So far, July hasn’t been a very good month in regard to physical activity and the ongoing weight loss project. Two weeks ago, I was incapacitated by prolonged TI band soreness. This week, it’s been the same with my calves. Pushing myself past the comfort of my running routines and embarking on muscle toning and growth exercises is shaping out to be just as physically painful and inconvenient as I expected it would be, but having started now there’s no choice but to see it through and keep pushing forward.
With all this downtime, I’ve been using the time of my day normally reserved for exercise to do some reflection and introspection — it’s been a good while since I’ve taken a personal “snapshot” for myself. Yesterday, I took the day off from work as I couldn’t even make it down the steps of the apartment complex with all the pain firing through my leg muscles. When I told my roommate that I’d be staying home and handed off the keys to the car so he could drive himself to work, he asked off-handedly if I had PTO to use for the day. I reactively laughed at the notion, since my primary source of income is still my temporary contract position doing admin work for a major bank and as a temp, I (and the majority of my co-workers) don’t get most of the benefits that come with a permanent full-time job.
As I spent the day at home putting my time to use towards my personal projects, I was surprised with how pleasant a mood I found myself in throughout the day on a weekday. When my mind wandered towards work, I realized that my elevated mood was a result of not being stuck in an enclosed room doing glorified data entry using outdated technology for a full eight hour shift. After posting that link to the article on LifeHacker about not needing permission to pursue one’s dreams, I started assessing myself through the lens of that piece of advice. One year ago, I was very happy to finally find a replacement source of income after that stint of unplanned unemployment. In the time since then, as I’ve recorded in previous entries throughout that time, I’ve been going paycheck to paycheck and barely keeping afloat financially. I’ve held in with the position in the hopes of having it turn to a full-time permanent position, but in the recent months it’s become clear that a secure long-term position is highly unlikely. Though I’ve considered searching for another job multiple times in the past year, I’ve been largely dissuaded by the memory of how difficult and time-consuming it was to find my current position. I’ve been intimidated and held back by my own fears and doubts, and over time I’ve sold myself a false sense of helplessness. Every day that I go in to work, I resent myself for allowing myself to have to spend my days doing something I dislike, doing unchallenging and mind-numbingly droll routine work instead of being part of meaningful projects that make the most of my capabilities. In focusing on the last year’s memories of stress and hardship, I’ve been betraying the true self that I’ve been so focused on embodying. Ignoring the relentless determination and ambition that fueled my great accomplishments of my early 20’s and acknowledging only my shortcomings and deficiencies.
The interconnected nature of the present day job market also adds to the pressure and doubt. The fields and positions that I’d be suited for lay largely unattainable; most require a college degree I don’t possess. Those that prioritize hands-on experience over academic accreditation I lack quantifiable recent demonstration of. In turn, the pressure has been placed on self-study in technological disciplines, honing my writing skills, and building a portfolio of work. In my head, this blog being only one Google search away from a prospective employer, the only out from my current predicament has seemed to wait until I can do x to do y in order to be able to do z and prove I’m capable of doing what I can. Save the money to buy the server space & domain to build the custom site and train up to being the writer the content to create a reader-base and prove to the world and myself that I’m capable of doing things I’ve already done. I’ve become so convinced that this difficult solution is the only one, completely ignoring that once upon a 2007, I coordinated multiple marketing campaigns with a globally distributed team promoting established Japanese music artists in overseas territories using an HP desktop equipped with Microsoft Office 2007 and a Nokia 6682 candybar phone. Now I have a powerhouse of a mobile office — MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad — yet all I do is update database tables using a dated terminal emulator and a proprietary webapp that requires Internet Explorer 8 to use.
After all the effort I’ve put towards matters of personal development over the recent past, I finally deem myself at a place where I can lay claim to self-actualization. In turn, being limited by such a myopic fear-based perception makes me a hypocrite. For the longest time, I was a self-doubting wreck mired in deep depression. I started publishing my experiences with it not just as a means to work through the issues, but also to openly explore and explain myself to the world. To be completely upfront with my challenges and lowly beginnings of the new story I intended to take on in life. My writing output has not kept pace with the internal change, and now I feel just as removed from the weak self-doubting wreck I was a year ago as I did from this better version of myself throughout the past decade. I don’t mean to abandon writing on those matters since I still cling to the hope that someone in a similar situation may find them to be of help in some way, but I also can’t continue to let cleaning up after the lesser past self of recent years keep dissuading me from seeking out opportunity.
