Everybody knows it sucks to grow up; and everybody does

I leave for Edmonton on Tuesday August 7th for my annual trip to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. That is 10 days away. I am still fat.
Oh, I mention the fat part because I have to bike around Edmonton. I stay with Eltee, my friend that was our tour guide in Thailand, and we bike everywhere. When I started running, one of the things I wanted to be able to do is be better at riding my bike on my annual trip to Edmonton. I am not so sure that I will be able to bike too well this year. I just don’t seem to have the stamina I had last year. I guess I will see in 10 days, eh?

I have run 3 times this week, mostly for about 20 minutes and 1.5 miles. Not too bad, but I’d rather be running more often. I am also eating too erratically. One day, I can keep it around 1600 calories, and other days I just eat whatever I can get my hands on and into my mouth.

I want to write about my new plan, but in doing a little reading into what I’ve previously written, it seems that I’ve done this forever and failed every time except for the initial time I went on the 1600 calorie diet on 03/19/2006. I don't know that I fully realized how many times I've written in this blog that I was goiing to get back on track on a specific day, only to go off track a few days later.

But here it is. I get back from Edmonton on 08/14/2007. I will be fatter than I was before I left (the food is incredible at the folk music festival) and probably won't ride the bike as much as I would have liked and be still out of shape. Therefore, I will come back and spend the first few days buying food and running every day, not just here and there. Then, on Sunday 08/19/2007. I will start the diet back up. 1600 calories per day through that Friday. I will run Monday through Wednesday, take Thursday off, then run Friday & Saturday again.

I will take it from there for week two, but I am sure I can at the very least do one week of this.

After nine days I let the horse run free, cause the desert had turned to sea

In the year 1087, William the Conqueror found that he was too fat to ride his horse. He had also been publicly disparaged by the King of France, Phillip, who had said that William looked pregnant (this might be the first recorded bitchy comment by a gay man in history, as King Phillip may have actually been a big old queen.)

So what did King William do? He went on what historians now recognize as the first “diet” in recorded history. He changed his food intake to lose weight. As King of England, he set a precedent for his whole kingdom by recognizing that food intake was creating his huge belly, and you needed to reduce the size of your belly to be healthier.

What confused our medieval brethren about weight gain was the fact that people wouldn’t exactly get skinny when they were poor and didn’t have enough food or drink. This was mainly because they would die from thirst long before starvation, but it was also because of the types of foods they ate.

Medieval people had to boil their water for purification, and if they didn’t have food to cook, they usually didn’t have a pot to boil the water and would either not drink water and die from thirst or drink rancid water and die from whatever was in the water. The poor got the cheap foods like white breads & pastries and the fattier/non-meaty parts of the animal, so everyone saw the poor, who may have been eating less, still being fatter. No one saw someone else get really skinny from lack of food.

Sadly, due to the limitation of science at the time (they did still think the Earth was flat then and was the center of the universe), William decided that he should stay in bed. And drink alcohol. He did not recognize the caloric amounts in alcohol, only food. And as William did not keep a blog, we do not know exactly what he plan was, but at least he had a plan.

The good news seems to be that it worked somewhat, because recorded history shows that William did get back on a horse later in 1087, which was his original reason for his weight loss regime. And he was comfortable enough that he looked a little less like he was pregnant to be seen in public. We know that he got back on the horse because he died following injuries suffered when he drunkenly fell off the horse.

If that happened nowadays here in the USA, King William would just breed bigger horses to take his fat ass around the country.

I don’t plan on drinking more alcohol or sleeping all day and only drinking alcohol or riding a horse while drinking alcohol. I plan on keeping up with the treadmill and I want to start eating less. I haven’t been too good on the eating less food this week, but I know what I need to do.

I walked on the treadmill yesterday for 30 minutes and it felt good to do it. Hopefully within the next few weeks, I can do that regularly and get into running. For now, I'm just trying not to be King William.

