you see these days, but I think they’re perfect.

What you see in this blog is not just my attempt to lose weight, but also my attempt to quantify the process of losing weight without following a diet. As I struggle through that, you will get to see the touchstones that I come upon during that search. So this post covers an idea I had this weekend.

To summarize:

My idea is that you know what you need to do to lose weight. You know that if you have a 14-egg omelet with sausage and chocolate-chips for breakfast that you should take it easy for lunch and dinner. In fact you know better than anyone the best way for you to lose weight because you’re you and you know what your issues are. The idea that the answers are out there somewhere is actually slowing you down. You don’t fail to lose weight because you lacked some knowledge that would allow you to lose weight, you fail to lose weight because you lack follow-thru. The ideal situation is that you are not constricted by any rules but you are still losing weight. This doesn’t mean that you’re eating like a pig and still losing weight, what I mean is that there are no particular types of food that are prohibited and no times of day that you have to eat or can’t eat.

I want eating in a manner that allows you to lose weight to be incredibly important to you, but I also want it to be so second nature that you don’t think about it or stress about. It’s like taking a shower. You wouldn’t usually go more than a day or two without taking a shower, but at the same time you don’t spend you day thinking about showering. Showering is so important that you engage in it almost every day, but so automatic that you don’t worry about it. This is what not eating too much can become, but we have to beat it into you.

People hate counting calories and exercising. Do you hate counting calories and exercising? Good, then we can use them as leverage.

Weigh yourself tonight. Okay, now let’s imagine you’re on diet probation and the scale is your probation officer (It’s a dumb metaphor, but it seemed to be the easiest way to describe my idea). For the next two days you can eat and exercise as much or as little as you want. You can have 1 meal a day or 100. You can eat celery every meal or drink hot fudge. It’s up to you. But at the end of the second day you have to check in with your probation officer again. Have you lost weight? If so you get another two day pass. Wake up in the morning and remind yourself that you’re trying to lose weight that day, but beyond that do as you like.

However, if you don’t lose any weight you’ve violated your probation and you’re going back to diet jail. And in diet jail, you’re MY bitch.  For your first violation you will be in diet jail for two day and you have to exercise at least half an hour day. Once those two days of strict calorie counting are over you’re free and you’re released out into the public again. But you still have to check in with the scale every two days.

And you can keep doing these two days with no rules over and over as long as you’re losing weight after every two-day series. But the second time you fail to lose weight you’re going back to the joint for three days of strict calorie counting and 35 minutes of exercise. And it will keep going like that. Each time you “violate probation” (fail to lose weight over a two-day stretch)  you add another day to your sentence and another 5 minutes to the amount of time you need to exercise per day during the calorie-counting period. So the fifth time you fail to lose weight during the two-day no-rules period you will have to count calories for the next 6 days and exercise for at least 55 minutes per day each of those 6 days. And you’re not allowed to estimate calories during the calorie-counting. Everything needs to be measured and weighed or come from a source where the calories are already listed. But that’s a pain in the ass, you’re saying. Yes, that’s the idea.

The theory is that the prospect of counting calories and mandatory exercise will be so unappealing that you’ll curb your eating and get in a little exercise during the course of each two-day diet even though it’s not mandatory. If you keep your nose clean and stay out of trouble then every time you weigh-in you’ll have lost a little something and you’re free to live without any rules in place. But if you act like a douchebag and eat like a pig then you’re going to the pokey.

Ideally you would find that every two days you had lost at least a little weight, even just a percentage of a pound, and then you would never have to count calories or mandate exercise at all. Your goal during those two-day periods would be simply to not eat like a maniac (or, even better, eat like you’re on a first date) and maybe get some exercise in when you can and keep yourself out of jail, the big house, the pokey, the graybar hotel, Old Stoney Lonesome, the pen, the can, the hoosegow, and so on.

Hello. I’m sick and in no mood to write a post. In fact, I’ve never been in less of a mood to write a blog post. Once I recognized that, I realized that I definitely needed to go write a blog post. It’s a good precedent to set. Now, the next time I’m not in the mood to write something I’ll think, “Hey, you did it when you were suffering with a sinus infection headache so there’s no reason you shouldn’t do it now.” So I’m writing this post more for my sake than yours. So here it is.

Today I was thinking about the Morning Banana Diet which is another goofy fad diet that was started in Japan. Actually, relative to a lot of stuff that comes out of Japan, this isn’t all that goofy. What it amounts to is: Eat a banana or two for breakfast. I have no doubt that people lose weight on this diet. Not because there is something about the diet itself that makes you lose weight, but just because it forces you to pay a little attention to what you’re eating which is all you need to start losing weight. There’s a reason a lot of fad diets work at the beginning and then stop working. And it’s not a matter of the diet itself failing or your body adjusting to it. It’s just that it’s not new and novel anymore so you don’t give it the attention you were at the start. It wasn’t the diet so much that was helping you lose weight, it was the attention you were giving to the food you were eating.

