Saturday, December 31, 2005

hello...hallo...hola...hi there

One of the main reasons I am doing this blog is to help me keep a personal log on my exercising regime, and my thoughts while doing it, different things I experience while doing this and so forth.

Being completely unoriginal, the FB in the title is completely stolen from somewhere else, but that is another story for another day.

I am 6'2" 260 pounds (as of yesterday morning.) I need to lose weight, and I have taken some positive steps towards that end. I have a new treadmill (NordicTrack 7600 R with the Reflex Deck) that I got it on October 30, 2005. I started running on October 31, running/walking/jogging 20 minutes 5 days a week. Adding 1 minute of running per week, and trying different things, I am now up to 27 minutes as of this week. I want to keep adding minutes each week until I am up to 40 minutes. At that point, I have been told that running more than 40 minutes isn't beneficial. And, being a heavy guy, I don't want to do damage to my knees (hence the reason I paid extra for the Reflex Deck.)

Starting on January 2, 2006, I am going to eat healthier. I don’t particularly like to call it a “diet” in the conventional sense, but I will decide what I think is good to eat. I will base it mostly on low carb, and fuck everyone who thinks that is wrong. I don’t care. I have lost weight in the past with the low carb diet, I just feel I need to introduce heavier exercise with that diet. And, last June, I tore my left calf muscle, and once I couldn’t play softball, I gained weight. Then, I decided that I would start eating better “later” so I started eating anything I wanted…and that is when it all started going bad this year. I started the year at about 238 pounds…and now at 260.

More about me: 36, gay, fat, college educated, insurance worker. I can't believe that when I thought of explaining myself, those are the first 5 things that come out. Stream of conscious. Hmmm - what does that say about me? Well, I am actually, despite my girth, athletic. I always tell the story of when one friend, who is well built, was described as "athletic" by someone else. We in the gay community have this thing that "athletic" is a look instead of an activity. In reality, my friend is well built and in great shape, but he doesn't do much of anything that is actually athletic in nature. He can't throw a ball, can't run bases or swing a bat in softball (he did learn some of those thing in one year of softball, but he won't be an all-star anytime soon) or volleyball or bowling or football.

I can play softball well (I have played all positions except pitcher or catcher in the softball league); volleyball, football, bowling and most any other sport, I enjoy. But no one in the gay community would ever, ever, EVER describe me as "athletic" because I am a big guy. I am described as a "bear," big, hairy guy. I have come to accept that as a description, but I don't want to be a big guy anymore.

That is the basics of me at the moment. Hopefully, I won’t fuck up and stop writing, so that I can record all the good things I do (as well as the bad things.) But for now, I am going to run for the last time in 2005, hoping that 2006 is the year that I actually keep a resolution, and get healthier. I need to, for myself, for my family, and so that I can feel more comfortable when I fly – those fucking seats are so small!!