Mental Discipline

Body transformation obviously isn’t easy. The main reason that transforming the body isn’t easy is because the body isn’t just a thing to be shaped into whatever we want it to be. Our bodies are the evidence of the way we eat, the way we move, the way we sleep, the way we work, the way we play, the way we rest… Our bodies are evidence of the life we lead. Which is why when you are losing weight, a good health professional will tell you that changing your diet or changing your exercise routine isn’t going to fix your problem. If your problem is your body, and your body is just evidence of the life you lead, you have to change your life. People with amazing bodies don’t just have healthy bodies: they have healthy lives.

But there is a tendency, while losing weight is our goal, to imagine our needs in that respect to be physical ones. And why not? It’s a physical problem. We’re fat. We look lumpy and rolly and big and so forth… Of course it’s a physical problem with physical needs and physical remedies. But in my experience it’s not nearly as simple as that. And I think a careful reader will have gathered that from my writing so far: making a physical change requires much more than physical discipline. And this may be the hardest part of the whole thing: changing your mind.

Bodybuilding: Week 3

(Previous week: 1, 2)

Week 2 was a little rough, of course. My best plans notwithstanding, I didn’t get as much done while on vacation in Chicago as I’d hoped, but also about the same as I expected if we’re all being honest. Still, I made some progress in certain areas even as some stagnated, so any progress is still progress, especially considering that I was gone for 5 days in Chicago and could have made no progress.

So let’s recap.

Long Term Goals:

• Increase my Squat, Bench, Deadlift, and Shoulder Press by 30%.
• Lean down to an athletic bodyfat %
• Qualify for a show

Near Term Goals:

• Increase my Squat, Bench, Deadlift, and Shoulder Press each week.
• Clean up my diet and maintain a very clear, very clean carb cycling regimen.
• Increase my cardiovascular endurance each week.
• Find myself a coach.

Like I said, some goals got met and some didn’t. Namely, my bodyfat goal suffered mainly because I couldn’t control my eating the way I’d need to in order to make progress there. But my lifting actually went really well!

Bodyfat: My weight stayed the same: I’m holding steady at 224.4. But I also increased my strength, which would seem to indicate that I changed some fat weight to muscle weight.

Strength: I made some impressive gains in my support exercises last week, which surprised me, but even more satisfying is the fact that I increased my strength in my four main target motions: bench, squat, deadlift, and shoulder press. My squat, shoulder press, and deadlift increased by 20%, which is pretty astonishing to me not just because the weight increase was so big but because I maintained my form through it. I’m doing a squat correctly and increasing my strength… which really shouldn’t surprise my I guess. Doing things correctly in the gym tends to improve gains. My bench press increased by 7% and while not as impressive as the others is still a pretty solid gain in one week. As far as strength goes, last week was really productive!

Diet: This part was a total collapse haha. Like I said, my food was hard to control in Chicago even though I tried planning ahead, but thankfully my weight didn’t fluctuate. Which actually really surprises me because normally my weight would shoot up from any deviation from the norm.

Cardiovascular Endurance: I didn’t get to do much Insanity in my hotel room, but I did do it each morning before I left and the morning I got back. I’m happy to say that my endurance is now up to about 80%-90% of my target (my target being “get through Insanity without stopping”). Again, sort of surprising considering that as an endomorph my cardio endurance is usually first thing to decay if I’m not consistent with it. So again, pretty happy!

Next Week:

With nothing surprising on the horizon, let’s see if I can get up to 100% with all my goals. This will mean focusing on healthy carbs on Saturday for my “refeed” as well as getting all of my cardio into the program. If I can get things to 100% this week, I’ll add some new goals!

Making “Fat” Part of the Plan

I’ve mentioned before that part of what was surprising about my epiphany was just how far I’d let myself go by the time I finally got a smack in the face by my own fat. And part of why I had let myself go so much was because I thought I was doing pretty well. I was getting low-fat groceries, I went on a walk now and then, I at least knew where the gym was… I was doing pretty well! At least as good as a normal person. Better than a normal person, I thought, especially if the food selection at the grocery store was any indication of the normal American diet. And yet I was enormous.

