Weekend Fail

So, I've become convinced that as soon as I can get myself to stay on diet and workout on Saturday, I'm going to spontaneously weigh 112 pounds. Maybe not, but I'd be closer than I am today.

This weekend, my good friends Josh and Janet came to visit from San Antonio. It was a great time. We got to hang out, talk, and introduce them to baby Sydney for the first time. What we did not do was workout, make healthy eating decisions. It goes without saying that the responsibility for my failure rest solely on Josh's shoulders (Just look at this shirt he had on. I'd say that he doesn't always look this creepy, but I've committed myself to being honest in this blog.)

In all seriousness, having a fun weekend and spending time with friends does not preclude living healthy. No one chained me to my bed and forced me to sleep in. The weight bench didn't catch fire during the night. It was available to use. My dog certainly wouldn't have refused a walk. In fact, my friends would likely have encouraged me to be healthy.

I'm only five weeks into this year of fitness, but I've already encountered some surprises. On the positive side, I'm a little surprised that I've been able to get up early and work out with any level of consistency. On the downside, I never realized how hard it would be for me to shake this mindset of the weekend not being a time for sweating.

Weekly Weighin

Man I didn't want to get out of bed this morning. Where did the night go? I seriously considered just skipping this morning's workout, and if it weren't for this blog, I probably would have. It's times like these that I'm grateful for this opportunity to disgrace myself on the interweb. It keeps me accountable.

I had intended to do the other half of the fat burning workout in my Men's Health Gym Bible this morning. The book says that you should take a day off to recover between them, but I thought I was feeling fine. What could it hurt? That was last night, about 15 hours after the first half of the workout. This morning, about 24 hours since the sweat session, I woke up in pain.

I feel as those someone used laproscopic surgery to insert white hot pieces of rebar into my quads. This is how Atlas is going to feel the morning after he puts down that big globe of his and takes a nap.

So rather than do the Men's Health torture routine, I only did about 15 minutes of weights. I focused on my upper body...because I figured it was less likely to bring about tears. After the weights, I did a solid 20 minutes of interval cardio. I tried to keep my heart rate above 120 the whole time. During the intense intervals, it got up to 145. Sufficed to say, it made me sweat like a pig, and my heart was singing soprano by the time I got off the elliptical.

When all was said and done, I stepped back aboard the scale for the sixth time since I started this program. Last week I weighed a svelte 214 pounds, this week I weigh 213. For those of you non-math majors, that's a one pound loss after another seven days of sweating and being sore. All told, I've lost eight pounds in the last five weeks.

Stepping off the scale, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't frustrated. Is this supposed to be this hard? I guess I just expected that as much as I've changed my routine, the fat would just drip off of me.


My feeling of frustration followed me to the locker room, and it wasn't until I started getting dressed that I made a happy discovery. My jeans have gotten pretty loose. I can't quite pull them down without unbuttoning them, but it's close. I don't know if that means I've dropped down a size, but it did make me realize that I'm making real progress.


Rome wasn't burned in a night. This is going to be a long road. Lucky for me, I've committed to at least another 47 weeks of traveling.

Pumping iron in the Living Room

Last week I described the intense new workout I'd found in the Men's Health Gym Bible. Its mix of fast-paced weight exercises and interval (read evil) cardio pretty much kicked my butt. I literally could not finish the routine. Taking that as a sign that it was a "good" workout, this morning I tried to do it at home...in the living room.

Most of the weight exercised translated just fine. I had a couple of dumbbells, so I didn't have a problem doing the squats, lunges, shoulder presses, wood choppers. Where I did run into trouble were the lat pull exercises. My living room, apparently, is not equipped with a lat pull machine. Believe me, I looked.

Not wanting to kill the flow of the routine or miss a beat, I settled for just pantomiming a set of lat pulls. Note to self, miming a lat pull does not work the same set of muscles as an actual lat pull. It may, in fact, work the opposite.

My Marcel Marceau-style lat pulls were just the beginning. When it came time for the interval cardio work, I realized that my living room (and home for that matter) doesn't so much have an elliptical or treadmill machine as it does a couch and chairs. Again, not wanting to throw off the rhythm of the workout, I just started running in place.

The idea of interval training is that you're supposed to go nearly all out for thirty second, go easier for a minute and repeat. Just for fun tonight try and go all out in your living room. Laps around the couch don't work too well. I'd love to be rich enough to afford a house that would accommodate sprinting.

Finally, I settled on running in place as fast as I could while speed punching the air. Sufficed to say, I think I got my heart rate up, but I wouldn't want to see video of the process. It probably looked like I was having some kind of seizure. If my wife had been awake that early, she might have tried sticking my wallet in my mouth.

