Please Let Me Get What I Want

206.4 lbs.

Starting another week with 200 looming on the horizon. I sincerely want 200 to be like 205 now, just momentary blips on the chart over a short period of time. If I am correct, we probably won't be seeing 205 again. As of Saturday's weigh in, I am no longer clinically obese - I am 24.5% body fat which is still on the high side but nowhere near the 40% and some change I was before. The next 15lb loss after hitting 200 lbs will be significant in bringing that number even lower. After binge days, I can really feel it and see the weight now and I really couldn't tell you that before. That is the hardest part about weight loss for almost everybody - having a way to measure the progress. There is a definitely a threshold moment where you get far enough past where you should ideally be that 5 or 10 lbs don't matter either way. You might feel a loss of energy but even that can be negligible. I think that's why it is so much easier to gain weight than to lose it. There are some things I have learned and even though it may seem common sense to some, that might not be true for others. Being overweight is like being stuck in this evil infinite loop and the cognitive dissonance can be overwhelming. I got myself into this mess, how will I ever get myself out of it?

Here are some quick pointers from what I have learned:

• Weigh yourself the very first thing in the morning after going to the bathroom. That's your true number for the day and don't weigh yourself again that day - ever. So many factors will effect how much you weigh during the day, good and bad. You will never get as good a number later in the day - ever. Remember, inconsistent measurements lead to inconsistent results. Simply: you'll quit because you can't see progress.
  
• If you stumble during whatever weight loss program (or experiment) you decide to torture... uh, put yourself through, pick yourself up, brush yourself off and continue. Shit happens. Move on, tomorrow is another day.
• Try to eat your last meal of the day at least 4 hours or more before you hit the pillow. More explanation in the next point.
  
• Try to make your last meal of the day the smallest meal of the day. We eat for energy and, really, how much energy are you going to need to watch T.V.? If you do feel hungry, find something to snack on that is small, filling and without sugar but try not to overdo it. It will show up on your morning weigh in.
• Get your sleep. If you want to lose any amount of fat, you must get your rest. Your body takes energy from your fat stores to keep you alive when you sleep - if there is nothing else to burn. Most of the fat you burn will be during your sleep cycle. You can see now why it is so important to limit calories at least 4 hours before you hit the sack. You can also discern that this is another reason why it is so important to weigh yourself first thing in the morning. Don't overdo it. Enough sleep is enough sleep. Try to avoid exercising late but if you have no choice, grab yourself some magnesium or melatonin. Late exercise will backfire if it delays or hinders a proper sleeping pattern.
  
• Some things are going to be out of your control. The nasty thing about obesity is that little loop I talked about earlier. Most people with weight issues also have sleep apnea. Snoring can interrupt your sleep cycle and make it harder to lose weight. Lots of medicines will make it harder to lose weight as well. Talk to a doctor or do some research. Counteracting things you don't think are a big deal will pay huge dividends.
  
• Eat within an hour of waking up, within 30 minutes if possible. Eat protein and lots of it. Your body is in a catabolic state upon waking, the same state that allows you to burn a lot of fat when you sleep. Avoid sugars if at all possible. Your body wants protein and it knows where to get it - your muscles. Bad, bad, bad.
• Consistency, consistency, consistency. Whatever regimen you are on, keep with it and try to stay consistent. You could starve yourself and lose weight pretty quickly (and add it right the hell back on) or you can be consistent and take the smaller steps and be healthy.
• Stick with it. A lot of diets and body building programs have an intake phase. Depending on what you are doing and how quickly your body adjusts, you might not see results for at least a month depending on what you are doing (no matter what the diet says). If you are incorporating exercise this is especially true. You might be trading fat for muscle and the scale will not show that if you are working out. You need to measure body fat and not get discouraged. The longer you go, the more the body fat will melt off.
  
• Be accountable. You got yourself into this and you are the only one who can get you out of it. You are also the only one who can really screw you over. If you are going to use stress, your mother's birthday or Canadian Thanksgiving for an excuse to eat more or eat something you shouldn't - you have already failed. Try to lessen the damage when there are special events in your life by trying to still eat as well as possible. Breaking away from your diet or regimen isn't necessarily bad but if you do it all the time, it becomes consistent. Consistency goes both ways.
• Check yourself before you wreck yourself. If you haven't done exercise in years and your are a great deal overweight don't just pick up and try to run and flail about because someone told you to on T.V. or in a book. You could really hurt yourself and kick you off of whatever regimen you've started. If you are morbidly obese, buy a pedometer for five bucks and just increase your level of activity each day. A lot of books and programs out there just expect you can pump out crunches (or whatever) like a machine. Some take this into consideration and tell you to do as many as you can but if you can't do one, it is discouraging and will not do you any good.
  
