Hear Me Out

Yeah, it's a commercial. I'm actually sharing a commercial with you. It's not something that I would normally do. I usually skip the commercials the second I possibly can, and if they don't allow me to skip them, then I grumble, and find something else to do for the ten or fifteen (or more) seconds that they are showing. However, this one caught my eye, and I watched the entrire thhing. Then I kept thinking about it later, and I went back and searched for the commercial, and watched it as if it were the actual content and not the annoying thing I had to suffer through before I got to the content.

This is a Dick's Sporting Goods commercial. They don't push any particular product in the commercial or anything, just themselves, I suppose, and not even really that. What they seem to be pushing is the idea of getting out there and enjoying life through sport...and not the kind of sport you think of when you think sports either. There is a little bit of golf and a shot of a kid chasing a fly ball in baseball, but it's more about those individual sports that we can all take part in very easily. Here, let me share it with you real quick, then I'll go on.

For some reason, this commercial hits me in the feels as the kids say today with their tiktoks and their snapchats. I used to run like a nut, five miles a day, and longer on the weekends. I loved it so much. I stopped, because my poor diet was taking its toll on me, and it was becoming painful to run. Before I did, though, I achieved one of the few goals that I've ever actually succeeded at (the other being those 300,000 words that I just finished writing last week).

I managed to get 500 miles running in one year. I made some videos about it, if you've read this blog for a long time (you know, those of you participating in the psychiatric experiment at Arkham), you might remember them. If not, I suppose I could share them with you as well as the Dick's commercial. Then all the videos on this post will be about dicks.

Every time I watch those videos, they make me wish I was back out there. They give me the same feeling that the Dick's commercial gave me. I think the fact that I participated in running as much as I did is the main reason that I love the Dick's commercial as much as I do.

Rish Outfield used to give me a hard time about the running that I did. He called me crazy. He wore a shirt around that had a picture of a tyrannasaurus chasing a person, and it said, "Exercise only with motivation," or something like that. Then, out of the blue, he decided to try runnning this year, and now he's totally hooked on it. It's one of the things that gives him more joy than anything else that he does each day. I bet he gets a similar feeling to the one I felt watching the commercial. It's one of the main reasons I wrote this post, so that I could share it with Rish.

At the end of that last video, I say, "Now it's time for the full marathon," but that's a goal that I never continued on to complete. It's something that I've meant to do since I was a young man. To me, it's one of those ultimate goals of endurance. Sure, there's crazy ultra-marathons out there. There's Iron Man competitions where people do insane things that sometimes I find hard to believe that they achieved while occupying a human body and not some kind of Six Million Dollar Man enhanced body or something, but for a normal everyday person, a marathon is a hell of an achievement. I was on the cusp of that when I was doing that running. If I'd only trained another month or so, I would have easily done it, but I didn't.

I think I fell prey to the false idea that has been more and more prevalent as the years go by that you can exercise your way out of being fat. I used to think that I was burning so many calories with those hours and hours of running I did each week that there was no way that I wouldn't drop a bunch of weight. However, one thing that stays constant through all three of those running videos is my big belly bouncing along as I run. My weight didn't budge an inch.

I finally got some straight talk about diet recently, and now I know what it is that I have to do to lose weight. Last year, I put it into practice, and lost 75 lbs. without doing much exercise at all. Instead, I cut out the carbs completely, and did a lot of fasting, and before I knew it, I as svelte as I had ever been. Sadly, that has been reversed, and I think I know why.

There's this guy who does videos on the no-carb way of eating named Dr. Robert Cywes. He talks about this stuff like no one else does though. He includes talk about the addiction side of obesity. Carbs are addictive. They provide you with dopamine, just like other drugs like cocaine and alcohol do. They give you that temporary high that makes you feel better, temporarily, and drive the behavior to seek them out again. Here, check out these videos:

Lots of other things give you dopamine as well. Dopamine isn't a bad thing, it's just a pathway in the body that programs you to do the things feel good. Gambling, for example, gives you a dopamine hit. That's why it's addictive. Being with friends and enjoying people's company can give you dopamine. Being out in nature gives you dopamine. Exercise also gives you that dopamine rush, too. It's addictive, but also beneficial.

When coronavirus hit, everything turned dark in my life, and I needed dopamine. The stress of 2020 made coping much more difficult, and like Dr. Cywes said, all I had in my toolbox for dealing with that kind of thing was carbs. If I had been exercising frequently all along, I might have been able to deal with it, but I hadn't, and I didn't. Instead, I spiraled out of control, and now I've gained all 75 of those pounds back, and I feel even worse.

So, I think it's time to start an experiment. I saw how well things went when I lost weight without exercising. Now we'll see how well it goes if I try the same tactics while adding exercise in as well. From what I understand, the pounds might drop off slower than they did before, but I'm hoping that they'll stay off better this time around.

I'm going to go back to fasting three days a week like I did in 2019, and eating zero carbs as well, but this time I'm adding in a three day a week full body workout, and a three day a week aerobic exercise. I'll start with walking, but I want to progress to running, and by the end, I want to be completing that marathon that I never made it to back in 2013. I don't know if they'll be putting on any big events any time soon. I may have to set up my own marathon course if they don't. Who knows, but I am going to complete a marathon in 2021. I gotta mark that off my bucket list.

It starts today. I'm going to go eat a big meal of tasty fatty meat, and start my first fast. Then Saturday morning, I'm going to do my first workout. I think I will go back to posting my Big Anklevich on Health videos, though I'm going to make them much less elaborate, just me talking for a little while. Short videos, posted straight from my phone every couple of days. I'll document this whole experiment, and we'll see how it goes. Wish me luck.

See you out there.