Home workouts are great. I've found a few DVD's that I really like, but at the end of the day. I won't be canceling my gym membership anytime soon.

No, I do not want fries with that!

At this point in my life, fast food is pretty much unavoidable. Between meeting that run late and dinners that have to be finished in 15 minutes, I often find myself getting food from places with drive-thrus. Still, I'm learning, just because I need a meal to be fast doesn't mean it has to come with a 1,000 calorie minimum. Last night, I took this high-speed dining to a new level, making healthy choices not just in the selection of an eatery, but also in my choice of side.

Obviously, if I want to lose weight, I shouldn't be going to the burger joints that got me into this predicament. I realize that many of them have healthier alternatives, but they are alternatives to the things I enjoy eating. Moreover, I'm a cheapo, and I like the idea of a value menu. You get a drink, a main course and a side. That's how royalty eat! On the occasions when I've let myself pop into one of these dens of delicious inequity, I don't just get the unhealthy burger, dripping with delectable cheesy, bacon-y grease. I also get the french fries, which I then feel obligated to eat. I don't want to be wasteful. after all. Of course, those fries are only really palatable if you dunk them in that tasty, albeit sugar-filled, ketchup. You see my problem here.

One solution I've found (I think dude named Jared lead me there) is Subway. Once upon a time, in a magical land where instead of being overweight I was a scrawny member of the varsity swim team, I could do damage to a Subway sandwich. I'd go in there and think to my skinny self, "Is a foot long going to be enough to fill me up?" I'd get the thing so filled with fixin's that it took a team of engineers to fold it closed and wrap it in paper. Then I'll trade in the chips for a couple of cookies, fill my cup with regular soda and go to town. Once finished, I'd burp offensively and all the calories would be carried away by the wind...or air conditioning, I suppose.

Today I still frequent Subway, but I have a different strategy. Rather than approaching the menu with an attitude of "What could I fit in my gullet?" I know that I can get a smaller sand which and fill it up with veggies. This way, I'll get full without using up a lot of calories. I will say that it's worth visiting Subway's website. You'll find that many of the tasty sandwiches that aren't included in their list of low-fat options are not as healthy as you might expect. A couple of them even rival the aforementioned burgers.

So that's the main course. What about the sides? Well, I've learned that even those burger joints now offer healthy substitutes for french fries. At Chick-fil-a, for instance, I was able to get a side salad or fruit for just $0.65. That's another opportunity to fill up on food and not fat. At Subway, they take it a step further. Instead of trading in your chips for cookies (shame on you Past James), you can barter them for apples or a cup of yogurt.

Yogurt, I've discovered is more than a little bit awesome. Sure, it's essential milk that has been overtaken by bacteria, but they're delicious bacteria. It's like a desert, but after eating it you'll still respect yourself in the morning. Even better, the stuff somehow expands to fill your gut. That way I don't find myself hungry twenty minutes later, looking for lost skittles in between the seat cushions of my car.

I think my mom would be proud to see me getting a little culture, bacterial or otherwise.

Honey...where's the dog?

So this isn't as much an account of my health regiment as it is a confession of my failure to maintain a good yard. After our baby was born, I've had trouble finding the time to do the little things...like say mowing.

Last week I cranked up the mower for the first time in almost two months. Did I mention that this is Texas, and it is summer? It turns out, grass (and lots and lots of weeds) apparently grows pretty quickly round here. The front yard was a real chore, with some patches approaching 5 or 6 inches. The backyard, though...the backyard was something else.

Do you remember the film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids? Our backyard looked a lot like that one, only we hadn't been reduced to Lilliputians by a failed scientific breakthrough run amok by a stray baseball. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that areas of the yard were well over a foot in height. At play, my dog looked like one of those lions on the Discovery Channel, surveying a a herd of gazelles, looking for the tiny one with a limp.

So it was that last week, after lunging and grunting my poor mower through the front yard, I moved on to this Herculean task. I worked it, too. I was back there, huffing and puffing, for more than an hour. That's when God decided to give me a break by opening up a raincloud. I had conquered all but a small patch of about ten feet by 15 feet. Not too bad, right?

Last night after work, I decided it was time to re-mow the yard. This time the front yard was child's play. It turns out, if you're responsible about maintaining the grass, the mower will slide over it like butter on a roll.

Most of backyard went by in a flash, as well. That small patch, though, was a regular nightmare. It looked like the weed patch that Godzilla must have been napping in during the nuclear explosion. Some of the weeds were definitely over two feet tall, and the grass itself was densely packed. Every inch of mowing was a struggle. I had to make two passes, like one of those newfangled razor blades with extra blades.