Goals
The 3 Obstacles to Doing Epic Deeds — and How to Overcome Them
The 3 Obstacles to Doing Epic Deeds — and How to Overcome Them
By this model, I’m working away at #3. Yet another great read from AoM.
Check In
I’ve been preoccupied this week to where I haven’t been able to make the proper updates, but the body logging reset and the subsequent workouts have been getting done.
3.9 lbs in 5 days, and the week isn’t over yet. I’ve got some updating to do this weekend. 🙂
Humble Beginnings
It’s been a good few weeks since I’ve done some writing. I’ve been neglecting both the blog and my offline journal, focusing on the goings of daily life, exercising, and planning my next steps carefully. The last update I posted on the blog was very cathartic for me; getting into a lot of the smaller details about the past couple years and everything that’s changed in that time has given me a sense of finality to a chapter of my life that I needed to bring to successfully bring a close since my younger self decided it was something worth introducing to the web. Moving past it, I feel like I’ve just woken up from a bad dream to a giant mess to clean up.
From experience and what I’ve read on the matter of productivity and goals, journaling and capturing life at its different stages provide excellent points of comparison against which to measure progress made. Here is the narrative at present.
Career
I’m 27, and on the cusp of turning 28. I’ve been in a prolonged state of isolation, almost two years, in my own journey of personal development. I’ve fought to reconcile myself with my past, reclaim my sense of identity, and redefine myself, my goals, and my expectations in life. I fight to give myself the opportunities a person of my capability deserves and to realize my full potential. I also recognize that the road ahead is long, and filled with challenges greater than those I’ve already overcome. Though I showed great promise as a child, I was not raised in conditions that agreed with academic achievement. I didn’t produce the scores and work to qualify for scholarships or even realistically apply to any university. Without any money having been saved by my family to pay for college, I joined the work force immediately after leaving high school. My plan was to take a couple years off to just have fun, and save money to buy myself a car and a computer capable of running software for graphic editing and web design, then return to school starting a local community college, and transferring into a university after a couple years.
From 18–20, I worked a series of jobs in retail and coffee shops. I bought myself a car, which was stolen only a year after I bought it. I came upon the opportunity to work a part of a startup marketing company that a group of close internet friends decided to form at the age of 21. For the first time in my life, I was able to apply all of the technological and organizational skills that I’d picked up through my hobbies and areas of interest for self-study. I spent 12–16 hours a day in front of my computer, writing emails, drafting documents, templating stationary, coordinating teams, managing projects, conducting research, processing data, and compiling business plans and campaign deliverables. The results the team produced opened the doors to some great experiences, traveling to Japan and meeting the bands I used to listen to in high school in a professional capacity.
Eventually, the marketing startup phased out of operation, and I returned back to “normal” life. I worked at a couple of restaurants before landing a job in a tech-oriented field as a support specialist for a local SEO company. At this point, I started making good enough money to buy myself another car, and build sufficient credit to finance a MacBook Pro to replace my aging computer that was unable to keep pace with my performance needs at work. Early last year, I transitioned away from that job, and after a couple of months wading through a highly competitive job market for a replacement income source, came upon my current position as a temp for Union Bank at a corporate office site.
Right now, I find myself frustrated and feeling trapped by my current situation. My job entails duties that are way below my capabilities. I’m constantly bored, and resent that I’m forced to spend my time doing what I do when I could be doing something more meaningful, and in turn, higher paying. I’m at an age where I should have a bachelors/masters degree and time invested with a company, or finishing up a doctorate degree. Since college wasn’t academically or financially viable for me and all that time lost can’t be reclaimed, my path is now forced to be one of the self-made success. I’ll admit that despite my age, I do have a strong intent to obtain the academic dress of a degree. However, the cost of education is something that I’m going to have to find a way to finance myself. Essentially, I’m going to be doing things backwards – getting the job to make the money for the degree, not getting the degree to make the money. Unconventional, but that’s just the way my life is.
