May 1st, 2012: I don’t think I’d ever want an easy-way pill out of this war. First of all, I’m afraid I’d just find something else to obsess over, and that new something might be unbeatable in this lifetime, so I’m ok with the devil I know. This isn’t to say I don’t keep my eyes and ears and mind open for anything that might make this, I don’t want to say “easier”, but maybe not so fuckin sllllloowwww, or maybe more linear in nature. The bumps and whoops are tough to take.
Before I get too far, I stepped off the scale at 272 today, so the pound I took on, has gone. The decimal numbers were actually 272.5 yesterday, and 272.4 today – but I refuse to get fixated on 10th’s of a pound, so I round, as mathematically appropriate.
I remember being a kid and seeing Dexatrim commercials – like in the 80’s. Isn’t it mostly an extra dose of caffeine? I bet I drink more caffeine than a pill of that stuff before 7am, so I doubt it’d do shit for me. How else would it suppress my appetite? Maybe there’s a placebo effect or something.
May 1st, 2020: The topic of dietary supplements is always present in the world in which I live, and that’s ok, it’s like a billion-dollar business and there’s a whole lotta bullshit that could bog you down, should you choose to enter this world.
One of the personal trainers I used to work with summed it up in the most basic of sentences, “Supplements are for supplementing.” It took me until like 2016 to dial-in with this principle myself. Prior to that, I believe I tried every supplement I could get my hands on at GNC, and would often use those to replace rather than supplement.
The photo in this post has the current supplements I use, Advil probably being the only one I couldn’t live without entirely. Prior to hip surgery, I was eating Advil like Skittles, but the absence of osteoarthritis in my hip has allowed me to cut back to maybe 1600 mg a week – my stomach may actually survive!
What you see in the photo is pretty basic stuff because I believe in getting most of what I’m supposed to from food, and that’s something I’ve taken care to figure into my program. The program is expensive enough without dropping wads of cash-salad on supplements that I honestly haven’t researched enough to really see what they could do for me.
The thing is, and I’ve stated it before – I’m no lab rat, nor am I a discipline machine. There are soooooo many variables to physical performance that I couldn’t ever control for just that one in myself. I couldn’t hold all else as a constant with enough fidelity to make the use of spendy supplements the only y-value in my process. I just come back around every time to the cobbled-together program that’s worked for me for a long time now. When I get the duck-tape and painter’s-tape and scaffolding and drop-cloths removed from it, I’ll put it out there to give y’all the option to try it, but…
…If what you take or use in addition to your regular diet seems to be working for you, well then…
….If it isn’t, stop spending money on it.