• Read the label. When I go to the store I read every freaking label in sight. I could tell you the content of most things within a certain level of tolerance. Become a proactive consumer. Most things that say they are healthy - aren't. If they strip the fat out of your food and replace it with starches and sugars to make it more palatable, what the hell good is that going to do you? I love tearing apart supposed "health" or protein bars, more often than not you would be better off eating a Snickers (though I wouldn't recommend it).
• A sugar is a sugar is a sugar. Fructose, sucrose, corn syrup, agave syrup, sugar, turbinado sugar, brown sugar, white sugar - it's all the same on a certain level.
• Avoid fake sugar. Sometimes your body treats them like real sugars. Other times, they don't act like a sugar but do significantly more damage than a real sugar ever could. Avoid them or limit them if you can't do without your Diet Soda - that doesn't mean limit yourself to a 1 liter bottle a day either.

Whew! Well that's about it for today. I think that is enough. It is Sunday after all.

It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

202.4lbs

It appears we might be meeting my old friend 200 sometime next week. I am not ruling out seeing 205 one last time. It's just the way it works since binge day is upon us tomorrow. I am now below what I was last week at this time by about 1.4 lbs. If I wind up at 2 lbs lost, I will be content.

By the way, I am not making light of anything with the name of the post today, it seemed fitting. I don't believe in that whole Incan calendar, rapture is around the corner stuff but like I said on FB today, I am beginning to reconsider my position on the matter. Upon hearing that 88,000 people are missing in Japan this afternoon, I hope God doesn't have another shoe to drop as quakes seem to have been marching their way around the Pacific basin over the past few weeks. After the destruction of Christchurch, New Zealand, a tremor in Hawaii and two major earthquakes in Japan, I hope the march willl stop instead of heading directly and inevitably toward the west coast of the U.S.. God save us all.

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So I got a bit slammed for a Facebook post I made concerning the death of the morbidly obese spokesman for the Heart Attack Grille - world famous for their ridiculously huge burgers and scantily clad waitresses.

12 News (local channel) posted this:

"In light of the untimely death of 29-year-old Blair River, 575 lbs spokesman for the Heart Attack Grill, have we reached a point in our culture where it's inappropriate to celebrate gluttony as an American virtue?"

I posted this in response:

"God rest this man's soul. But as Critser so eloquently notes in his book "Fatland", obesity exponentially kills more people than bulimia and anorexia combined. We have become a society that exalts morbid obesity. This gentleman is not the first to die because someone decided to enable him rather than help him. There is a growing list. Big Pun, the rapper, died because of constant overeating because, frankly, obesity is even more exalted in some hip hop circles. Rarely does a year pass by without Oprah hiring a forklift to remove some poor soul from their house to be paraded on national television.

Speaking of mass media, haven't there been a number of sitcoms with obese men and women? Aren't there several TV channels that deal with food alone and often to the point of showing gluttony half the time? Doesn't this have the same damaging effect as print media, which celebrates thinness and lambastes the obese, by telling us it is okay to be gluttonous or waddle around our environs perpetually? If magazines and media ads featuring the thin or airbrushed really had such a profound effect on weight loss we wouldn't be the most obese nation on earth. By the way, anorexia and morbid obesity can have certain things in common. Certain people fail to see their body image correctly. Where anorexics see themselves as fat, some segments of our obese nation, see themselves as just fine as fat is slowly strangling their internal organs. In 2009 there were 218 deaths from anorexia. Deaths directly related to obesity? 112,000."

Oh man did that cause a bit of a storm, here was one of the responses:

"I like man vs food its a cool show I have learn where to eat good food around az n las vegas and cali if u r disgusted by the show just dont watch it."

I like that show and many others like it but isn't this guy missing the point a bit? This guy is actually trying to equate gastronomy with gluttony. Isn't the half pound burger enough without resorting to eating a five pound burger?

And another response:

"This is America, land of the free.. he made his own choices. We certainly do not need government telling us what to eat or how much we are allowed to eat. I am an adult. Maybe if the government put more effort into smoking or DUI/DWI instead of how many Twinkies a person had to eat this month, we as a nation would be a heck of a lot better off."

Oh so it's okay to regulate and prosecute everyone else's sins (smoking) but not yours. Got ya. Hmmm I am highly suspect of anyone being able to make their own choices when they are getting paid to make the wrong ones. Some people can't choose properly at all and that's when the trouble begins - add the root of all evil to it and bam! Also lots of people make choices; suicide victims, self mutilation etc. Does that mean we should stop trying to help those people as well?

What's funny is how many obese white people brought up anorexia and bulimia and young girls and unhealthy images in magazines in that thread. As a whole, those two illnesses are rarely found in ethnic communities where obesity is most prevalent in our society but it is the first thing screamed to the high heavens when the white folks hear that someone is going to grab that twinkie from their cold dead hands. Are they afraid if they start eating right they will suddenly develop a psychological disorder that will transform them into Karen Carpenter? The fatter and whiter you are, the more likely you are to scream fire at the BBQ. Once I was apprised of that notion, I have noticed it everywhere.

