Rewind to August 2, 2009. My right knee had gotten a little sore the day before in Boulder, but I'm a tough guy and wanted to help Sprawl win. So I pressed on despite the acute pinch through a couple of games until during the third game when a hard fake and an up the line cut got us a goal but made my knee cry uncle. I was done, and despite RICE-ing for the next several days, the knee just wouldn't get better. I was worried; I tried playing softball the following Friday and kicked some arse but still couldn't really run. I was worried, yeah, about my "athletic career," but there was another thing on my mind, too. Check the quote:
"On the minus side: why was I playing third base? Knee is still gimpy. Nothing terrible, just hurts laterally and continues to have fluid in the joint. Running is pretty okay, it's the stopping that's really bothersome, which obviously puts a damper on my Ultimate plans for the weekend. I guess it had only been five days since Sunday's breakdown, so maybe last night was a little early to expect to be back. Frustrating, but survivable. I will continue to rest, ice, ibuprofen and skip practices in the meantime. Oh, and not eat, since without the calorie-burnage of running and Ultimating, I can quickly become 1.4 Nyets. "
And yeah, the cessation of exercise came to pass:
"In more body-related news, Ultimate / softball / exercise in general have come to a grinding halt..."
I was already not paying too much attention to what I ate and such, pretty resigned to my fat handler status. "Nyet the Lesser" was relative, I suppose. But I recall that after a couple of weeks of zero exercise in order to get better accompanied by that lack of attention, I went to the gym to do some leg weight exercises. I stepped on the scale afterwards, and the 1.4 multiplier was in effect: I weighed 208 pounds. Yikes. I felt crappy, my clothes were tight, the whole deal. Getting back on the Ultimate field in September helped get me back into the 190s, but the holidays and such kept me up there. Sprawl started in earnest in January, and I can pinpoint a moment: after a bad switch, I was failing badly at guarding Dheintime with my swollen knee, and I had one of those crystalline realizations that this whole situation was utter bullshit, and I had to do something to better myself on the field - for me, for my teammates, for the general aesthetic experience of those who view me shirtless. :) This must have been mid January, because my birthday came up and interfered with any kind of dieting plan, but I jumped on it the following week. I hit the gym at some point during the week starting January 25th, and after the workout weighed in at 194 lbs.
Now, some fifteen weeks later, I weigh roughly 163:
A big self-congratulatory pat on the back (not to mention the borderline narcissistic behavior of having Sparkle take a picture of me shirtless) for losing 30ish pounds (45 since August!!) over an appropriate two-per-week fifteen week period. 163 is approximately my high school football playing weight - don't let the 6'1", 190 lbs. program stats fool you - and I figured it would be good to get back down to a weight associated with the last time my knees felt decent. So I started this self-designed program in late January and have stuck to it like a fiend (if anything, I've struggled to stop it here at the end). How did I do it? How really, given that I've continued to be injured through a lot of the spring, had family throwing nice dinners at me, and all of that? :)
The most obvious thing I did was to start keeping a food diary. I began the week of January 25th (as evidenced here), and other than the two day tournament at NYF on Jan. 30-31 (where I was a bit distracted and didn't really think ahead to keep track of all the granola bars, Smart Start and Gatorades, etc.), I've kept a pretty accurate account of everything I've taken in. Seriously, pick a date, any date. Roll of the dice ... March 9th? Here ya go:
3.09.10
-------------------
two oatmeals - 320
a little powerade 40
lp - 290
Guinness - 150
wine - 80
steak - 160
swordfish - 70?
salmon - 50
potato + cheese - 250
broccoli - 100
cookies (1.3) - 110
------------------------------
total - 1620
And that was an iPFam night, no less. How about April 19th?