That guy who wrote that book about the bell curve - my hardest kick in the ass. It's comin' kick in the ass

I was reading an article a few weeks ago and I came across a section explaining the psychology of what happens when men lose control of something on which you have based your self esteem. Usually depression, sometimes violence. But the feeling off loss becomes tremendous and overpowering.

I saw a lot of myself over the past 4 months (tomorrow will be 4 months since the accident) in the article. Even though things weren’t perfect, I’d spent 17 months running, and subsequently losing a lot of weight. I felt good about myself for the first time in years. I’d accomplished at least one of my major goals, becoming a better softball player. I’d becoming healthier, and seemed to understand, after about 18 years of struggling with my weight, how to actually lose weight.

And it seemed simple – eat less, healthier food and exercise. And I could do it.

That is, until the night of March 16, 2007. After the initial shock wore off a few days later, the pain in my neck started.

I will easily admit that I went overboard with the eating. I have repeatedly told the story of how salmon was the dinner I’d had the night of the accident, and in the hospital bed all I could think about was how I had really wanted pepperoni pizza with extra cheese. And that played on my sensibility.

When I got out, I ate. A lot. I know I’ve written on here the past few months, but I really have eaten pretty much everything I could shovel into my mouth, especially if it was batter dipped and deep fried. And any time I’d try to use the treadmill, I’d end aggravating the whiplash resulting in headaches, weakness and neck pains.

Well, the good news is that I’ve been headache free for the past 11 days. I’ve walked and lightly jogged two days this past week, and the next days I did not have any residual pains. I will say that it was very light walking, and only about 2-3 minutes jogging (total of 30 minutes on the treadmill Monday & Thursday) but it was something, and encouraging that there was no pains.

Now I need to work on controlling the food intake. I am still reading that book I was previous, You on a Diet, so I haven’t figured out if I am changing my diet, but what I want to do is something I know, something I know works. Once I get on a roll running and eating well, I can look into changing it up to suit a specific need, but until then, I want the comfort of what I know.

By the way, my weight last Monday was 243 lbs. That only sounds like 14 pounds over what I was just prior to the accident, but it is actually a much fatter 243 lbs, or that was a much leaner 229 lbs. Either way, my belly is huge right now.

Oh, and I’ll try to get back to updating 3 times a week on here. I think that is actually important, as I can see a progression, a record of my success. And I say success because, really, I seem to write on here when I am successful. No one wants a record of failure, do they?

Oh, and the title of this post is from a song by one of my favorite artists of all time, Moxy Früvous. They started in 1990 as a busking band from Toronto, but they blossomed into a one of the best live bands I've ever seen (I've seen, by my own count, over 500 artists live in concert) and they had a way of wrapping a melody around some great, socially conscious lyrics in many different genres of music. They are currently defunct, but for about a 10 year period, they were the bomb!

You wonder if your chance will ever come, or if you're stuck in square one

Haven’t been in the mood to update here much as nothing much good has been going on in my world. Not that anything bad has been happening, but it has just been same old same old for me.

I tried exercising on the treadmill last Monday and Tuesday, and by Wednesday, I was having a bad headache and my neck was sore. Very frustrating, to be honest. So I just comfort myself by eating all the food I can. Very stupid and very destructive in one way, but it is just too frustrating.

Work has been hectic, but nothing I can do about that, just keep working. I am on a leave of absence from the movie theater as they aren’t doing as good as they had budgeted, so my weekends have been just letting myself eat and sit around. And repeating.

Softball has been horrendous, to be honest. I’m hitting alright, but I can’t seem to play defense too well. The team is 5-7, which isn’t too bad considering we started 1-5, and one of our games we were winning was postponed when the other team had a runner come home and snap his leg, having to be carted off by the ambulance to the hospital. Our team hasn’t been able to get going like we were last year. Hopefully, we will be able to hit on all cylinders by the time the playoffs come around.

I am hoping that after the Fourth of July, I’ll be able to concentrate better on eating well and maybe using the treadmill for some light workout. And, in the long run, get the BowFlex to my house and start using that, at least for some light weight training. I am making myself no promises, but at least I am still thinking I can get it going once I am healthy.