What revealed just what was wrong with my situation wasn’t really something that happened to me, but something I saw when I was visiting my family for a wedding. My problem was of course that I was eating poorly in general, but the reason I was eating poorly in general was that, bizarrely, being fat was part of my “routine”.

Bodybuilding: Week 2

So week 1 of my bodybuilding odyssey is under my belt and it’s time to update this series of posts. What I’ll do is give a recap of what my goals were, discuss if I met those, then unpack the reasons I succeeded or failed at a given objective. Finally, I’ll go over some plans for guiding next week’s performance. So here we go: the recap.

Long Term Goals:

• Increase my Squat, Bench, Deadlift, and Shoulder Press by 30%.
• Lean down to an athletic bodyfat %
• Qualify for a show

Near Term Goals:

• Increase my Squat, Bench, Deadlift, and Shoulder Press each week.
• Clean up my diet and maintain a very clear, very clean carb cycling regimen.
• Increase my cardiovascular endurance each week.
• Find myself a coach.

So how was the first week? Actually went pretty well, all things considered. I didn’t reach some goals, but I also learned to focus on things in a different way to help my overall performance. But let’s go over each goal and how I met it.

Getting to Know the Body

I’ve alluded to this subject several times in previous posts but it’s taken some time build up the wherewithal to start writing about it. It actually seems funny that this should require so much more thought than the rest since it is basically the backbone of my entire fitness philosophy: I should be easily conversant about it! And maybe I am. But there is just so much to say that it can be difficult to start. But I’ll start from the start: why this as-yet-unnamed topic even came about.

This subject would come up because I came to believe that everything the nutrition industry had told me was a lie, and that the “science” behind weight loss was a mix of pure fiction, wishful thinking, and witchcraft.

Ok, Let’s Be Real…

It’s a phrase I use with friends when it’s time for us to really cut the BS and face reality. So that’s what I’ll do here for you, dear reader, because while it’ll be painful to document my own BS, it’ll probably be helpful for me and maybe even for you! (I’m imagining this being a long series… I have a lot of BS I cut through). So prepare to look behind the curtain.

Poisonous Positive Reinforcement 2

Part 2 in a series (See: Part 1)

I always try to remember that the people who love me only want the best for me. It’s good to keep this in mind when I hear someone’s advice, because sometimes it is so wrong-headed, or so discouraging, or so flabbergasting, or even so offensive, that if it were not for the foundation of “this person cares about me” I would be completely thrown for a loop.

When last I discussed Poisonous Positive Reinforcement, I pointed out the three things that discouraged me – that discourage many fat boys – when I heard them as a kid. Those three fairly common sayings from loved ones were all designed to make me, the fat boy, feel better about myself inasmuch as they absolved me of any responsibility for trying to do something serious about my weight. That was the intent, anyway. But there are many other ways in which positivity can sabotage our efforts, and ways in which loving concern can be a stumbling block.

Bodybuilding: Week 1

Ok, so what most of this has been so far is the past: what happened and what I did about it and the changes I made years ago or decades ago. What, you may be asking, am I doing these days?

I’ve stressed before that part of aiming toward being fit is adopting a lifestyle of fitness: of inhabiting that and embodying it and making it part of your everyday life. This, of course, includes always having new goals to strive for. There is no end to this process, guys. The process is an end in itself. You enjoy the fruits of your labor even while you continually struggle to the next highest height.

So what about your resident Former Fat Boy? For me, I want to accomplish something I never thought I could. I want to be Colossus.

Inner Fat Boy

It occurs to me that I’ve given a little bit of advice, but also spoken mostly about what it was like being a fat kid right up until the first week I changed things. There will be a lot more about that – it was 20 yeas of life, after all, hardly able to sum it all up in December – but one thing that will come up in Former Fat Boy in the final chapter and the Afterword is my perspective on the whole thing now. Looking back on that whole life lived, did I get what I wanted from all that work?

Here’s something people need to understand about about being a Former Fat Boy: the fat boy never really goes away. Let me tell you what I mean by that.

Amazing Transformation!! (Isn’t it?)

A big part of my work here is the Transformation Narrative. As well it should be! My whole story is about the transformation. But as a kind of followup to the last post about being aware of what you’re looking for when you try to find a trainer, you should also be aware of what you’re looking for when watching someone’s amazing transformation on TV. Seems obvious, right? Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.