4.19.2010
oatmeals - 240
fiber one cup - 120
popsicle - 15
lp - 290
milk in coffee x 2 - 40
Popsicle - 25
turkey burgers w cheese - 670
broccoli - 50
lemonade - 20
mango tangerine sherbet - 100
summer sam - 170
---------------------------
total - 1740
There's also some evidence of the second big thing I did within the diary system, which was to be very, very routine about what I ate for breakfast and lunch and control it. I've had two packets of oatmeal for breakfast pretty much every single day for the past four months. It's 320 calories if it's regular and 240 if it's lowered sugar. And at the expense of much fun-making by my colleagues, I had a lean pocket for lunch almost every day, too. Compared to whatever I was normally eating (who knows - 1400 calories?) before I started this, that was 610 calories a day like clockwork. It left an ample amount in the bank for a snack when I got home from work and a huge meal (1000 calories or more) if I needed it at night. And really, again, I didn't need it - once I got firmly in a mindset of small, controlled portions, I started really paring down what I took in. So I was largely eating a lot of the same stuff - turkey burgers, burritos, chicken dinners, fish - just controlling the intake. With burgers in particular, even with non-Atkinsian motivation you can drop the bun just to eliminate a surplus 200 calories. I completely recognized that i needed to be careful not to starve myself, of course, but missing those calories meant a beer or a side serving of rice / beans wouldn't really hurt me. If this is sounding OCD, well, yeah, but part of the benefit of keeping the diary and getting OCD about the endeavor is that it provides the framework from within which you act. And if you let the rules sort of take over, it's a lot easier than just winging it and thinking that you just won't eat as much*.
* - It's become readily apparent to me that essentially what I'm doing is a calorie-based version of the Weight Watchers points system - i.e., I'm turning it into something of a game, and attacking that structure and buying into its surrounding rules seem to be things for which I have a proclivity. Them WW folks ain't at all dumb, it seems...
The goal early on was to keep the total under 2000 for most days and to let it creep above rarely during the week; this kept me on track to win the whole calories in minus calories out game, but also let me e.g. eat MoJo or a pizza dinner on the occasional Friday date night and not get too hung up about it. I tried not to go too low, knowing the dangers of self-starvation (especially when I was still playing sports), but honestly once I got diligent about the operation, I found that I just didn't feel like eating a lot very often - as long as I spaced things throughout the day and took the time to savor what I did eat, things worked pretty well. Plus the act of writing down calories really forced me to value where I used them, so as you might guess, I sort of instinctively turned to a high protein, low fat and low carb diet while not really eliminating any of them. My only non-calorie guide was to eat vegetables often enough, get enough fiber, and to make sure my protein intake didn't drop off the map for muscle concerns (see below). Otherwise it was just an energy-in / energy-out mentality.
Plus, as we all know, I'm a big nerd, so along with the diary, I tracked stats. From Jan. 25 through March 21st., my median intake was about 2050 calories with a max at 3800 (big tournament day) and a min at 1215 (weird day where I missed dinner and didn't feel particularly well). I also occasionally guesstimated my extra calorie output through exercise, which makes those running meters on the ellipticals at the gym great things indeed. To date, meaning from Jan. 25-May 20th, I've eaten 266,830 calories. Assuming that 30 lbs is what I've lost, at 3500 calories per pound, that's 105,000 calories lost, or a total of 371,830 calories burned since I started keeping track. I know, I know, sounds like a lot, but we really have no frame of reference here. But it has been at least a lot to keep track of (aided by iPhones, incidentally), and engaging that area of my brain has helped my discipline something fierce. Discipline in food selection, AND discipline at the gym.
The goal early on was to keep the total under 2000 for most days and to let it creep above rarely during the week; this kept me on track to win the whole calories in minus calories out game, but also let me e.g. eat MoJo or a pizza dinner on the occasional Friday date night and not get too hung up about it. I tried not to go too low, knowing the dangers of self-starvation (especially when I was still playing sports), but honestly once I got diligent about the operation, I found that I just didn't feel like eating a lot very often - as long as I spaced things throughout the day and took the time to savor what I did eat, things worked pretty well. Plus the act of writing down calories really forced me to value where I used them, so as you might guess, I sort of instinctively turned to a high protein, low fat and low carb diet while not really eliminating any of them. My only non-calorie guide was to eat vegetables often enough, get enough fiber, and to make sure my protein intake didn't drop off the map for muscle concerns (see below). Otherwise it was just an energy-in / energy-out mentality.