Now that is not to be disparaging of people who are overweight, I don't think that is right at all. I don't think people should have to endure discrimination because they are overweight. People come in all shapes and sizes - naturally. I will, however, call you out if you are complaining about having to purchase two airline seats for your ginormous ass as you down two value meals at the gate - that's unnatural.

Obviously, some people can't help being overweight and some people just need guidance but to die at the age of 29 from the flu because you weigh 575 lbs is just a sad state of affairs. I think if more people knew how much the calories have grown in the food they eat over the past 20 years, they still wouldn't make the right choices.

Everyone seems reticent to face the facts and no one seems to be helping, including the government who should just stay away from what we eat altogether (I have to agree in part to that one response). The government has done such an absolute piss poor job due to lack of funding and corporate lobbying that it has no right to tell anyone what they should eat whatsoever. If, as an authoritative entity, you change the country's recommended diet more than a half dozen times because you can't figure it out, how on earth would we trust anything you say to be true for more than 5 minutes?

By the way, to clarify something: anorexia is not only an eating disorder, it is a mental illness and no amount of fat people on the cover of Vogue or Cosmo will reverse this fact. Air brushed images of the supposed ideal certainly do not help anyone at all, of course. Also, obviously, these unreal pictures could be triggers for susceptible younger women. When you are younger, your brain is still trying to sort it all out because it is still developing. That's why anorexia and the like are often viewed as mental disorders - calling it an eating disorder softens the blow a bit with sophistry. I also think this holds true for the morbidly obese though somewhere in the early part of the last century we quit viewing morbid obesity as an illness. That's a fact.

I had friends in my life that weighed a good bit more than me, like a 100 pounds more, but since I was overweight they felt perfectly fine comparing themselves to me because they viewed themselves as my size even at times when I was not so overweight. They had a mental fun house mirror in their brain that I just didn't. I have never been morbidly obese but man was I fat at moments in my life. I knew this but they didn't seem to have the same self awareness. Though, admittedly, there were times in my life I tried to deny it to myself with phrases like "barrel chested" - yeah right, a barrel of fat! I propose that morbid obesity is almost exactly the same illness as anorexia. Distorted body image? Check. Self esteem issues? Check. Unhealthy eating habits? Check.

It's truly interesting to note, as a nation, we rarely assign the same importance or alarm to morbid obesity as we do anorexia and if you look at the mortality rates, that's just bizarre.

Silent Running

204 lbs. Goodbye 205, it was nice knowing you but perhaps we'll meet just one last time. You never know.

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I can remember the day I fell in love with running and the feeling it gave me. I was 16 years old and it was a cold February. In my head, the only thing I could think to do that afternoon was to go running in a snow storm. Adolescent minds have the luxury of seeking out the new that an older mind does not. As an adult, when we have done or seen something different we tend to categorize and dismiss it all away for its lack of originality. We've seen it all before or tell ourselves we have without taking the time to actually realize that everything can be new if you know how to look at it.

That day in February, black skeletal trees held up a gun metal gray sky while large white snowflakes created visual static. My running shoes were hushed by fresh powdery snow as I flew into the monochrome world. Without thinking, I dashed into the woods off of the road near my house, turning one direction and then the next like a startled rabbit. My breath pushed little momentary clouds before me.

The towering bones of dead trees stood watch as I jumped and dodged my way toward a hard frozen crooked line of ice where once was a creek. The white blanketing the broken and tangled remains of the forest dead swallowed every sound I made as I seemed to float forward into the gray.

All time was compressed or lost, I ran along the banks of the creek until I emerged from the forest gloom and reached the edge of my little town. I turned toward the road and followed it past empty field upon empty field where only wind breaks occasionally drew thin crooked pencil lines across the empty void that stretched out before me. Soon the snow increased and the sky darkened further. I could have run into the nothing and disappeared forever but better judgment took hold and I turned heel for home.

Once I got back to my house, I immediately went to my room to lay down. As I fell back on my covers, I swore for a brief moment I had glimpsed the mind of God. I felt warm and secure and at peace, a feeling that has eluded me ever since. I could brush it off as a runner's high from endorphins flooding into my brain from two hours of running in the cold but it was something distinctly different. It was almost as if this were to be a demarcation line between my life as a child and my life as man. That evening I didn't say a word at dinner but went back to my bed and tried to contemplate it all and perhaps steal another glimpse of eternity. I quietly fell asleep and drifted into the future.

Basketball

205.2 lbs. Well, Mr 205 has started begging for forgiveness and keeps saying things like: "Oh I am nothing but water weight really" and "You know I bet that last tiny piece of Key Lime pie won't set you back a bit!" It's all so very sad.