It’s like a relationship. You start a new relationship and you’re putting a lot of effort into it and you’re thinking, “This is great. He’s great. We have so much fun together.” But then the novelty wears off, you stop putting as much effort into it, things fall apart, and you start looking for a new person.

In that way the serial dater and the serial dieter have a lot in common. They’re looking outside themselves for the answers. The obvious solution is to try and find in yourself what you’re looking for outside of yourself.

But hell, that’s hard to do. So here’s an idiotic fad diet for you all to enjoy!

I call it, The Google Diet. The way it works is this. Google this phrase “andy ate a” except instead of Andy use your name. Make sure to google it in quotes. You’ll end up with a certain number of results. For example, I had 126. Now, whatever follows the “a” is what you’re allowed to eat at that meal. For example, my first result is “Andy ate a mountain of peppers.” So for breakfast on day one I can eat a mountain of peppers. It’s that easy. Your second result is what you can have for lunch, your third result is what you have for dinner, your fourth result is what you have for breakfast on Day 2. For example, my first three days on the Google Diet would look like this:

Day One

Breakfast: Mountain of peppers

Lunch: A bottle of Vitamin C

Dinner: A daddy longlegs

Day Two

Breakfast: A plum

Lunch: A frozen loaf of bread

Dinner: A lot of black beans

Day Three

Breakfast: Chorizo and French fries

Lunch: Salad

Dinner: A cat

Yum!

Once you get to the end of the results, you just loop around again. Or you can try Googling “_____ ate some” for a whole new diet. It’s just that easy! And I guarantee you’ lose five pounds in one week. Or one pound in five weeks, I forget the data. Have fun!

I don’t really publicize this site anywhere. I’m not too concerned about how many people read these words. At this point I’m writing primarily for my own benefit and trusting that if anyone is going to find something worthwhile in these postings that they will find this site somehow. It’s been linked to a few times and I appreciate all the traffic that has generated, but I wouldn’t mind writing even when it’s just for my own benefit.

So, a lot of the traffic that comes to this site comes via random searches, and one of the greatest pleasures of having a blog is seeing the search terms that brought someone to your site. I presume most people know this, but I’m sure there are a few who don’t, so here’s what I’m talking about. If you’re searching for a site on, say, preserving peaches and you type peach preserving into Google, you’ll get a bunch of sites. Once you click on one of those sites, that site will now know what search terms you used to get to that site. And with most blogging software you can see a list of those terms that people used to find your site. And I was very pleased to find that someone recently found this site by typing lose weight by masturbating into Google.

Now, that’s not a topic I’ve ever broached, per se, but I’ve definitely used those words individually a few times. Anyway, it made me curious. I began to wonder just how many calories one does burn by masturbating. Sadly, this information is tantalizingly elusive. There are many references to it online but there didn’t seem to be much science behind them and there is a large range from 50 calories to 300 calories (for a “vigorous” session). It’s difficult to quantify because, of course, different people of different sizes will burn different amounts of calories doing any activity. And some people will F themselves in a couple minutes while others like to wine and dine themselves over the course of an evening.

There is a very handy site out there for figuring out how many calories you burn for any given activity. It’s called, understandably enough, Calories Per Hour, and it can estimate the number of calories you would burn for hundreds of activities. Unfortunately it doesn’t have masturbating on it. However, I thought maybe we could use some similar activities that it does have as estimates for masturbation. Now, everyone has a different style and is built differently but the activities I chose to substitute for masturbation are:

For Men: Playing the trombone
For Women: Waxing a car or boat

Using those activities as estimates, I’ve determined that a 250 pound man, or 180 pound woman will burn approximately 7 calories per minute they masturbate. Obviously, that’s not to say that the average man and woman will burn the same amount of calories over the course of a year from this activity. There is a lot more trombone playing going on than boat waxing, I would venture to guess. When I was 16, there were times when I would play the trombone 6 times in a day. I was a regular Tommy Dorsey. That’s all any guy does at that age. I’m sure if you go to a male juvenile detention center at night it sounds like a Sousa march.

Here’s a simple chart to allow you to know how long you have to masturbate to burn off the snack you’re considering eating:

Snack — (Minutes)
Apple — (10 minutes)
Doughnut — (33 minutes)
McDonald’s cheeseburger — (47 minutes)
Outback Steakhouse Cheesefries with Ranch Dressing — (4 hours, 54 minutes)

However, remember to consult your doctor (or maybe a sexy nurse) before starting this or any exercise plan.