Right now, I work my day job to cover the essential living costs. I’ve been in a constant state of financial constraint for almost a whole year now, causing me to further resent myself for letting myself get into this current position, but also motivating me to do something to change it. In my down time, I’m focused on buffing up my knowledge in various disciplines in a systematic order. Right now, I’m concentrating my efforts on getting acquainted with computer programming by learning Python, and soaking up everything I can in relation to finance and taxes. One thing I’ve noticed in all the loan applications I process at work is that successful people applying for high principal loans all have extensive investment portfolios – indicates to me that I need to learn how those work. I’ve also been planning to make a stronger effort to develop my writing ability, both by building a blog with read-worthy content and keeping my private offline journal consistently up to date. Once I can successfully design & build for the modern web landscape, I aim to freelance my development talents to make the income needed for school, and to upgrade my lifestyle. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to make another income stream out of building useful software for computers and mobile devices.
Health
Along with the career situation at present, the subject of health commands the majority of my efforts at present. I’ve been meaning to address my physical deficiencies for a very long time now, and I’ve grown tired of constantly carrying the guilt of failure at actually getting anything done. Over the past year, I’ve been making solid strides in making that part of me that enjoys running a regular part of my routine. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been completing my 5+ mile routes multiple times a week. Admittedly, I haven’t been dieting too well because I’m hesitant to push to a lower weight at the moment – doing that would mean having to buy new clothes, and I’m still not out the woods enough to accommodate that investment. Still, I run regularly now, and have also starting implementing arm and core workouts into my exercises.
This year, I’m going to reach those high goals I set for myself so long ago. I’m running out of 20’s, and while I’ve still got youth on my side, I want to experience the what “the other side” feels like; I’ve been a husky kid and an overweight guy pretty much all of my life, and I’ve got no excuses for letting things stay that way. I want to enjoy runs in different parts of the world. I want to be able to go rock climbing and hike long & difficult trails. To know what it feels like to sprint down a shoreline or lose myself in the middle of a crowd at a dance festival without a shirt on and feel confident.
There’s a giant laundry list of experiences and sensations that I want out of life, and being the pudgy, sedentary, overweight smoker I’ve been over the past few years has outlived its viability as an option.
Relationships
In my time away to myself, I aimed to get myself back to a state of mental/emotional self-sufficiency. Though I’ve proven to myself that I could very well live out the rest of my life in permanent solitude and in perpetual pursuit of a better self, living life isolated and alone is not how I want things to ultimately pan out – one of those just because I can doesn’t mean I will type of situations. So in addition to everything I’ve got on my plate in direct relation to myself, I also aim to start reestablishing my “tribe”. Back before I started focusing on all of this self-improvement, I was a pretty active social butterfly and networker. Now, after so much time apart to myself, staying in touch and constantly in communication with people has come to feel very strange and irregular. Yet, now that I’m once again confident in my ability to create, nurture, and maintain relationships with people, it’s a part of life that I’m very eager to once again partake in.
In Closing
I look ahead at what the year will bring, and I see wave after wave of continuous hardships and challenges. I no longer have the naive belief that I’ll reach some certain “point” at which I’ll feel happy and content. I’ve got a lot of dreams that I want to accomplish and some pretty high standards that I’ve set for myself, and I’ve got a lot of lost ground to make up for. My story hasn’t been a happy one, nor an easy one, but I accept it. More than that, I celebrate it. Had my life played out to all of the better alternative outcomes of my past experiences, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. For a long time, I focused on all the negative results of those experiences – the self doubt, the feelings of abandonment, the unwillingness to fully trust the people closest to me in life, etc. Now, I’ve reconnected with that inner fire, that unwavering confidence in my identity and capabilities. I’m ready to pick up the fight again and start doing everything I should be for myself.
May this year be filled with things that I’ve legitimately earned. I’m ready and willing to hurt, sweat, and bleed however much it takes to get things done.
Reconciliation: Recovering From a Mid-Life Crisis at 27
In migrating my self-hosted installation to my previously-abandoned wordpress.com blog, I’ve found myself re-reading past entires as I’ve been going through and changing the visibility on past posts I’d forgotten were still on the web; I archived everything when I was self-hosting, and you know…consistency. One entry that stood out at me was one that I composed back in August of this year regarding my personal journey in isolation throughout 2012. I can vividly recall my mindset when I wrote that: I felt unburdened and free, yet lost. I’d been a highly self-critical introspective mental-emotional train wreck for so long that when I allowed myself to let go and move past that, I didn’t feel like I had an identity of my own. So I wrote about the circumstances, the inspiration behind my decision, and the result (which, admittedly, is something that I’ve done many times before, each one feeling like I failed to capture all I really meant to say). Though the writing was on the wall throughout the entire length of that post, the one thing I didn’t touch upon was what the core issue was: I had been recovering from a conflict of identity and lack of self-esteem — a “midlife crisis” in my 20’s. This is what working through that has been like.