I keep dropping weight because I am able to resist temptation even when the temptation is overwhelming. Last night I went to the Suns game with my friend Lee and let me tell you the smell of fried food and the demonic scent of vanilla flavored Cold Stone ice cream permeates the air of U.S. Airways Arena. It always has; even when it was called America West Arena - us locals just call it the Purple Palace because God only knows what it will be named tomorrow. Anyway, I am pretty sure the simple act of breathing can cause you to gain weight even though it seems you are walking around half the game since the place is ginormous.

Yesterday's game was more interesting than normal because Lee had this crazy contraption on his hand because he had shattered the first joint in his index finger - while playing basketball. Lee was in a whole different world of pain after having had surgery on his shattered finger. I love the guy and I felt so bad for him but Lee's love of the game knows no bounds, he was going to go to the game even if he was a double amputee and had to drag bloody stumps behind him to get to his seat. So we had to be very protective of his fickle finger of fate. He could have just had the finger joint fused and been on the mend quicker but he went the more painful route. Why? So he can play more basketball. You've got to admire the dedication.

I have always loved basketball though I was never really any good at it whatsoever. I played in junior high and would get involved in pick up games when I could. It also seemed that a lot of my friends in life loved the game as well. I remember my friend Chad had the poster of the picture at the top of this post hung on his wall in high school, George "Iceman" Gervin of the San Antonio Spurs sitting on a throne of ice in all his regal glory. Chad and I also loved the song in this post and would blast it out of his green VW Bug as we cruised Douglas in Wichita. I still have such a fondness for Kurtis Blow and those nights in the city.

Once around the summer of 1996, basketball proved to be my weight loss savior. Another friend, named Joe, and I would go to the middle school near his house and play basketball in the afternoon. Anyone who has lived through a Phoenix summer can attest to how foolish this is. 106 degree heat on hot concrete is not ideal pick up game weather. But Joe and I soldiered on and played sometimes upwards of two hours straight. We weren't completely foolish because we always brought a gallon of water each. By the end of each basketball escapade, those gallons would be drunk dry. We did this a lot since we both had jobs that started incredibly early and we were girlfriend-less at the time. But it did mean we could eat pretty much anything we wanted that year and the weight would keep dropping off. As I mentioned before in another post, Joe's eating ability was one for the record books. I was not far behind, I have yet been able to make a binge day match what I was able to choke down in those days.

Another basketball connection that worked for me at the time was "Abs of Steel". I can hear you saying, "What?". Let me explain.

I always thought work out videos were crap and I pretty much still do. They are overpriced, overproduced and monotonous after the 2nd viewing. I once had a drill sergeant in the military who had a side job at an electronics store and he was very fond of the Jane Fonda workout at the time. So, as you can well imagine, he made us do the Jane Fonda workout on the drill pad each day. I do not hate Jane Fonda for her political posturing but I definitely hate her for that stupid freaking workout. Now, I can actually look back and laugh at the fact that there were 150 military men prancing about as if they were in a Monty Python skit.

Having said all that, there was one work out video I did like and it was incredibly effective - "Abs of Steel". I even converted the damn thing from VHS to DVD, I liked it so much. Despite the cover of the thing, there was not some half naked oiled up Adonis goading you to prance about in a homoerotic fashion. Instead, there was a rather smallish normal looking man dressed in a t-shirt and gym shorts guiding you through stages of the short workout. That man was Kurt Brungardt, physical trainer for the San Antonio Spurs. Moreover, the whole thing actually worked without being arcane. Within a month I had cuts (the good kind) that I had never had before. Nothing has worked that well, with so little effort, since. I can't speak to any of the other "of Steel" series, I just know this one was effective and it had a real honest to goodness sports trainer to walk you through the finer points. It was one of the best discount rack buys I have ever made. That $1.97 gamble paid off.

I learned some important things from that tape. As much as I hoped that my $1.97 would turn into pure comedy gold - it just didn't. I think that tape was also responsible for keeping me in relatively good shape up until 2000. Yes, I would forsake the tape for the gym (such a horrible monetary trade if you think about it) but it showed me that you could get results if you actually stuck with something. It was one of the mantras Kurt said on the tape, just do this for a month and you will feel and see the results. Kurt was right. As I hit another burst of workout mania about 6 years ago, I made sure to go back and rediscover the tape. It was not nearly as effective the second time because I was not nearly as motivated. I was nowhere near the 240lb-250lb mark that I was in 1995. Still, sometimes it helps to go back to a time that something worked for you. It means you don't have to start from scratch and you might have already traveled part way down the road without realizing how close you were to your destination in the first place.

There will always be something new to catch your eye, a trend, a diet or a workout but in the end what works for you works for you. As you watch late night cable commercials try to put a new spin on every diet and every piece of cheap exercise equipment that you can find previous variants of at a Goodwill, remember this - the key to your future success might be in your past.

