May 30th, 2012: Well, I gained that pound back and I’m temporarily depressed. I’m 267 today. I promised myself I wouldn’t split hairs, or split numbers, i.e. consider fractions of numbers, but I will say that it was 266.5, but I round up at 0.5 or greater, so it doesn’t matter. The particulars don’t matter, blah, blah. I guess I’m just still eating too much.
Sometimes when people tell me they weigh the same as they did in high-school, I tell them that my goal body weight is 8 lbs. 6 ounces. This way I can say I weigh the same as when I was born. Top that fucker. For some reason, it just bugs me when some ordinary dude starts preaching on about his fitness successes to me, when, if you didn’t know me at 350 lbs., it looks like I’ve had very little success. It’s all relative of course, but I wonder if Mr. Fitness would preach to a pro athlete like he does to me about weighing the same as he did in high school. Maybe I would like to ask him if he’s had any fun post high-school, or done anything but look in the mirror, or ever tried anything that led to epic failure.
I’m just venting. I feel like I have to vent because I’m agitated about the scale number today.
It’s Wednesday and I’m taking my son to the zoo. I’m not going to work, I don’t feel like dealing with all the people who are morally, physically, mentally, and just overall superior to me. Zoo day is very important. I plan on being a regular at the zoo this summer. Last summer when we went, Will was too little to care much about the animals and I was so fat and it was so hot, that all I thought about was drinking fountains and snow cones. So he cried out loud and I cried inside. I bet it’s going to be different today, and maybe I’ll sand off some angst about what I’ve got to tweak with the diet.
May 30th, 2020: The untrained or panicked machine-gunner approach to dieting isn’t good. The program is based on hard-science, and while speculation is fine occasionally in science, manipulating a bunch of variables at once is like uncorking your M249 into the pitch dark when you don’t exactly know what you’re shooting at. In either case, it’s a waste of ammo at best, dangerous at worst.
As a dieter, I am 100% guilty of this phenomenon: you’re on a program, doesn’t matter which one, and you’ve been regularly successful. This means that if you’ve plotted your weight on a graph, it has followed a steady downward trend. With your rifle, this means that you are regularly on target when you’re calm and do as you’re supposed to do, and you place your shot. One bad day (scale goes up), and you let it get to you – not totally – but it plants that seed. With your rifle, you record a clean miss, yet you’re almost certain you did everything properly. Two bad days and you begin to feel the first chills of panic. With your rifle, and no spotter to calm your ass and read your last shot, you hold three inches high, and fire again, this time a steady squeeze turns more into a quick pull. Three bad days and the temptation to spray and pray can totally overtake you. You adjust windage with a complete fucking guess and hold high again. Forget breathing, you just yank the trigger and pull your head away too fast, looking at your target and hoping you get lucky. Four bad scale days and I could sell you a 500mg vitamin C tablet by telling you it represents the cutting edge of weight-loss methods. You jerk that trigger back – steel to steel – and you can’t let up even when the barrel’s smoking and the ejector port has flipped open and your magazine is empty.
The rare piece of direct advice: please, please, please don’t fall victim to manipulating more than one variable at a time in your diet program. Even when it just doesn’t seem to be working as well as it once did, you cannot set for fully automatic and begin shooting in the dark. I promise you this rarely works, and that is not just in my ;personal experience. It seems to lead only to exasperation with yourself, and this exasperation is just like Phlegyas driving your boat across the river Styx into the fifth circle of diet hell, where you quit for good.
When you have no answers, this is when you have to see a personal trainer or a dietician, or your doctor, or all three. LISTEN TO HIM/HER AND DO AS YOU ARE TOLD. Even when you’re fairly well-versed about legitimate methods of losing weight, it’s still like trying to perform an appendectomy on yourself. So yeah, if you find yourself firing blindly, get some help man.
