Weigh-In Day #2

Sorry that this post is late. I had a splitting headache yesterday, and didn't feel like doing anything, including posting something on my blog. I'm starting to think that I might be one of those migraine sufferers. I get these headaches fairly often, and they really do make me want to quit on everything. And the headache hasn't gone away completely, it's still there on the fringe of my awareness certain to come back and plague me later today or something.

But I'm not here to whine about that, I'm here to talk about my fatness. So...

And I thought last week didn't go well. At least I lost weight last week. I weighed 276 after last week, and this week?

Yeah, so I'm up 1.4 lbs. Or, I lost -0.5%.

My biggest problem is that I can't be consistent, and consistency is the #1 key, I think. I tend to be good for 90% of the day, but during that other 10% I'm so bad that I make up for any good that I might have done. I just gotta figure out how to overcome that last bit.

That, and I need to get back to exercising. I haven't done anything since I finished my 500 mile goal on Dec. 30th. That sucks. But inertia is a hard bugger to overcome. I even got up early one day this week, and still couldn't get myself to actually exercise. Instead, I just sat on the bed, not going back to sleep, but also not doing anything of any worth either.

And I know that it matters too. When you exercise, your body gets filled with endorphins and all that feel-good stuff. People who exercise are happier, don't have depression problems nearly as much, and live worthwhile fulfilling lives. Then there's me right now. Unhappy, depressed, unfulfilled. I could make it all go away if I could only get up and run. That's my goal for this week. To get moving.

Tomorrow morning I will be up at 6:30 AM, pounding on that treadmill. And I'll post about it, to prove it. I swear. I really do.

Oh, that's my one goal of two. My other goal? To out-lose my wife. A few months back, she came up with this idea to help motivate us to lose weight. She made it a contest. Whoever lost the highest percentage on the week got to enforce a penalty on whoever lost the least. It broke down on us, when my wife decided that I had to help her clean the basement out. We didn't have time to get to it that week.

When I won the next week, I told her what she had to do, and she said, "sure, as soon as you clean the basement with me, I'll do that." The basement was a big job, though, and we simply never got around to it.

But this past weekend, we finally did it. The basement is cleaned out and organized. So, I have fulfilled my penalty. I told her the next day that now we were getting back onto the game again, and that I was going to win. We weighed in on Sunday, and I have to beat her, so I can force her to do all sorts of awful things that she'd never want to do otherwise, like maybe go running with me...

Anyway, I guess I'll let you know how that goes in a future blog post too.

Okay. So, I've reported. Marshal it's your turn. He was the only one who reported back last week, and the winner of the percentage as well. Tobias and Jeremy? Have you already dropped out? And also we have a new person that joined in, and it's thanks to her and her prodding that I finally got around to posting this report. Tena, how did you do? I'm afraid to find out, because she said she'd been good, so I'm sure she smacked me down good.

Anyone else want to join?

Classic Sci-Fi and Character

I'm reading, or trying to read, a classic science fiction novel called The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard.

I'm still at it, but it's been pretty difficult.  It's a problem that I run into with nearly all the classic science fiction novels I try to read.  The characters in them seem to be so wooden and uninteresting that I can't give a crap about what's going on in the book.  Why is that?  I'm sure all the readers of this blog know better than me.

My guess is that a lot of the authors who wrote science fiction in the classic era were scientists first and writers second.  It's like they have an idea about something that could happen; like the earth heating up, causing the ice caps to melt and evolution to digress creatures back into a state that suits that environment; or a world that is like a ring around the sun, so it's a million miles wide and 600 million miles in circumference; and then they shoehorn in some sort of meager plot and characters.

I'm trying not to give up on the book, but I have no reason to keep at it, really.  Stephen King once said that if an author hasn't hooked you by the 15% mark, then you have no reason to keep reading.  I'm past that, but I'm slogging on.  Any time I've done that in the past, I've found that it was the wrong decision.  I never grew to appreciate the story later.  We'll see how much longer I can go.

Weigh-In Day #1

Okay, so how'd it go this week. Well, it wasn't a total failure but it wasn't great. Here's what I weighed in at today:

Last week, I was at 278.6, which means I lost 2.6 pounds this week, or 0.93%.

Not terrible, for sure, having lost that in a week.  The reason I saw it wasn't great is that earlier in the week I weighed 274.  I lost several pounds, because I was doing really good, but then the weekend came along, and I fell flat on my face basically and gained half of the weight back.

I haven't started in with the exercising yet, which might be part of the reason why I find it so hard not to cheat on my healthy eating plan.  I was sick part most of last week, so I was waiting to get all the way to full health before I started wearing down my body with miles of running or tons of weights.  I think that exercising might really help me though.  For one, after working really hard, you feel a little more invested, and are less likely to undermine the hard work with gluttony.  So, I'm going to get on that.

But it's been difficult to get started.  My wife went out of town for some training this week, so I've been playing both Mommy and Daddy all week long.  That really cuts down on free time for things like running and weight lifting.