Dogs

206.2 lbs. Going down sharply again. 205 is still snickering like some crazed asshole over there in the corner. I really hate 205 with a fiery passion. I feel no enmity for 200 or even the 190's for that matter. They are old friends I have not seen for a very long time. 205 is just a bastard, plain and simple. He thinks he has tiger's blood but I keep assuring him that my foot will soon be on his throat.

On Facebook there are a lot of my friends getting healthy and working out. It's neat to watch. Sometimes they post what type of exercise they did that day or what amount of weight they have lost over a period of time and it is really encouraging. The posts I find most interesting are the ones where people do shout outs to their work out music of choice. It happens a lot more often than you realize. "I just love the new Black Eyed Peas! They made me go that extra quarter mile today!" and so on and so forth. I love seeing these posts whether I agree with the choice of music or not. Rarely will I disagree with anyone's choice of work out music, if it gets you motivated - it gets you motivated.

I know when I was in High School my workout music choices were pretty odd. I used to enjoy Billy Joel's "All for Leyna" because it was angry and sort of fast (at least in my teenage mind). I also liked The Police's "Spirits in the Material World". I felt energized as I aimlessly pumped my concrete filled plastic weight set on my Weider bench. I say aimlessly because when we learned about weight training at Derby Senior High, we didn't learn much except intimidation.

There is certainly a demotivating factor, overall, to gym workouts. As you flail away on this exercise or that weight set you are forced to view people who have spent a good part of their lives fighting athlete's foot and sucking in the aroma or locker room ball sweat to achieve a superior physique (steroids never hurt anyone right?). If I were to make an accurate assessment, through hindsight, about my early experiences in the gym room, I would have to say the demotivation factor was higher than normal in the Derby Senior High School P.E. weight training class. Without knowing it, I had enrolled myself in a class principally loaded with student athletes. It was one of those little secrets I was not privy to: Weight Training was the class that all the jocks took for P.E. credit which was why it was run by one of the coaches of the football team. This was not a class for shlubs or interlopers, this was a class for kids who already knew all about weight training.

Sure there were other shlubs like me among the Olympians and of course we looked like the cast of Revenge of the Nerds: The Early Years. As our other classmates were setting maxes and grunting more than a prison cell block after lights out, we tried to get on a bench or get strapped into some device so we could figure it all out. The coach was such a raging steroid adled asshole that he reserved certain machines (most of them) for the players. For those of us who had never heard of steroids or power lifting or reps or sets, we were lost. I think I spent more time in that class looking at the excellent student painted mural of the Pink Floyd Animals album cover than I ever did lifting a weight. I can still see myself standing there watching the inflatable pig floating over Battersea Power Station.

Upon getting my first weight set (if I remember right, I bought it out of money I made delivering papers), I sorrowfully attempted to teach myself how to lift them. I knew how to do a bench press but without a spotter I was basically doing very little good. I did all kinds of lifts but having one long bar, two short bars and 110 lbs of weights made things a bit more difficult. It would take me five minutes to reconfigure the whole deal so I could do a different type of lift. There were no spring loaded clips you young whipper snappers, we had clamps and wrenches to add a special level of difficulty to our workouts. Oh boy, was that ever a motivator!

Then there was the dad factor. He would say stuff like, "Well I bet you think you are pretty tough lifting weights!" My dad was never much for that type of physical exercise. He believed and still believes that keeping busy is exercise enough. I definitely was not overweight at the time but after watching all of the student athletes I felt woefully inadequate in the muscle department. Still, despite all of this, I kept at it. I lifted everyday which is antithesis to everything I know now. I was not building hardly any muscle at all even though I could break quite a sweat flailing about in the unfinished room in the basement. I was doing a good job of staying fit. By the time summer rolled around, I decided that perhaps running was the better option for me anyway.

I have to relate something funny my wife said the other day and it is almost completely off subject. We were talking about all the dogs we owned over the years. Now my wife Christy has a way of putting things out there without context which makes them even more hilarious. When she had her first interview here in Arizona she told me the following: "They told me not to sell my winter clothes." Now living in Arizona and her having just come down from Colorado that sounded pretty awful and pretty mean to me. I told her I was so sorry. She said, "No, they told me not to get rid of my winter clothes because it can get pretty cold here." See? Way different meaning in context.

So Christy sprang this on me in the middle of a conversation: "Well I had Sassy for a few years until she was eaten by wolves." I gave her a puzzled look because I didn't recall wild packs of wolves prowling the outskirts of Wichita in the 80's. Then she put it into context, "You know coyotes or whatever." Christy has lots of funny things she says that have endeared her to me even more. One of my favorite little phrases she says when exasperated: "That really drives me up a tree!" How can anyone not love a woman that cute?

The Gambler

208.8 lbs. Well, I got to see my old friend 210 again yesterday for a brief bit of time. We reminisced and he was a little surprised to be back again. I felt bad because I knew it would only be a brief time for us to get reacquainted. He smiled as he talked about a massive slice of pumpkin cheesecake. I didn't have the heart to tell him that he was probably going to be gone in a matter of hours. Besides, I really couldn't concentrate because 205 was laughing his fat ass off in the corner the whole time. Bastard. He won't be laughing by the time Thursday gets here.