Depression
I tried to work these things out at the age of 25 when I first identified and acknowledged them, but it was like working a math problem that just didn’t add up. How could someone who’s constantly told that he’s capable and produces great work still be wading in the shallow end of the career pool at college-graduate age? How could someone who grew up knowing a large loving family turn out to be a person whose family is his greatest source of emotional anguish? Why, if I’m as smart as I think I am, have so many of the choices in life I’ve made turned out to be costly mistakes? Every day felt like I was trapped, confined to an contradictory existence. Day to day life felt like I was trapped behind an invisible screen, watching some meaningless life unfold. I remained functional; I went through the motions — went to work, hung out with friends, spent time with the little family I still had an active relationship with — but at the end of the day, I felt hollow and worthless, a pitiful jumble of inner turmoil and self doubt.
Resistance
In 2011, things improved financially to where I was finally able to stabilize myself, and could afford more time and mental energy to really focus on self-improvement. Though I’d been trying for quite some time to sort things out alone, convinced that I could solve my own problems by myself, I finally caved and decided to seek out professional assistance. So I started seeing a therapist.
I’d wager most people picture a patient lying down on a couch having a cathartic emotional breakdown when the subject of therapy comes up. I’ll admit, that was part of what encouraged me to give it a shot; maybe if I just loaded someone up with all the details and have him systematically hit me with each one, I could just cry it out and move on. The reality (which is much better than what I’d been secretly hoping for) was rather ordinary. It was like paying to have the conversation I needed to have. To discuss my innermost truths with someone of an objective and analytical mindset, not with someone who’d be quick to feel sympathy or validate my opinion as friends are prone to do. Someone who would carefully listen to what I was actually saying, and know the right things to say and the right questions to ask. That helped alleviate a fair amount of the pressure, and for awhile, things were looking up. Then things in the then-present personal life took a steep nosedive. I hit a breaking point, and I snapped. So I made my decision to have my 2012.
Self-Exile
In that year alone, I put a distance between “me” and myself. I stopped seeing my past as a linear history, and more like a collection of different people that I’ve been. It was partially externalizing all the chaos in my head, and partially an invitation to escapism. I put serious consideration into the idea of leaving all my social media accounts deactivated, getting a new phone number, disappear and head off to the opposite end of the country, and just completely start over during those first few months. While this approach helped me in getting some needed distance to get a better perspective on my sense of self, there was an unintended consequence. With every day restricted to absolute minimum social interactions and lots of time with my thoughts, there was nothing to really trigger emotional response or engagement. Day after day without the company of friends of the comfort of family to look forward to. No love, no happiness, no sadness, just…me. I stopped processing emotions, and was still in a detached state, only without the saddening pull of depression.
Reconciliation
When you spend that much time with a person, you inevitably have to make peace with them. This year, I focused on filtering out all the negative “programming” I’ve picked up through life and reconnecting with all those “past selves” I turned my back on. Around the same time I wrote that post on 2012 in August, I read an article on artofmanliness.com that analyzed the quote “the child is father to the man,” and described something very similar to what I’d been feeling in regard to my own history. This November, I toyed with the idea of partaking in National Novel Writing Month. As I did some research on story structure, I read about the “Hero’s Journey”. I tried translating my own experience into the monomyth model, and realized why it is I’ve been having such a hard time writing about this all. I thought I would find myself at the final stages in the model. Ultimately, I placed myself towards the beginning, at the step labeled Atonement with the Father. Since then, I’ve reconciled myself with the child I used to be, and hold in such high regard. I accept that he’s gone through some heavy ordeals in life that have led him to a place of unhappiness, and that his story is mine. The grief I carried for so long is not a result from an inability to meet societal standards or the expectations of others, but simply in having failed to deliver on the promise I used to hold, like I somehow managed to make all the wrong choices in life for myself in spite of my better qualities.
