Six days a week of exercise. Navy Seal training. I'm taking it seriously. In lieu of employment, I exercise. And yeah, okay, so... I went from "swimming and yoga" to Navy Seal training, it's no big deal. And it's a little bit of a paradigm shift, but I'm motivated. The yoga derailment should be set straight on Sunday and I hope it works out. I can't tell you how badly my body needs it. Every muscle in my body is in crisis and though I am enjoying the heart health, it comes with a bit of a price tag. Because when heart health is the primary motivation of your workout it usually means that the rest of your body is already a comical wreck. It takes a lot of time to "reconstruct" those parts of your body which are in disrepair. These are the parts you will need if you want to make the heart healthy again. It's like flipping a house that needs new plumbing and electrical. It's all very messy.
Seal training involves running, swimming and weight training without taking a break. The emphasis being put on pushing yourself physically and mentally to see what you can do. You workout past the pain (stupidly). The theory, of course, is that Seals are required to do some outrageous stuff and being a machine that doesn't require a break is a good baseline for success in the sneak-up-behind-the-enemy-and-garrotte-them business. They run over 45 to 50 miles a week. They swim 20 to 25 miles a week. And their weight lifting regime involves doing a million sets of every painful exercise you can imagine. And again, without breaks. I guess I could have chosen a much milder workout but if I die during my workout I want it to be during something called, "Navy Seal Training" and not "Zumba."
And guess what? After all this working out, I'm still fat. Though now I feel like a fat man who can sneak into a third world country, garrotte someone, then swim back home before breakfast.
So the issue must be my diet.
I eat well. I really do. I have only one night a week where I eat bread and dairy - Friday. That's pizza night. For the past four months we have eaten at a new pizza restaurant somewhere in the Kansas City area on Friday nights. We have met with some success (Minisky's, Mafia Mikes, Old Shawnee and Sarpino's) and a bunch of failures (Art of Pizza, Pizza Bella, Gambinos ). I look forward to pizza night because that is the dark corner of my diet. The rest of my week I eat like a man worried about his weak heart. I really do. Well... I like soup and that can be rich in sodium but that's really the only thing I eat that could be considered crappy. Well, that and pizza night. I would like to point out that pizza night is usually only a margherita pizza, and not meat lovers or anything like that. If one night of pizza is causing me to stay fat, then i'm just plain screwed. I don't drink sodas. I don't eat sweets. I don't snack. I don't get it. And no, my portion sizes aren't out of hand. For example; I eat two pieces of pizza.
Paleo is the diet rage of the season. Paleo as in, caveman. As in, if a caveman could eat it, you can eat it. As long as the caveman in question doesn't like rice, wheat, beans, potatoes, sugar, salt, dairy or bad fats. OH, and he loves chocolate... Which, I guess, grew on chocolate trees, which are all extinct now. Sorry. This diet follows in the footsteps of the South Beach, the Atkins, and a bunch of other diet regimes which require you to abandon a portion of your known diet while embracing others. This is done in an effort to chemically reprogram your body. It eliminates the part of the modern diet which is killing us. And part of this reprogramming will be a fat burning clause. They all say so. What always surprises me is how fast people leave these diets. They give the diets a good go for a while - they even try to convince others to join them - but they all come back to the land of wheat and cheese.
My friend Todd is a bit older than me, and he is a fan of all things having to do with weight loss. In the ten years we have known each other, he has tried every diet, every cookie, every shake, every work out regime, every fad in weight loss technology short of acquiring cancer, and yet, at publishing time today he is not a subscriber to anything. He has abandoned the faith for each of his former pursuits, like they were former girlfriends. And like former girlfriends, when you first meet them, you talk about them highly and tout their benefits to anyone who will listen, but given enough time - and reflection on all that is sacrificed - you grow weary and long for normal life again. He's 46. I'm 40. Weight loss for us is just living to 60 with all of our toes still attached.