When all was said and done, I had a respectable yard (minus the occasional haystack), and a lower body that felt as those it had been through a pretty intense workout. If I had been holding a 40 pound medicine ball and doing lunges across a park, my back and legs would have been less sore.

There are two lessons here. One, everyday chores like lawn work can provide great workout opportunities. Two, mow your dang yard if you don't want it to look like a scene from the Congo.

A Wii Bit of Exercise

Generally speaking, I'm not a big video gamer. In college I spent (you might say wasted) hundreds of hours engaged in virtual battles. After graduation, I got married, and sense then I haven't been much of a gamer. Enter the Wii, an delightful little gaming system that has offered us lots of fun and a few sweaty workouts.

When we purchased our Wii a few years ago, my wife and I mainly played sports and laughed at each other. This was all well and good, but it would hardly qualify for a journal of me being less of a couch potato. Then, last year we picked up the Wii Fit package, and quickly found ourselves addicted.

The Wii Fit utilizes a balance board to put you through various cardio, strength training and yoga workouts. It is also packed with fun balance games...I may have spent a bit more time on the games than the exercise. Who can say, really?

Fortunately/Unfortunately, Wii Fit also had a journal that would track your progress...or lack there of. Before every workout or play session, the board weighed you and judged you...harshly. The first time I ever stepped atop the attachment a tiny anime voice called out, "That's overweight!" She said it with such cruel glee that I was just waiting for her to steal my lunch money, give me a wedgie and kick my dog.

This weigh in feature could have been a motivator to work out, I suppose. It didn't really play that way for me. Instead, it became a reason to not step on the scale. I just didn't want to see my graph show any upward momentum or have that voice poke fun at me (Which it did, every single time I signed in).

To be honest, I haven't stepped atop that scale since before my wife got pregnant. It has been nearly a year, and I was just beginning to get the courage to face the anime voice when my wife read about Wii's new fitness program Wii Active. This sounded like a great chance to dodge the mean anime lady, so I jumped at the chance to pick up the new program.

It turns out, Wii Active is a whole lot like Wii Fit. Instead of a balance board, it comes with a pouch that holds the Wii remote against your left, registering the movement of your legs and you do everything from run in place to performing squats and other isometric exercises. It also offers the chance to customize your workout with activities, including boxing.

As a self professed fan of MMA, I was immediately drawn to the boxing activities. It's easy to see how these could be easy-going low-impact exercises, but I get so into it...it gets pretty high impact. You'll notice in the image on the right that my fist have gone full-on Chuch Yeager and broken the sound barrier.

At least for me, Wii Active wouldn't take the place of my regular routine, but it does offer a great alternative for those times that I can't find the time or energy for a traditional workout. I think it's important to occasionally trick myself into workouts that feel like fun. It's like I'm hiding broccoli in my own mashed potatoes...horrifying.

Wii Active does offer Wii Fit balance board compatibility. I imagine it would add new elements to the game...I just haven't gotten up the courage to try it yet.

I Deserve This.

Friday I stopped just short of falling down dead in the Summit Family Fitness Center. This weekend I used that workout as an excuse for enjoying some delicious desserts. I'm starting to think some of my weight loss may be taking place between my ears.

How can I punish myself with a workout so intense that I couldn't finish it only to dig in peach cobbler and homemade ice cream in the following days? I have a couple theories.

Theory 1, 2 AM James owns the weekend. In the last month, I've spent more than 9 hours working out, none of them on a Saturday or Sunday. Clearly I view weekends as a time for licenced laziness. Clearly, calories don't count on Saturday. Which means desserts are fair game.

Theory 2, I've gotten overconfident in the effectiveness of my weight loss regiment. Is it possible that, after the first two weeks of consistent weight loss, my subconscious decided that my metabolism was now bulletproof? "Surely with all the calories I'm burning with these morning workouts, I could eat this stick of butter without fear of comeuppance."

Theory 3, my lazy butt thinks it deserves to get paid for waking up early and sweating. The wage it seeks? Deliciously sweet dessert foods. Sure enough, looking at that peach cobbler Saturday night or the extremely tempting cake Thursday night, the thought that crossed my mind was, "You know, a few months ago I definitely would have eaten that, and back then I wouldn't have worked out afterwards. Given that A+B=C, I clearly have no choice but to pour this down my gullet."

I'm not sure which of these is my problem. It is likely some grotesque hybrid of the three. The conundrum for me is that I don't want to pretend I'm never going to eat another dessert. I'm going to eat dessert. I just need to limit myself. I don't want to be the old me plus regular sweat sessions. I want to be making consistently healthier decisions...unless we're talking about my mom's cardamon bread...then diet be darned.