So if you look at the chart you will notice quite a jump from our low point. I literally ate and drank myself sick Saturday. Saturday's weigh in was a surprise since I jumped .2 lbs upwards but there was one saving grace because my body fat dropped to 27%. It has not been that low in a very long time and means I am just a couple of percentage points from being in the normal range for my age. I also did not have a very good sleep cycle Friday. I just didn't get the rest I needed and I tossed and turned all night. Lack of rest will get you every time since that is the period which results in the most fat loss and I kind of suspected the results to be lacking the next morning. Sunday's weigh in was a shock, however, but was also not completely unexpected either.

You see, I gambled and took this whole binge thing to a new level on Saturday. I had a protein shake the first thing in the morning and it all went downhill from there. Christy and I were basically forced to eat fast food because we had such a short period of time to eat between events for my youngest daughter's "Odyssey of the Mind" competition. The first place we hit during the morning break was Jack in the Box where I wolfed down an ultimate bacon cheeseburger and enough diet soda to float a battleship. I couldn't make it through hardly any of the fries. I was feeling a bit queasy.

We then ran back to the competition and walked and walked and walked. Around 11am, my youngest was practically starving so we ran off and grabbed some Arby's. As Marge Simpson so eloquently put it to Lisa Simpson: "Oh Lisa people do lots of crazy things in commercials - like eat at Arby's." I downed another half gallon of diet soda and had two regular roast beef sandwiches. I was stuffed and was still stuffed when we got to the major portion of this gluttonous day.

Around 5:30PM or so, the event was over and we headed home. My daughter had won 3rd place at the competition and was excited because she was now going to the State Competition on the 19th. We couldn't be more proud of her but the girl is a pip, I will explain further in a moment. I really really was not feeling well at all at this point. Christy had to run out to take our oldest daughter to a sleepover as soon as we got home. As Christy did her sleepover run, I read through some Facebook posts and waited for her to return. I also sat and tried to decided what projects I was going to do over the rest of our truncated weekend. As soon as Christy returned around 6:30pm or so, we dug into fixing the back sliding door that is attached to our bedroom. After we got done with that, we both looked at the clock and decided we should just order pizza - we were pooped. Oh and did we ever order pizza.

Now two hours and a medium pizza later, I was hurting more than ever. Yummy, salty, heart clogging bacon and chicken pizza. But somehow, in my addled brain, I decided I could still pack in a good part of a key lime pie like I promised. So I did. I also washed it down with more soda. My stomach was stretched so much I thought I would cause internal damage if I moved, seriously. It was awful. It was horrible. The rest of the evening was shot and once again I slept like crap. My body was screaming at me to make it all stop. There was no possible way to eat any more than I did. The upside is that my weight jumped and the downside is: my weight jumped. It still is number two among my all time weight jumps. I hate it because it is a huge weight jump but I love it because it gets me back on track a bit and makes the weight loss week over week greater. I have had a feeling I was getting diminishing returns the past few weeks because I failed to embrace binge day which put me at a "starvation" risk. It's a gamble but I think it will all work in the end. Right now, the losses thus far are more consistent with what I saw the first few weeks. So it is very possible to see 202 or even 200 this week which would be sweet.

Now I mentioned earlier that my youngest was quite a pip. She is headstrong, dramatic and dour about everything. Our mental picture of her little life away from us is one of constant struggle against teachers, fellow students and people involved in just about any extracurricular activity she chooses. By her own account, we would think she was universally loathed. It's Daisy vs. The World dammit! But, of course, this is the furthest thing from the truth. In all actuality, her teachers, fellow students and team mates all think highly of her. She is friends with almost everyone. Sometimes I can not help but view her as a little Hitler. She has Germany and Austria but, oh yes, she must have Poland and Russia! Muhahahahaha. But as I view her sweetness and kind nature away from home, it assures me she will not be plotting an ill fated land war against the Red Menace - yet. Gosh but I was so much better in 4th grade, wasn't I? Uh, no.

You see, I was quite a pip myself in the 4th grade. I was trouble with a capital T. I was in the Principal's office probably more than I was in class. I hated my teacher. I was the scourge of Lakeview Elementary's 4th Grade Class. Personally, I knew the world was against me the first day of school. However, I did have some logical reasons to believe such a thing.

The very first question my teacher asked, our first day of 4th grade, was: what LDS do you belong to? As each kid rattled off a number, I sat terrified. I didn't belong to a LDS whatsoever. I had no clue what it meant, really, when he asked. I did put two and two together after a moment and realized he was asking what LDS church I belonged to. We did live in one of the most highly populated Mormon cities on the planet at the time: Roy, Utah. The city had so many large Mormon churches, they actually gave them numbers. These numbers were preceded, of course, by the acronym LDS.