Redemption
Things now are, for the most part, in a pretty good place. I’ve got a laundry list of things that I need to get done in the near future – namely, developing a second income stream and finding something to replace my current primary – and some financial hurdles that I’ll be carrying over into the coming year. Those details aside, I feel whole and in complete control of myself, something I’ve been struggling to regain for a very long time now. I’ve rediscovered my inner warrior, that part of me that is fearless and thrives in adversity. I’ve been actively exercising, running 5+ miles on a regular basis. I’ve also been buckling down and pursuing mastery in the various areas of interest I’ve acquired over the years, my present focus placed on writing and getting to know computer programming by learning Python.
When I was a child, I envisioned my adult self to be someone who is genuinely interesting to meet, one of those people who are knowledgeable and proficiently skilled in multiple disciplines. Now, after so much internal struggle, I’ve remembered who I really see myself as, and have belief in “me” to give myself the chance to become that person.
Weight Loss Project: The Big 100
After migrating from a self-hosted installation back onto wp.com, I’ve been tied up in other affairs (justifiably so, not just another manifestation of the productivity myth) to hammer out an update. Though I haven’t been on-point about updating, I’ve definitely been sticking to the work behind it. Thanksgiving week was expectedly gluttonous, and I ended up gaining about 3 lbs back, according to the scale. I also think I was weighing in less than I should have, since I wasn’t eating much the week prior because of all the stress. Since then, I’ve been trying to work on my running, but winter makes it a real challenge to push myself out the door once I get home from work. By the time I get home from all the traffic, it’s already dark out and the sunlit hours of the day have been cold lately. Still, I’ve managed to do a decent job at keeping the running habit going, and even set a new best personal time for the 5+ mile route I do down to Balboa Park a few days ago.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my logging process. I started writing about my fitness efforts as an accountability mechanism as well as a journal throughout the process. However, with all the social networks and fitness apps available on the mobile web, it’s so easy to outsource the logging to different services to where blogging about it feels redundant. While they all do a great job tracking activities and overall progress, they don’t provide the granularity that someone like myself who’s enamored with the idea of the quantified self would find sufficient. For that, manual logging is the tool for the job.
Going only by my weigh-ins on the digital scale was working fine for awhile, but the fluctuations in weight over Thanksgiving week made me realize how badly I need to get back to taking regular measurements. Though the fluctuations in weight were minor, the resulting physical sensation would have me believe otherwise (there’s more to be said on that, but I’ll save that for another post). So, here we go again:
MEASUREMENTS
| Height | 5’ 10” |
|---|---|
| Goal Weight | 165 |
| Day # | 100 |
| Date: | 12/10/2013 |
| Measurements | |
| Neck | 16″ |
| Chest | 42″ |
| Upper Arm (Left) | 11.75″ |
| Upper Arm (Right) | 12.5″ |
| Waist | 36.5″ |
| Abdomen | 39.4″ |
| Hips | 40″ |
| Upper Thigh (Left) | 23″ |
| Upper Thigh (Right) | 23.75″ |
| Calf (Left) | 16″ |
| Calf (Right) | 16″ |
| Total Inches | 276.9 |
| Total Inches Lost | – |
| Weight | 199.9 lbs. |
| Weight Lost to Date | – |
| BMI | 28.7 |
| Change in BMI | – |
| Goal Distance | 34.9 lbs. |
Update: 12/15/2013 @ 10:27:20 PM
I just compared these numbers to the ones I posted back on Day 1 in September. This is why logging is important. The story the numbers tell is that I basically gained weight in September, and slowly started burning it off again throughout October and November to break even. However, my running times and stamina have started to gradually improve and are much better than they were back in September. Physically, I feel much better now than I did then as well. That being acknowledged, I clearly need to kick things up a couple notches.
First Things FIrst: This Body of Mine
When it comes to getting to work on long-standing personal projects, the thing that immediately comes to mind is my physical state in relation to health and fitness. Getting in shape has been, at this point, a goal that I’ve been meaning to accomplish for years now with very little traction. All of my life, I’ve been on the heavy side. As a child, my diet was controlled by my parents who seemingly had no notion of proper nutrition and portion control. What started as my 9 year old self having to resort to wearing “husky” sized childrens clothing culminated in a record weight of approximately 255lbs when I was ending my time in high school. Up until that point, I had somehow always managed to be comfortable in my own body. Shortly after I turned 18, I started running regularly even though I had a long-established hatred for the act, and dropped my weight into the lower 200’s. Over the past few years, I’ve fluctuated through the 200–230 lb range, the lower end at which I presently find myself.