Plus, as we all know, I'm a big nerd, so along with the diary, I tracked stats. From Jan. 25 through March 21st., my median intake was about 2050 calories with a max at 3800 (big tournament day) and a min at 1215 (weird day where I missed dinner and didn't feel particularly well). I also occasionally guesstimated my extra calorie output through exercise, which makes those running meters on the ellipticals at the gym great things indeed. To date, meaning from Jan. 25-May 20th, I've eaten 266,830 calories. Assuming that 30 lbs is what I've lost, at 3500 calories per pound, that's 105,000 calories lost, or a total of 371,830 calories burned since I started keeping track. I know, I know, sounds like a lot, but we really have no frame of reference here. But it has been at least a lot to keep track of (aided by iPhones, incidentally), and engaging that area of my brain has helped my discipline something fierce. Discipline in food selection, AND discipline at the gym.
Ah, the gym. I had it etched into my brain to avoid starving myself as my body would start to break down muscle proteins as an energy source, so I tried not to go too low AND make sure my body was aware that the muscle needed those proteins to maintain the muscles I was tasking. So I started a pretty generalized arms, chest /back, abs, and legs weight routine that I alternated at the gym most days. Plus I started working out on the bikes and the ellipticals to help save wear and tear on the knees and assist in the calorie burnage / muscle maintenance endeavors*.
* - As I understand it, the general problem with a lot of American dieting is that most people opt to just starve themselves or starve themselves and add in some moderate exercise like walking. Problem is, with no signal to conserve proteins for muscular maintenance, your often glucose- and glycogen-depleted body will turn to protein stores as an energy source. Lost protein stores means a slower metabolism, so if you eat at a particular rate, drop it for a few weeks (and lose weight but also muscle weight), you will be operating at a lower basal metabolic rate when you return to your eating habits as usual. So your previous caloric intake will probably be too much for your new, lower muscle mass percentage body, so your weight creeps back up. You get back to where you started, only now you have less muscle mass, so it's not really a zero return AND it's now that much harder to lose weight the second time around. This is probably all 101 stuff, but I have found it meaningful to wrap my head around how relatively easy or not it may have been for me to lose weight while some people have a horrific time - a lot of it is very history-, not will power-, dependent. So this underlying lost BMR phenomenon at least gives a little insight into yo-yo dieting, and gives us a very good reason to incorporate relatively strenuous cardio and weight-training into even the most basic, small goal-having of weight-loss plans.
I shouldn't understate the importance of the gym and the discipline I've tried to apply there - lots and lots of waking up at 5, packing my stuff the night before, and getting in workouts at the school Student Resource Center, all before starting office hours at 8:30. I started with a low weight high rep routine to help dodge injuries (both on the field and in the weight room), but have since occasionally inserted "heavy days" to help with muscle mass. And back when I was doing PT, my trainer really emphasized planks and crunches and other ab drills to help with stability and knee pain - not sure if it's really helped the knees (as I've been doing all kinds of other knee strengthening exercises, too, and my knee still hurts regardless, so it's unclear what if anything is having a positive effect), but I've taken those on with a vengeance and have noticed better stability on the fields. Plus, you know, something resembling a six-pack* these days. Grrr, argh. Or something. Seriously, though, it's amazing what I can do now, just through a dedicated routine that I've stuck to (i.e. no crazy, spine-wrenching massive weight loads), that I've never really been able to do before. Just for a frame of reference, I began unable to finish five sets of 30-second planks with 30 seconds of rest between; now I do five sets of 45-second planks with ten seconds between routinely. I started off doing 25,15,12,10 sets of biceps curls on 15-20 lbs. weights and am now up to 32.5-35 lbs.; with the bench machine that I use (which apparently has no relationship to real, earth-gravity bench weights), my early weight range was 100-145 lbs on a 15-12-10-8 rotation; now I throw around 190-235 lbs. All of this while my body weight has been dropping - in other words, I started out maxing out at roughly 75% of my body weight and am now maxing out at 142% or so of my weight. And this with just two times a week on each muscle group. I guess what I'm getting at is that my little routine has successfully taken off weight without killing my muscle mass, and as this was the goal, I'm pretty happy with it. And as long as I'm at it, my cardio, which was already pretty good, is silly now; I can pretty routinely crank the resistance to the maximum on the elliptical machines at school, do 8.5 miles in an hour and burn 1000 calories. It keeps my heart between 160-170 bpm for the entire 60 minutes and wears me out pretty well, but I could definitely keep going at the end. So yeah, some empirically good outcomes in the gym.