Now I really have nothing against Mormons, I honestly don't. I did learn more about Mormon history in grade school than I ever cared to or wanted. All in all, I believe Mormons to be nice people (part of my family is Mormon). But in Roy, the Mormons did seem to have a thing against anyone not Mormon. So when it got to be my turn and I said I went to the sole Baptist church in town, my teacher's face became overcast and he quickly moved on. Even though I liked living in Roy, I will tell you that our church was vandalized a number of times while we lived there. That was an awful feeling and another reason I knew my dark brown hair and olive complexion were not very welcome in Roy, Utah.

Despite all of this, I did love 4th grade. There were all kinds of new things to learn amongst the fair haired and blue eyed children of the damned. Below is a picture of my class (I am behind the teacher in this photo):

Around the middle of 4th grade, we started to learn economics. I remember sitting with my classmates and cutting up scores of "class" money the teacher had printed. We each got a set amount and we had to figure out some way to set up a business or a service to earn more class dollars. It was a massive project for our little 4th grade class and we also were going to join with another 4th grade class once a week and have a business fair where we would ply our goods or services.

My grand idea for a money maker? I brought in an enclosed shooting gallery I got for Christmas. You got 3 shots for 5 dollars. It was pretty cool. The tip of the gun was magnetic and you could pick up a ball bearing from the bottom of the gallery and a spring loaded plunger in the gun snapped at the ball bearing sending it flying into targets. No one got a prize, they just got the joy of shooting the gun. As you can well imagine, the novelty wore off pretty quickly and I was just sitting there beside my little game earning nothing. I did get to bring a toy to school and that, in and of itself, was priceless.

The next week I brought another toy to school: a set of over sized dice. I also found a way to increase my revenue stream outside of our little business fair with my toy: I inadvertently reinvented craps. Heck, I really had no clue what craps was exactly. In fact, I had never heard the term before. All I know is that I figured out what worked on the dice, number-wise, for me to turn a profit as the house. I soon set up shop in the boy's bathroom and raked in the dough. Some kids made money but a lot of kids lost money. Over a two week period, my little game became the most popular recess activity among 4th grade boys in our school and I wallowed in the excess.

By the time the next business fair rolled around, I was sitting by my lonely shooting gallery feasting on cupcakes and playing with junk I had acquired from other businesses. I had more money than I could ever spend, so I would buy out other businesses and they would then become part of my business. Need cool pencils with the Flintstones on 'em? Well step right up. Looking for a specific baseball card? Go ahead and look through my stock. I had created an empire out of a pair of dice.

About a month into my foray into becoming the 4th grade Vegas of the Rocky Mountains (the games became bigger and the stakes larger each day), I got caught because the other kids could not keep it quiet. There was no need for the children of the damned to shout after every freaking roll but of course they did despite my protests. The din could be heard up and down the hallway. Teachers are smart and they know where there are loud noises in a lavatory, trouble abounds. My teacher, having heard the shouts and laughs and "oooohs", marched right in and we were caught red handed. Wait, let me correct that, I was caught red handed and was frog marched off to see the Principal. The other kids were nothing more than dispersed for taking part in my loathsome criminal enterprise. The teacher and Principal kept throwing words like "gambling" and "craps" at me the whole time - like I knew what those words meant having lived in Roy, Utah for the last 4 years of my young life. The teacher and principal were exasperated. How could this little boy sully capitalism in our school?! He undermined the currency! He has made a mockery of 4th Grade economics! Let me get this boy's parents on the phone and we'll take care of this right away!

When I got home that night my dad looked at me with extreme curiosity and amazement. He still had this odd look on his face as he tried to admonish me without breaking out into laughter. Still, my dad desperately wanted to give me a stern talking to even though he was also simultaneously proud of my ingenuity. "How did you ever figure out how to do this? You do know that gambling is wrong don't you?! How much did you make? How long were you able to keep it going? It's just wrong son to take other people's money like that. Did you have a system to make sure you would always make money?" And so on and so forth.

In the end, I lost my dice and got a pretty bad grade for the class economics project despite having made the most money overall by a wide margin. If I would have stopped while I was way ahead, I would probably not even remember anything about our little economics project. It would have been just another grade school blur of a memory.

So maybe my little gamble on Saturday will pay off this week somehow. As I often said in that 4th Grade bathroom before the dice rolled across the tile floor, "It's not whether you win or lose kids, it's how you play the game." Especially if the odds are in your favor.

Candyman

203.8lbs. Well, well, well. 203lbs might be in reach and I can thank green bananas for that (look at the post "Hollaback Girl" to see why). It really has made quite a difference. It was definitely a calculated change in this experiment. Fruits are verboten, mostly (lemon juice in small amounts is allowed, it has some really weird properties that help with blood glucose). But after doing my research I realized it might behoove me to include bananas. I am already down 2.4lbs from last Saturday's weigh in. I've eaten better this week than I did last week.

