February 25th, 2012: Got two pounds for the price of one today. That puts me at 305. It may be that I paid the price for two pounds. I stayed home from work, and did not stop moving much at all yesterday. Besides the normal treadmill workout, I did a boxing workout as well – plus some serious cardio-housecleaning, long overdue. Mopping floors (shoulders and lower back), cleaning toilets (triceps and forearms), carrying garbage (biceps), vacuuming (shoulders). I actually did try to move kind of fast for the extra cardio effect – and I’m actually pretty dang sore today.
So here’s a strange phenomenon when you’re a guy on a diet, hanging out with other guys for whom dieting has never crossed their mind. As Jeff Foxworthy says, “you’ll never hear one guy ask another guy ‘does my butt look good in these pants?’”
I had some rice cakes on my desk the other day, which I thought were synonymous with dieting. One of the guys I work with asked me what rice cakes were when he saw them. My response was just to arch the one eyebrow in disbelief. You see, I work with guys from the truck driving, beer drinking, deer-hunting crowd. Either they would never give a second thought to their weight or, (and I gulp and take a deep breath here) they are trying to gain weight. If we lived in a less civilized society, I would punch them in the face every time they drank a huge weight-gain shake or said stuff like, “No matter what I do, I just can’t gain any weight.” Damn that pisses me off, seriously. It seems like they make a point of saying it to me. Isn’t life all bass-ackwards sometimes? This has got to be mostly a problem with the male dieters, but I could be wrong, and just I thought it’d be an interesting thing to point out. Just another mental challenge. The bright side of this is that I really haven’t lost any strength with this diet. I mean there are a few things. In December, I bench pressed 365 lbs. for 6 reps, now I can only do 350 lbs. for a single rep. But, my point is, I think if I stay with this until I get to 190, I’ll be able to hang with those smaller guys on the cardio stuff like running and boxing, but still be strong. Then when they say, “I wish I could gain weight”, I’ll just yawn, dismiss the comment, and move on with my day – instead of letting it bug me so much.
February 25th, 2020: I often forget about the population of dieters who’re trying to gain weight. I think I forget because it’s just so ingrained in me to lose it, rather than gain it. Truth is, gaining weight appears to be one hell of a challenge for many people. When a guy says he’s trying to gain weight, I’m assuming he’s trying to gain weight in the form of muscle. I started to consider what it’d be like to have to stuff yourself constantly with protein-packed foods and constantly track the macro’s and pack huge lunches, etc. Imagine the digestive factory overload of the guy who needs to have a vendetta against the common barnyard chicken and must express it by eating a dozen eggs and an entire one of those roasted grown-up ones every day. Add constant broccoli and volumes of bland-ass white rice to that menu, and getting sick of eating could be a serious possibility.
The old-school, and still often broadly accepted way to build muscle is to go through a “bulking” season. I guess I could just say I went through a 10-year bulk season then! I won’t deny I was pretty damn strong when I was that heavy – it simply takes a lot to move that much weight, and I did try to move as fast and as often as could, until it just hurt too much. When I peeled off the weight, much of the muscle went away right along with the fat. I didn’t care! I just wanted to be lighter!
There are ways to build muscle without getting excessively fat. The science is superbly cool, and the results even superbly cooler, provided the user is superbly disciplined about yielding to science. I have discipline, but not to those levels. Because of that fact, I simply had to go through a stage, right around maybe 230 to 240 lbs., where the only way I could describe it is that I definitely looked a lot better with my clothes on. With clothes off, I do believe I pretty much resembled the underside of something; a halibut fish maybe? Some people call this “skinny-fat”. 230 lbs. is not skinny on a 5’-10” guy, but you get the idea.
Anyhow, for the people who have to diet to gain weight, I may not ever be able to identify, but I understand the battle a little better now. You can’t just go around eating whatever the hell you want, thinking you’ll pack on muscle. Seems like without some serious planning and discipline, you may just end up with a gut. It’s hard to follow any program so closely that you’re basically your own science project. That human mind, it’s pretty complex, and those human choices cause very real and very human things to happen. Sometimes you gotta just hold on and enjoy the ride, which, although cathartic, is sometimes very diet-detrimental.