I also worried about this weekend, because it's Valentine's Day.  Surely My wife and I will go out to dinner and eat at some place that is fattening and unhealthy.  And also, chocolate is always involved in Valentine's Day as well.  Or at least some kind of candy, right?  Will I be able to turn it down?

As Ben Stein always used to say on that "Win Ben Stein's Money" show on Comedy Central from about 10 or 15 years ago, "I shall do my best."

So, Marshal, Jeremy, Tobias, how did you do?  What were your percentages?

Challenge

So, I challenged Marshal Latham to a weight loss contest, since he had sounded amenable to it in the past.  Then, Jeremy Carter decided to join in with us too.  If you want to join us, just comment, and I'll add you to the list too.  I'm excited about the possibilities.

I'm going for it.  I've been trying really hard to keep to my diet.  I made my big salad again, and brought it to work with me.

I also ate an omelette for breakfast made with one egg, and a serving of those Egg Beater things.  They're lower in calories, supposedly, at least that's what my wife says.  I chopped up mushrooms, onions, and red bell peppers to put in it, and then added one slice of ham and one slice of cheese for flavor.

I may have to drop the ham and cheese eventually, because of the added calories, something like 150 cals for one slice of cheese and one slice of ham.  But I may be going too hardcore, as well.  I've heard that if you eat too little, you won't lose weight either, so I don't want to go there.  What would suck more than going without food, and not losing weight too?

Yesterday was a bit of a snafu on my part.  I've been bringing a large amount of pre-cooked meat to work, and keeping it in the freezer ready to go, so it's easier to pack my lunches in the morning.  I ran out, but for some reason I thought I hadn't.  So I came to work with just an orange and an apple for snacks.  When lunchtime came, I realized what I had done, and was bummed.

Yesterday turned out to be one of those days in news where there's a big event going on, and we were covering it the entire day, non-stop.  So, leaving the station to get some lunch was out of the question.  Instead, I just had to stay here, and grin and bear it.

When it was time to go home after the five o'clock show, a special treat arrived.  Subway sandwiches to thank us all for the hard work we'd been doing.  I'm trying to lower my carbs, and those big French bread loaves aren't low in carbs.  I should have turned my back on those sandwiches and walked out.  And, had I eaten anything all day, I would have, but I was so famished, that I ate three sandwiches instead.  They were big subs divided into smaller pieces, so three pieces probably equaled one footlong maybe.

Anyway, I don't know how much that derailed my progress, I refuse to weigh myself this morning.  I don't want to get discouraged if it did derail me greatly.  Instead, I'll wait till the week is over, giving myself time to make it up.

Thumbdrive Found!

I had given up hope, after looking everywhere I could think to find that thing, and then, when I walked into work this morning, my boss handed me the thumbdrive, and said, "Somebody found this in the parking lot.  I guess you dropped it out there."

Well, dropped is probably the wrong word, but it works.  And here it is:

If you look closely, you can see that the place where you attach the key ring is completely broken off.  I bought this stupid nubbin of a thumbdrive because it had a metal hook to attach the key ring to.  That was supposed to make it so that they stopped breaking.  Instead, it broke way quicker.  Piece of crap!  At least somebody found it, and it made its way back to me.

So, my files, stories, and the like are saved.  I've already backed them up onto another thumbdrive, and will back them up on my hard drive when I get home too.

Some folks have told me that I need to get with the times and start saving important files on a cloud server.  I think I need to look into that.  I've got a Google account, that comes with Google Drive, which I believe is something you can save files to, right?  Also, I know I have 5GB on iCloud automatically with my phone, but I'm not sure how to save particular files with that, because it's new to me, and doesn't seem to have an option for just dumping whatever crap I'm working on into it...unless I work on it with Pages, I think, which I suppose I could start doing.  If you have knowledge of iCloud or Google Drive or anything else that I should use instead, let me know, I'd love to get with the times.  I hate being left behind.

A Word Of Advice About Thumbdrives

I keep a thumbdrive on my keychain, so that I can access files that I use most wherever I am.  It has come in handy more times than I can say.  From writing stories on computers I usually don't use and being able to save them onto my keychain, to bringing audio files to other places to work on them for the show.  I feel a little lost without my keychain thumbdrive.

Unfortunately, the stupid design that SanDisk has for their thumbdrives means I have to replace them relatively often, despite the fact that the inner workings are still in tip top shape.  Because the thing you attach the key ring to is made of plastic.  And, in the course of removing my keys from my pocket and putting them back in, the strain inevitably cracks the plastic and the thumbdrive falls off the key ring.

Here's my most recent keychain thumbdrive:

You can see the cracked plastic bit there at the bottom of the picture.

Well, I've been buying and replacing these thumbdrives for years now.  When this one broke, I thought I needed to change something up.  This problem with the plastic breaking could be remedied if I could find a thumbdrive that had metal there instead of plastic.

I went searching, and quickly found this:

You can see that at the point where the key ring attaches it is a metal ring.  It should be perfect.  Now, granted it was pretty small, but that shouldn't matter, right?