Last week, I felt like I was not eating very much and it was such a chore and I was ridiculously hungry in the evening. The whole point is not to be hungry. After binge day, it became unbearable and I almost dropped off of this thing -almost. I had such a crazy desire for anything with sugar on it or in it. If you had just finished a Reese's peanut butter cup, I would have probably sucked the wrappers and chewed your fingers off to get to the sweet sweet glucose running through your bloodstream.

I have to say this has been the easiest week so far. No weird cravings, no hunger. I have been eating like a pig, honestly I have. Also I have noticed that my weigh ins seem more consistent. Usually, this time of the week I am slowing the weight loss down to a crawl. It's an annoying feeling to think you have sacrificed like crazy only to have the scale tell you that you haven't. I really want to see if the banana thing helps with weigh in consistency on tomorrows weigh in. I am thinking it might and the sole reason I think this is regularity. How green bananas help with probiotics is an amazing thing.

Seeing a .6 or .8 lb loss every Thursday or Friday just pisses me off. Yeah, I know, that is consistent but it's not consistent over a period of days. Usually Wednesday is the big weight loss day where I drop the most. It's just sort of how it works and that has definitely been consistent. The last 3 weeks have been incredibly consistent from spike to decrease and though I really did not like charts in the past, I have learned to embrace them. It's a lot easier to see things visually over a period of time and make critical assessments. One thing I have noticed is that spikes after binges are a lot smaller. I think this is a very good thing because my body has become more regulated over time.

Another thing I have been able to notice is that eating late on a binge day causes losses in the early part of the week to be less dramatic. I try to pack my calories in earlier in the wake cycle now, if I have the willpower. The rule of thumb for Saturdays: willpower is a dirty word. So I really don't try to put too much into it consciously. It makes only a slight difference anyway. I also have noticed that we rarely binge on fast food at all. We want good food that is generally forbidden and we eat so much that dessert never cross my mind except before we start eating. Here's the thing: I need to eat that crap.

So tomorrow, I will try to pack more sugary forbidden things into the day. Someone warn the local supermarkets, there is going to be a run on Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs tomorrow. There is also a Key Lime Pie inside the freezer. I will make my best attempt at rendering into an ex-pie Saturday. I have had one crazy fast food craving this week and it is Taco Bell. I am going to make such a run for the border that someone will be calling ICE on me.

Some odd positives and notes from the week. The "skinny" jeans I bought while I was in Wichita are now baggy on me and the waist is getting all bunchy. I am on the last hole on everyone of my belts. This Sunday will be 8 weeks and we start week 9 (Saturday's weigh in is fairly big because of this). If we hit at least 203lbs tomorrow, I will be only 18lbs from my original goal of 185lbs (my weight through most of high school). I also will be lighter than I have been in the last 18 years. The closest I can remember being near 205lbs was somewhere in the late 90's. When I reach 190, it will be the lowest weight I have been in 25 years. My lowest weight when I was 20 years old was somewhere around 176lbs. But, honestly there wasn't much muscle mass. I think I actually stripped muscle because of the military's fondness for aerobics and my love of running at the time. It certainly made maintaining a good healthy weight much harder later on.

I might adjust my goal lower as we hit the next 8 weeks because I would like to get into a much lower body fat percentage. 185lbs is a high average for my height. I would feel much more comfortable at the 175 number and I will see the results better with a higher level of exposed muscularity. At that point I am turning this thing on its head and bulking up with lean meats and proteins so I can achieve more muscle mass. With more muscle mass, it will be a lot more difficult to pack any weight back on. The goal then will be my original one: 185lbs but with the caveat that I have a body fat percentage between 10-15%. I did a short survey of NFL wide receivers who are my height and found that anywhere between 185-195lbs is fairly ideal. I can't wait until we get to this point. Now that's not to say I am going to avoid exercise, I really don't want to and as we approach 185lbs, it will be a lot harder to pare the last 10lbs away without it.

Overall, I can see this regimen as a life style once we get past the point where I am trying to achieve goals. I feel so much better eating well. I am not really fond of the binge day thing but I understand it in terms of metabolism. There will just have to be a more even approach to the week. Just avoiding tortillas the size of baby blankets and other useless carbs will be helpful.

Now despite what I said earlier about being a candy freak tomorrow, I do have to take into account how much carbs backfire on you. The more you eat the more you want the next day. So I will have to be careful about when I eat them so that Sunday does not feel like torture. Eat something sugary one day and note what you hunger level is the next day. That processed shit is sneaky. Except for Reese's and Jordan Almonds, that shit has to be good for you because it tastes so good. Flying in the face of all evidence to the contrary, I still refuse to believe Reese's are pure evil. Nuh-uh. You can't make me.