Mondays tend to be weigh-in days for me.  I was anxious about weighing today because for various reasons I have been stuck in the 208-209 lbs range for the last 3 weeks.  I had definitely hit a plateau which I started to fear I could not break through.  Right or wrong, since the beginning of the year I have worked out hard on the days of weigh-in.  Certainly, water weight is part of my "loss", but at least I am consistent about it.

Today was fairly typical for a weigh-in day.  I started out lifting weights for about 10 minutes, then I worked for 10 minutes on the rowing machine.  I had already started to sweat by the time I stepped onto the treadmill.  Those of you who are squeamish about bodily functions may want to stop reading here.  I set the machine for 30 minutes going at a 6 mile an hour pace at level 8 with random hills (the machine tilts up to simulate hills).  After about a minute of running a small spot of sweat appears at the top of my shirt around the neckline.  As the minutes roll by the spot gradually expands until my whole shirt is sopping wet (this shirt is supposed to wick away the moisture).  It is really quite something to see.  After the 30 minutes there is a 5 minute "cool down"  with slower running to fast walk to walking.  The treadmill says I burned 580 calories during that time period.

Then it is time for the moment of truth.  I walk over to the scales, take off my shoes (sorry foot patrol) and step on holding my breath. The pendulum moves back and forth as I make ever smaller adjustments.  And voila, 207 lbs, I have lost 1 lb for the week!

Consumption:

Bowl of Honey nut Cheerios, Bran Chex cereal and skim milk
Rice cake smeared in peanut butter
Large salad with a cup of lentils  with feta cheese and red onion
Orange
Chicken kabob 4 pieces of chicken breast
Cup of rice
Pita and hummus - 4 tablespoons 
Glass of milk

Exercise:

Well you know

As mentioned, I am taking a yoga class on Sunday's at 12:15 which I love.  One of the things about yoga is that you get your body into a position that it might not normally be in, and then you hold that position for a period of time.  The result is that you find yourself up close and personal with a part of your body you might not otherwise really look at.  For example, we spend a lot of time bent at the waist with our arms hanging down.  This puts my face in close proximity to my  knee.    What I see is my skin - a little looser than it used to be, freckles, some hair.   You might be asking yourself  by now, why would one want to spend quality time with your knee?  What would that do for me?  Part of what I like about yoga is it helps me get to know my body better, what it looks like, yes, and sometimes what it smells like.  When it is working well I am also listening to my body.  How hard am I breathing?  Am I starting to sweat?  Is this position painful?  Am I pushing too hard and do I need to stop.  The reason this is important is surprising - I think much of the time we ignore our body to our peril and  do not pay attention to what it is saying to us.   Like the immortal words of Herman Munster when he was playing golf and was told to address the ball -  say hello body!

For those of you in the military, P.T. has a special meaning.  I believe it stands for physical training and each person is supposed to do a certain amount of it each week to maintain a minimally acceptable fitness level.

In my family, those were my father's father's initials and some people called him by that.  I called him Grandaddy.  My grandfather worked in a cigarette factory and he also farmed.  He did whatever it took to take care of his family, his wife who was a  home-maker and his five children.  He took me to the cigarette factory when I was a little boy.  I remember seeing cigarettes rolling down by the hundreds and the wonderful smell of tobacco.  Mostly though, by the time I knew him, he was finished with that work and just farmed.  

A common thing for me then was to see him in his khaki work shirt and pants, his brogans, his hat with his pipe firmly between his teeth as he drove his tractor cutting hay.  He was a hard worker and a strong man who, into his seventies,  could still through a 40-lb bale of hay from the ground to the top of a pile on the back of a pick-up truck in one motion.  I think he was most happy outdoors.  I remember following him around on cold mornings to help feed and water his cows.    He also kept bees for the honey  and did not have to wear a bee suit when he took the honey.  I think it was because the bees could sense he was not afraid of  them.  

My father reminded me today that my grandfather had his first heart attack when he was 61 - the same age his father had died of a heart attack.  My grandfather had been feeling pain and pressure in the days before.    He had gone to see a doctor about it and was in the hospital when it occurred.  Thereafter, he always carried medication with him.  He had another "episode" a few years later when he was up trimming an apple tree.  He took the pills and laid back on a branch to wait for it to pass.

When he was 78 he had his third and final heart attack, and that one took  him out.  He had spent the day  working with my Uncle Butch, helping him build his lake house.  We all still miss him, but it was understood that he died happy, doing what he wanted to do, which is not a bad way to go.

My father has told me a few times that there is something about the way I look that reminds  him of my grandfather.    I can't say that I see it myself.  But I do remember that when I was in the seventh grade and really chubby,  my grandfather told me he had been the same way at that age, as fat as a butterball.  He reassured me then by saying I would grow out of it like he did, and I was relieved when I did.  