Throughout this time, I’ve tried many different ways to motivate myself to not simply lose the weight, but to implement a complete lifestyle change. I don’t just want to fit into smaller pants and have my shirts flatter my form, I want to have the option to engage in physically taxing but rewarding experiences like learning how to rock climb. To this end, I’ve invested money in workout equipment, gym memberships, smart scales, and various fitness training/tracking smartphone apps; I’ve written public blog posts with photos to shame myself into maintaining a steady pace; I even buzzed off all of my hair, one of my most personally prized features, and told myself I had to reach a target goal weight before I’d allow myself to grow it out again. Yet, all these mechanisms have resulted in failure because I’ve lacked a key component, an actual interest in myself, my life, and my well-being. I don’t want to deviate and go into detail since this isn’t the post for it (and also one of the reasons I archived all of my existing posts a couple weeks ago), but I’ve admittedly been in a very long depressive state for years. Now that I’ve found my self and my way again, it’s time to start turning desired goals into achieved accomplishments.
One thing that I do want to carry over from my old composition style are the weight loss centric posts I used to put together where I log my activity and progress. I still intend to document that progress photographically, but those will be kept offline (for the time being, at least) and I’ll continue to use numerical data and narrative text to represent the outcome of my efforts. Tomorrow will be my “day one”, and I’ll upload my first check-in then. In the mean time, more writing and productivity, and perhaps a good run/walk later in the evening — this whole California-currently-being-on-fire thing is making the weather quite the de-motivator.
Getting Started: The Hardest Part
Two weeks ago, I wiped the slate clean on this blog in an effort to start building a cohesive online identity that supports my present goals. In contemplating the process, I’ve been admittedly overwhelmed by the various points of consideration that have crossed my mind. I’ve more or less decided not to engage in any extensive reputation management efforts and clean up the traces of my past scattered about the internet. Being an internet user for so long and having delved into so many different services and technologies over the years, doing so would be a time-intensive endeavor that I cannot afford. This leaves nuking all of my profiles and content as the only feasible alternative, and it was hard enough to do that with my prior blog posts; I simply can’t bring myself to support the notion that all of the experiences in my past and the time I invested in documenting them have to be eliminated for the sake of appearances.
Moving beyond the past and shifting focus to the present & future, I find myself similarly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of goals I want to accomplish and the various knowledges I aim to acquire and master over the the next few years. It’s a lot easier for me to come up with ideas for things that I should write about than it is to stay focused long enough to translate the ideas in my head into text — this is something that needs to change immediately.
Luckily, this weekend is a three-day holiday weekend. I have nothing scheduled, and am free to utilize it for productive purposes to get caught up with myself. This is something I’ve been in desperate need of, since the hours my current job had me working up until the start of this month have been taking up the majority of my time and leaving me too mentally exhausted to use my free time productively. I’m really feeling the pressure and necessity to upgrade myself and my life to get myself to the point where I need to be, and this is where it all begins.
Measurement Monday: The Start of a Diet & Exercise Shift
I am resurrecting a practice I once started to use awhile back that I called “Measurement Monday”. Now, I had already done this back in July right before I wiped all my accounts to a clean slate, so this might be redundant if the original post was read. Now, As much as I’m excited and eager to do this, it’s a serious long term commitment that honestly intimidates me; Not only is the commitment aspect intimidating, but this particular practice introduces a risk of humiliation. “Measurement Mondays” aren’t just text updates of tables and numbers. I also plan to attach photographic documentation, and publicly posting revealing photographs when you’re not physically in shape is a pretty embarrassing prospect that can only be validated through change and progress. So I have to really be committed and reach my goals, or end up making quite a big fool of myself.
When I think of this project and all future posts under this “fitness” category, I wish I had an extremely defined plan, something that whatever few readers I get could not just follow, but also participate in. However, I don’t have detailed knowledge when it comes to diet and exercise like a nutritionist would. I’m just going to go along with what I have, and document the progress. However, I do have a rather vague plan, and I’ll get to that later on.