Dieting and exercise aren't natural, which is why we abandon them so easily.
There are large mirrors in the gym. I guess they're there for inward reflection. The young men stare in the mirror and see something. I wish they would say it out loud. Young women look in the mirror and look at themselves the way they want others to look at them. Men my age look in the mirror and think, "why did they put a mirror there?"
I have no aspirations for running a marathon or to compete in an Iron Man. My goal is much less lofty. I plan on joining the Navy.
Seal training involves running, swimming and weight training without taking a break. The emphasis being put on pushing yourself physically and mentally to see what you can do. You workout past the pain (stupidly). The theory, of course, is that Seals are required to do some outrageous stuff and being a machine that doesn't require a break is a good baseline for success in the sneak-up-behind-the-enemy-and-garrotte-them business. They run over 45 to 50 miles a week. They swim 20 to 25 miles a week. And their weight lifting regime involves doing a million sets of every painful exercise you can imagine. And again, without breaks. I guess I could have chosen a much milder workout but if I die during my workout I want it to be during something called, "Navy Seal Training" and not "Zumba."
And guess what? After all this working out, I'm still fat. Though now I feel like a fat man who can sneak into a third world country, garrotte someone, then swim back home before breakfast.
So the issue must be my diet.
I eat well. I really do. I have only one night a week where I eat bread and dairy - Friday. That's pizza night. For the past four months we have eaten at a new pizza restaurant somewhere in the Kansas City area on Friday nights. We have met with some success (Minisky's, Mafia Mikes, Old Shawnee and Sarpino's) and a bunch of failures (Art of Pizza, Pizza Bella, Gambinos ). I look forward to pizza night because that is the dark corner of my diet. The rest of my week I eat like a man worried about his weak heart. I really do. Well... I like soup and that can be rich in sodium but that's really the only thing I eat that could be considered crappy. Well, that and pizza night. I would like to point out that pizza night is usually only a margherita pizza, and not meat lovers or anything like that. If one night of pizza is causing me to stay fat, then i'm just plain screwed. I don't drink sodas. I don't eat sweets. I don't snack. I don't get it. And no, my portion sizes aren't out of hand. For example; I eat two pieces of pizza.
Paleo is the diet rage of the season. Paleo as in, caveman. As in, if a caveman could eat it, you can eat it. As long as the caveman in question doesn't like rice, wheat, beans, potatoes, sugar, salt, dairy or bad fats. OH, and he loves chocolate... Which, I guess, grew on chocolate trees, which are all extinct now. Sorry. This diet follows in the footsteps of the South Beach, the Atkins, and a bunch of other diet regimes which require you to abandon a portion of your known diet while embracing others. This is done in an effort to chemically reprogram your body. It eliminates the part of the modern diet which is killing us. And part of this reprogramming will be a fat burning clause. They all say so. What always surprises me is how fast people leave these diets. They give the diets a good go for a while - they even try to convince others to join them - but they all come back to the land of wheat and cheese.
My friend Todd is a bit older than me, and he is a fan of all things having to do with weight loss. In the ten years we have known each other, he has tried every diet, every cookie, every shake, every work out regime, every fad in weight loss technology short of acquiring cancer, and yet, at publishing time today he is not a subscriber to anything. He has abandoned the faith for each of his former pursuits, like they were former girlfriends. And like former girlfriends, when you first meet them, you talk about them highly and tout their benefits to anyone who will listen, but given enough time - and reflection on all that is sacrificed - you grow weary and long for normal life again. He's 46. I'm 40. Weight loss for us is just living to 60 with all of our toes still attached.
Dieting and exercise aren't natural, which is why we abandon them so easily.
There are large mirrors in the gym. I guess they're there for inward reflection. The young men stare in the mirror and see something. I wish they would say it out loud. Young women look in the mirror and look at themselves the way they want others to look at them. Men my age look in the mirror and think, "why did they put a mirror there?"
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.