If we share some of the same physical characteristics, I hope through efforts that I take now, and modern medicine, to avoid having heart disease.  However, I hope to be as lucky as my grandfather, to live to be a relatively healthy 78 year old and  when I die be doing what makes me happy.  

Consumption:

Honey nut Cheerios and Bran Chex cereal with skim milk

We snicker at those commercials that come on usually later at night.  In one of them we see an older couple outdoors in two bathtubs side by side.  They look knowingly at one another and we are left to wonder:  how did they get there and what  did they wear?  

Of  course the pills he took were for a different purpose, but I want to praise my little brown pills.  As I mentioned in my post, Other Kinds of Signs, I have naturally high cholesterol and a family history of heart disease.  At my doctor's urging, I recently started taking Crestor, one tiny little pill a day, which lowered my overall level from the 230s to the 130s - a hundred point decrease.  And I am very proud to say that with my recent focus on diet and exercise,  as of my last physical, it had gone down another 30 points to 102, which was personally astonishing to me.  My "bad" cholesterol had gone down as well and is now below 50, and I feel very good about that.  I feel like I took a risk factor that I thought I just had to live with and turned it on its head.  I realize  that cholesterol is just one measure of good/bad health, but it make me feel like going outside and getting in  my bathtub!

Consumption:

Honey Nut Cheerios and Bran Chex cereal
three pieces of bacon
Tuna sandwich
2 apples
2 pieces of white pizza
2 pieces of bread
Greek salad with grilled chicken
1 glass of red wine
Apple cider

Exercise:

None

My hat goes off to all you single parents.  My wife has gone out of town for a few days and by day two, I am already yelling at the kids.  Pizza was for dinner, and while I am trying to avoid it, I ate three pieces before I drew breath.    Then there was popcorn to follow and a pack of peanut butter crackers.  Then I watched Outsourced.  What I am saying is, if I were a single parent, I would likely be quite large.  To those of you who pull it off every day with aplomb, I stand in awe.

Consumption:

Honey Nut Cheerios and Bran Chex cereal with skim milk
A bowl of white bean soup
Apple salad with blue cheese and dried cranberries
Chocolate milk ( I noticed after I drank it, it contains corn syrup)
4 pieces of Papa Johns cheese pizza (1,100 calories)
popcorn
apple
pack of peanut butter crackers
cup of apple cider

Exercise:

Yoga - 15  minutes
Weight lifting - 15 minutes

According to My Fitness Pal, I was 600 calories over my goal today - ouch.

I am all in favor of rest.  There is nothing I like better on a Sunday afternoon than to lay down on the couch with the newspaper and read until I feel very relaxed and my eyes start to droop.  I find a good nap to be restorative and refreshing.

The problem is when we start to rest too much.  There is a lot of rest built into the modern life.  For example, I work in an office  and a significant portion of each day is spent sitting looking at a computer screen or talking on the telephone.  Then there are all the little choices we make:  do I stand or sit on the metro? do I walk up the stairs or ride the elevator?  I consider myself to be "active",  but when I think back over the last several years, I realize that I probably managed to exercise on average only two to three times per week.  Even then, I had a "comfortable" exercise routine and I was not really pushing very hard - I was coasting or you could say "resting".  I remember in one high school class we learned that a body at rest stays at rest.  I would say that is true.  One more point about rest, the ultimate rest is cardiac arrest.

Consumption:

honey nut Cheerios and Bran Chex cereal with skim milk
1 banana
12 almonds
chicken pesto sandwich
hummus and pita bread
Grilled chicken breast kabob
White rice with yogurt sauce
Glass of milk
4 slices of cheddar cheese with crackers


Exercise:

10 minutes rowing machine
30 minutes running on treadmill doing 10 minute miles
10 minutes of weight lifting
2 minutes of crunches

At my college there was a magical place called The Training Table.  Kids who were there on athletic scholarships got to eat there - not me.  From what I heard, they had everything good you could ever want: steaks, pizza, spaghetti, ice-cream and cake - every night and as much as you wanted.  Come to think of it, maybe it was just an elaborate fantasy of mine.  I never ate there myself  or saw it, and I never knew anyone who did - hey, it was a big school.  Real or not, it became a fixture in my mind, as did the expression that followed: pushing away from the training table.  The idea was  that sooner or later, after you had stopped competing at a high level  of athletics, after you had stopped burning thousands of extra calories a day through training, that you would have to push away from the training table or else you would get fat.  Mind you, I never competed at a college level in any type of sport.  My athletic "career" ended in high school  some time after my sophomore year.  Regardless, I understood the concept even if it has taken me a few years to act on it.  Just like I fantasized about the proverbial training table, one day I knew, I would have to push away.

Consumption:

Honey Nut Cheerios and Bran Chex cereal with skim milk
Banana
24 almonds
Chicken Pesto sandwich
Carrots
2 Apples
Spaghetti with meatballs and sauce
1 slice of bread
One glass of white wine

Exercise
10 minutes of yoga
10 minutes of rowing machine
Eliptical machine for 20 minutes holding 7.5 lb barbell in each hand

My Fitness Pal calculated I earned 400 extra calories today.  Unfortunately, spaghetti and meatballs have a lot of calories so I just broke even.