STARTING POINT
| Height | 5’ 10” |
|---|---|
| Goal Weight | 160 |
| Day # | 1 |
| Date: | 08/02/2010 |
| Measurements | |
| Neck | 17 |
| Upper Arm (Left) | 13 |
| Upper Arm (Right) | 13 |
| Chest | 44.5 |
| Diaphragm | 44 |
| Waist | 42 |
| Abdomen | 45 |
| Hips | 43 |
| Upper Thigh (Left) | 24.5 |
| Upper Thigh (Right) | 25 |
| Upper Knee (Left) | 17 |
| Upper Knee (Right) | 17.5 |
| Calf (Left) | 16.5 |
| Calf (Right) | 16.5 |
| Total Inches | 378.5 |
| Total Inches Lost | 0 |
| Weight | 232.6 |
| Weight Lost to Date | 0 |
| BMI | 0 |
| Change in BMI | 0 |
| Goal Distance | 0 |
More of me than anyone should ever have to see [Taken back in July 2010]
PRESENT SITUATION
Right now, I’m at the heaviest I’ve been in two years. I’ve gained (what I’ve recently learned to be) more weight than I estimated over the past 6 months. My sleep schedule has also gotten way off track lately. I find myself staying awake into the late hours of the early morning, and waking up in the late mid-morning hours (around 11:30 – 12:00). When I wake up, I feel lethargic and tired for a good two hours after waking up. My energy levels are pretty low. My metabolic rate is abysmal. My circulation, I’ve learned by how easy my legs "fall asleep" when sitting cross-legged for a moderately short amount of time, is also really poor. Compounding this, my cigarette consumption has gone through the roof due to stress and boredom. I haven’t had an elevation to target heart rate since I last went to the gym about months ago. I feel my body yearning for exercise because I get really restless often, but mentally, it’s been so long without regular exercise that for some odd reason I find myself scared to engage in it, because of how badly I’m expecting to perform. I haven’t done any of my favorite things, like walking or dancing, in quite some time as well. Nutritionally, I’ve also been failing pretty hard. Due to the budgetary restraints imposed by unemployment, a lot of my diet lately has been consisting of cheap fast food and frozen processed foods, both of which are doing me absolutely no favors. Subsequently, bowel movements have been kind of infrequent and more often than not feel lackluster. Again, I blame what my diet has been mainly comprised of lately.
PLAN OF ACTION
I’ve been preparing mentally to start working on my physicality, and also materially. Combined with equipment I already owned, my current resource pool is as follows:
- Large Balance Ball
- Perfect Pushup Handles
- Iron Gym Pullup Bar
- 8lb Medicine Ball
- Ab Roller
- Resistance Tube Set
- Jump Rope
- Light Resistance Band
- Medium Resistance Band
Not pictured, I also have 4 750ml stainless steel water bottles, which I plan to drink at bare minimum three per day to meet the recommended daily water intake.
I’ve also recently acquired copies of the P90X DVD set. So for the first few weeks, I’m going to do running and combinations of the workout DVDs supplied with the balance ball and resistance tube set before graduating up to the P90X videos. Once i get other pending matters in my life squared away, I’ll renew my membership to 24 Hour Fitness and work fitness classes and gym time into the routine. Far as tracking goes, I’ve done my research on systems. On the web, there’s Spark People, Dailyburn, and Livestrong to name a few. On the iPhone, there’s also a range of apps, such as Lose It! and iFitness. After playing around with different interfaces, I’m going to attempt to use Spark People and iFitness, since they seem like the ones that’ll work best, and I’d rather hit a home run with my first picks than try ones that don’t work and have to waste time exporting data to another system.
GOALS
Upon doing some more internet research, I’ve also determined a goal weight. Average ideal weight of people my age/height/weight/gender: 194 lbs Medical Recommendation: 132-174 lbs. Devine Formula: 161 lbs All the sources listed present quite a big range. Initially, I was just gonna take the average of the first two and eyeball it from there, but I like the Devine formula. 161 lbs sounds good, but considering my body type and frame, I think 165-170 is the target range. Other body specific goals:
- Get rid of the gut, get some ab action going
- Get my poor arms to match the bulk and tone of my calves (which are pretty boss, considering they carry the rest of me around)
- Whittle down the mass of my thighs. They’re way too big.
- Build some muscle in my ass. Shape and tone back there would be nice.
- Have my back muscles well defined too
Performance specific goals:
- Vastly improve time it takes to run a mile
- Be able to do a set of handstand pushups
- Increase flexibility. I have pretty awesome flexibility now, but I’d like it to be borderline gymnast status
- Train body in basic tumbling and flips