* - Once when I was playing basketball in middle school in 1992, this kid (Ugly Boy, if you remember, which was an unfortunate but terribly accurate nickname; he went on to play sports at Holmes) elbowed me in the face and tore the central little membrane that is between the upper lip and gumline. I started bleeding profusely, and my mom took one look at me and screamed "Oh NO, you've TORN YOUR FRENULUM!" in a stunning crescendo that rang through the gym. I am pretty sure that she, the professional anatomist, was the only person who had any clue what she was talking about. In retrospect it was kinda funny, and probably the goofiest mom-anatomy reference in everyday life I can remember.
Until this past spring... I was in Texas for the GPGDS concert, and Aaron and I had just been tossing the disc up at Clark. So I was shirtless in the living room. And my mom looked at me and said earnestly "Oh MY, you can the see the EDGES OF YOUR RECTUS!" Rectus abdominalis, of course, but her meter indicated for all the world that she was about to rhyme this phrase with "the rims of my Lexus" or something. I.e., she sounded like she was freestyle rapping about my abs. So this is the new champion goofy mom anatomy utterance. Props to MC Doc J!!!
All of this is rather confusing - because really, it seems like a little dedication to Ultimate and Sprawl was all I needed to push me over the edge and get my act together. Which makes me worry as to 1, what will happen when Sprawl stops, and 2, have I inadvertently ingrained this so much that I'm a neurotic basket case about calories and weight-lifting / cardio? Have I created an unhealthy (whatever the hell that means*) obsession with Sprawl / Ulty as an excuse? I know I've written about this before, but I remember specific instances in Boston when trying to lose weight where I ended up standing on the Boston Common having a really vicious internal debate over whether the aesthetic value of a NY style slice of pizza was worth the caloric penalty. And I even couched in that exact term, "caloric penalty," to make sure that my attitude had all the trappings of an eating disorder. So I'm well aware of the dangerous psychological ground on which I tread, and I really would like to know why this time I was able to do it when I've basically known I was overweight for the past several years. I mean, if Sprawl Ultimate is such a great motivational device, why wasn't, say, "so you won't look fat in your wedding pictures for eternity?" Just as an example... really, I think I've been much healthier about it this time, but as my method has employed a fair bit of obsession**, I feel the need to be careful.
* - One of my favorite games - and it comes up in bioethics type classes all the time - is to challenge people on what they mean by "healthy." It's a slippery fish, friends. Because there are reasons you probably shouldn't just define it in simplistic terms of "living longer" or "feeling better" because of all kinds of assumptions about aesthetic values that are embedded in those ideas. And people don't often get that in depth anyways, instead employing surface level labels like "more natural = healthier," and again, what the hell does "natural" mean. Or worse, "organic = healthy." Or way worse, "processed = unhealthy." I will cut myself off here, but trust that health does not really mean what people tend to think it means if they've thought about it at all. People, especially undergrads, generally use "health" as an offhand or inherent label rather than as an indicator of some other form of benefit. Maybe for another post, but if we want to fire off on this in the comments, go right ahead. Maybe I will convince you that the fleeting orgasmic aesthetic experience of a MoJo yogurt is healthy independent of its probiotic benefits and in spite of its caloric detriments, an argument we employ quite frequently around these parts...
** - I mean, I kept a running mental note of how much Smart Start I munched each day at Daweena. I know I don't need to do that, but that's where the successful neuroses level has been set, so... help me out here?
I guess the real question is do I feel any benefit, or am I just proud of myself in a want-to-emulate-the-cover-of-the-latest-Men's Health kinda way - what are the real physical effects here? Well, I'll start with the domain of the stated goal: I definitely feel lighter / more agile on the Ultimate field, though I also get knocked down a lot more easily. My knees are still sore but are slowly getting better, again, a multi-variable scenario in which its hard to tell how much the weight training is impacting relative to the weight loss alone. And I'm not really suddenly fast or jumping over everybody; the effects are subtler (and really, I just finished writing pretty extensively on how *un*-athletic I felt at Daweena, though I am pretty sure that was more the time off beforehand due to the grapefruit knee than anything else) (though that grapefruit knee is also an indication that the lost pounds are not a magic joint elixir). In non-Ultimate physical effects, I don't even really know how I relatively feel - I ache from the normal sports stuff, I'm tired from working and not sleeping enough per usual... so I can't say. I do have lots of energy most of the time, though I definitely crash now and then. Psychologically /mentally or however you want to frame that aspect, I am certainly proud of myself for setting a goal and accomplishing it, and I think I look better by your typical Western mass media Caucasian standards. In that respect, I think I better appreciate the mirror-gazing that goes on at the ASU SRC weight room - I mean, if your corpus is your project and therein lies the motivation, why not ogle the results? Due reward, right? I still try to avoid the behavior.