The other day my daughter said she wanted to talk with me.  I braced myself expecting another harangue about why she should have a puppy, a treadmill or fill in the blank of her current agenda item.  This one was different.  She said she noticed that I had missed a couple of blogs.  She knew I had been traveling so she understood the reason.  Then she asked if I planned on writing that night?  I told her I planned to.  She said that was good, because it was important that I keep going, it was important that I finished what I started.  Now keep in mind that she has lived with me for almost 13 years with the opportunity to observe me up close and personal.  I suppose she has had the chance to notice that I like to have multiple projects going on at the same time and that there might have been one or two occasions where I never quite got around to finishing some of them.  My wife accuses me of having this quality, pointing out that the Christmas tree stand is still sitting on the side porch instead of in the basement where it belongs - I did move it from the yard to the porch when the complaints became too frequent.  And then my daughter stuck the knife in, "You know, Dad, this is important because someday I might have a project that I need to complete, and I will remember how this went."

Consumption:

Honey Nut Cheerios and Bran Chex cereal with skim milk
1 Banana
36 almonds
cup of split pea soup
Apple, cranberry and blue cheese salad
hummus, cheese and crackers
breaded chicken breast
steamed brocoli
Glass of orange juice

Exercise:

10 minutes of rowing machine
30 minutes of running on the treadmill - 10 minute miles
10 minutes of weight lifting

In the movie Dodgeball, Ben Stiller's character White Goodman is a successful entrepreneur who owns a chain of gymnasiums.  He is super-fit, although over the course of the movie we learn he was once a compulsive over-eater.  At the end of the movie, he is devastated and humiliated by losing the dodgeball championship in Las Vegas.  In one of the last scenes we see White alone in a room, eating wildly and watching TV.  He is massively overweight and clearly out of control.  Because it is a comedy and his character has been the obnoxious bad guy, we laugh.

However, there is more than a grain of truth in the scene, that we emotional eaters all recognize.  And it strikes fear into our hearts, that we too, will someday suffer a devastating emotional blow and will turn once again to food and over-eating for solace.  This week I flew on a plane beside a woman who had had her career in the military.  She told me that she was pulled out of a meeting five minutes before the plane flew into that part of the Pentagon on September 11th.  She went to 17 funerals of personal friends who were lost that day.  She said she had survivor's guilt for the next three years, and I am sure she still thinks about it every day.  

The truth is that none of us knows what is going to happen in the future or how or what we will have to do to deal with it. The most I can do is control what I can control now, and hopefully in the process establish some strong patterns that help carry me through when I have to confront more difficult times, which will inevitably occur.   Until then, all I can do is continue to dip, duck, dive and dodge.

Consumption:

Honey  Nut Cheerios and Bran Chex cereal with skim milk
Two and half biscuits with honey and butter
One piece of bacon
String cheese
Salami
Havarti cheese with crackers
Caesar salad with grilled chicken
one beer
10 fries
One chicken strip

Exercise:

One hour of yoga

A couple of years ago for Christmas, my parents gave me a book written by Roy Williams the basketball coach for the men's varsity team and UNC-Chapel Hill.  I was interested not only because UNC is my favorite basketball team, but because Roy Williams grew up in the same town that I did.  He came from an extremely impoverished background, a broken home and I believe he was the first person in his family to go to and graduate from college.  Despite those obstacles, he has become one of the best and most respected coaches in the game.  He attributes his success to hard work, and I never realized before reading the book how hard it is to be a coach at that level, the focus and intensity it takes to perform again and again.  

Somehow all these years I thought I could be healthy simply by thinking about it, hoping somehow that I could magically eat whatever and as much as I wanted and still be at a healthy weight.  What I am starting to realize is in order to achieve and maintain my goal weight, I am going to have to stay focused and intense for a long period of time,  as in the rest of my life. And as I am sweating on the treadmill, lifting a heavy weight above my head or crunching an ab one more time, it is starting to dawn on me that I, too, am going to have to do some hard work.

I have been lucky in that I have always had enough of everything I have ever needed and I did not come from a broken home.  In fact, today my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.  I am very proud of them for accomplishing that and although they did not say it, I am sure to get there, at times, involved some very hard work.  Congratulations Mom and Dad!  I love you!!!

Consumption:

Cheerios and Corn Flakes cereal with skim milk
Half a grapefruit
One banana
Beef and broccoli hunan
Apple
Havarti cheese and crackers
2 spring rolls
Wonton Soup
Flank steak dipped in vinegar sauce
Red grapes
1 beer

Exercise

20 minutes on a stairmaster
10 minutes of rowing machine
10 minutes of weight lifting