So, I bought myself one, transferred all my files off my old thumbdrive to this new one, and attached it to my keychain.  That actually took some doing, because the attachment thing is really small.  The keyring that my old thumbdrive attached with was too big.  I had to get a thinner ring for it.  Luckily, my wife had one that I could use.

But was it luckily?  Probably not.  Here's my keys now:

That thin ring on the tip with nothing on it is the one that once had my new thumbdrive attached to it.  It fell off at some time, and I didn't see it happen, or notice.  You would think it would probably turn up, but it's so small that I will probably overlook it if it does.  It's so small that it likely will get thrown away with the other specks on the floor when it gets swept up.  It's so small that it will probably just get vacuumed up instead of noticed on the carpet.

I've looked everywhere I might have lost it, and found nothing.  And the worst part is, I've been very lazy in backing that thing up and making sure the files that I want to keep from it are saved somewhere beyond that tiny portable drive.

I looked on my home computer to see which stories I might have lost.  Rish got me in the habit of putting the stories I wrote in folders labeled with the year they were written in.  On my home computer, I don't even have a folder for 2012, let alone 2013.  Luckily for me, I've been super lazy at writing, so I probably haven't lost much.  But I do know for a certainty that unless I find that itty-bitty chip of a thumbdrive, the work I've done on "Sunny & Gray" is gone, as well as my TWSC story called "The Wrong Ingredients".  The version of "The Wrong Ingredients" that I turned in for judging is still in the email, but the longer version from before I hacked and slashed it down to fit the word count is gone.

And I don't know what more is gone besides that.  I suppose, there will come times when I think that I have something, and then I go to look for it, and discover that it's nowhere to be found.  Could be next week, could be years from now.  Will probably be both.

Now I walk around, looking at the ground, getting hopeful any time I see something small and black on the ground where I think it might possibly have fallen to.  I'm like one of those guys in a sad movie montage.  I'm still hopeful it'll turn up.  You never know.

So, anyway, my advice to you is don't buy a thumbdrive that is so small that when it falls of it immediately disappears into the ether, because when it does, you'll regret the files you've lost.

Time To Get Serious

I was recording the show with Rish the other night. As usual, we'd gone on for a long time, so long that the screen saver on my computer kicked on, and it started showing me pictures from my hard drive.

One of the pictures that came up was of me dressed in my zombie regalia for the Zombie Walk 2012 that Rish and I attended together.  My screen saver is set do do the Ken Burns effect, which means that the pictures zoom in and out, and there's a dissolve in between each one. So, this picture of me was zoomed in a lot.  It was pretty much just showing my face, and I was struck by how thin my face looked.  Was that really me?

I suppose it's probably hard to see, what with the blood spattered all over my face.  But my face is pretty dang skinny.

That picture was taken 18 months ago.  I don't look like that now.  Now, I look like this:

You can really see the difference around my face, all the extra rolls of fat there.  Sigh.

I went back to figure out when that picture was from, and discovered that it was from the end of the time that I was working really hard at losing weight.  If you've read my blog for a long time, you might remember this post: Fitness Challenge: Final Update.

That was the end of the first round of the fitness challenges that we were doing at work.  I ended the first round at 245.  The second round wasn't quite as good for me, but I still lost another twelve pounds, ending at 233.  That was right about the time of that zombie walk.

Right now, I weigh almost the same as I did when I began those fitness challenges in March of 2012.  It took me six months of self-control to get to that state.  It was hard, but I did it.  And I can do it again.

This year is one of those milestone years for me.  I hit an age that is hard for me to believe I have reached.  I don't feel like I'm that old, but the calendar don't lie.

Unlike most folks, who set resolutions by calendar years, I tend to set them for myself by birthdays.  The years of my life instead of the years of the calendar are the ones I measure by.  So, before arriving at that milestone, I wanted to achieve some things.  I made some goals.  One of them being to get to my goal weight of 200 pounds and friggin' stay there.

The first three months of the year...remember we're talking my year, not the calendar year, and my birthday's in October...I've been unable to get motivated.  Instead of losing weight, I've gained it.  I've had bursts of motivation, but they've been followed by long stretches of not giving a crap.  And I was doing a lot of running in December, which kept my poor eating habits from catching up to me too strongly.

When I made it to 500 miles, I decided to rest so my shin splints would heal, and I've packed on a good ten or more pounds this month.

That picture (and other pictures of me from that same era) seems to have given me the motivation I need to get back on the horse and go for it.  This is what I weigh now:

I'm going to report each week on how I do, and how much I weigh.  I think I may challenge Marshal Latham to a contest to see who can lose the most weight (he was saying he'd probably be up for that), and I'd be willing to do the same with any reader of the blog who wants to participate.  We can report our progress in the comments, and talk smack and everything.

I started eating good today, and was 100% faithful.  Hopefully, I can keep it up tomorrow, the next day, and for the rest of the year, until I reach my goal.  I was going to start back into running this morning as well, but I woke up with a sore throat, so I went back to bed instead.  It doesn't help to wear yourself out when you're sick, so I'll get back to running when I'm fully healthy again.

I've learned from past experiences that exercise and healthy eating are the only way to lose weight without regretting it later.  So, that's what I'm going to do.