But really, is my mood better or anything like that? Probably not. Still stressed, still concerned, still get irritated at life's little undergrad quandaries. So I think somewhere in the back of my head I "know" that it's a good situation - my vitals are great and I'm less likely to have a heart attack or develop diabetes with all of this work - but I'm also inclined to realize just what a conceptualization angle this all has, that if I think of physical fitness and weight loss as a good, then I'm likely to feel good accordingly. All of this, i suppose, is to say that there's something happening here, but I don't know what it is...
Yeah, you know you wanted that one. :)
The most interesting thing of all of this (provided that you think any of this is interesting) is the residual effects. One, I have definitely had the crystalline thought that milkshakes should be illegal - knowing that McDonalds monsters kills something like 40% of a regular male's daily calorie requirement and knowing how damn good they taste just makes me feel that the FDA should step in here. Those new iced frappe-ish things they're advertising are 560 calories a pop, and you know the intent there is to get people to throw that on top of an already stupidly caloric meal. I'm reciting the obvious here - Smack Donalds makes you fat - but the real deal is that I now have this visceral repulsion to the idea of their being allowed to serve these things sans alarms and flashing lights. Said the guy who eats 600+ calorie MoJo treats on a regular basis, but you'll recall that I'm doing that in the context of having run 8.5 miles that morning.
The second big residual effect is that now that I have hit my target, I have no idea how to maintain as opposed to lose. My appetite is pretty small from eating so little the past few months, and the internet is full of conflicting ideas on how much / little I should be eating to maintain my current state. Seriously, the estimates have ranged from 2500-3600 calories. The best advice I've found is to self-experiment - eat a particular amount (say, 3000 calories) per day for a week or two and see what happens to your weight. Of course, 3000 calories is now WAY more than I'm accustomed to eating, so I find myself just tossing on cereal and sorbet at the end of the day to compensate for my now-screwed sense of pace. And I am so terrified of regaining the weight that I've got a psychological brake that stops me at the 2400 mark - I just don't want to go more, even though I know I need to. A good problem to have, I guess, but still one that makes things frustrating. I'm sure I'll recalibrate given some time. We shall see.
Lastly, I have Pavlovianly fixed myself. I cannot eat a thing without thinking of the calories involved - so when some hands me, say, a chip, the "10 calorie" notion flits through my head. Good and bad - it's how I got to where I am, but I can see how much of a burden such a mindset could become. I press on.
Thanks for reading this far - there's more I could touch on in this realm (e.g., the fact that my lost weight and tendency to avoid alcohol as unnecessary calories over the past four months have rendered me a ridiculous light-weight of the two-beers-and-out division), but this is probably enough. It' s clearly weighed on my mind quite a bit and required a lot of creative management - I'm still a little shocked that I dropped the weight right through Houseguestapalooza and all the caloric engorging associated with that, but that mainly just speaks to the benefits of my breakfast-lunch routine. I will continue to work hard to "keep it off," though that is probably the opposite of my problem for the immediate future. As mentioned above, getting myself to eat enough is a big challenge right now, particularly since I have lost the concept of where "enough" is*. And I should thank the Beck for helping me out and committing to lower calorie dinners and such herself (though she is about to hike the GC again and can consequently eat whatever she wants for the next few I'm sure). Anyhoo, just thought I would share some of the running thought processes behind this endeavor, and if you have any of the same OCD-ish tendencies that I do, I definitely suggest the food diary and same meals every day rituals as rock solid foundations for a weight loss program. There is something nice and ascetic about the same food every day - so I guess my mom's monk comments weren't too far off the mark - but I'm not sure if you spice-of-life types could handle my appreciation of the lean pocket mundane. Still, good luck to all the weight losers or maintainers or gainers or whatever you're trying to do out there, and trust in self-aware, conscious routine as good practice towards achieving these sorts of goals.
* - Dhein et al.: "Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not." Were it that simple...
No comments:
Post a Comment