Weight loss blog 2: Electric boogaloo

So 98 kilos this week.  It's mildly discouraging after the amount of effort I've put in, but I suppose 2 lbs is what's considered healthy, right?

Wall of text this week, but I like this topic.

So, exercise.  I've read that diet is more important to weight loss, but I personally find that depends on your point of view.  See, the way I see it, committing to a diet is a constant effort, you've got to stick with it all day and if you don't, it's not going to work as well.  No surprises there.  The great thing about the gym?  Once you're there, you're there.  I'm not going to turn around and leave, it's more trouble than it's worth to leave and go home when I've made the effort to come out.

A diet is an all day, every day expenditure of mental energy or as I like to refer to it, "arse", as in "cannot be arsed".  It requires a lot of arse.  By the end of the day, you might be burnt out and want to get a pizza.  The gym boils down to a single decision point, a 10 second period where I decide to turn left and go home or to go straight ahead.  This requires little to no arse.

The other great thing?  Diets usually leave me craving more of a bad thing.  Exercise doesn't do that.  The more I exercise, the more I want to keep exercising and while the first 4 sessions are usually the ones I have to bully myself into attending, from then on the general feeling of well being takes me.

If you're having trouble with motivation, I also like to take advantage of my own mental shortcomings.  I'm a bloody terrible creature of habit, if I make plans and can't commit to them, I get irritable for hours.  It struck me after a while that by making the gym a regular thing, by making my mind think of it as "that thing you do after work", it suddenly became something that, rather like dropping a box of toothpicks in front of the rain man, I felt compelled to do and actually got a little put out if I missed.  I find ways to compensate if I miss a session now.

The gym isn't the be all and end all, though.  Really need to stress that.  While I think that the gym is really important, there are other perfectly reasonable alternatives.  I've quite taken a fancy to having a walk during my lunch break at work.  I get a good 3 miles in, I spend my lunch time actually getting fitter as opposed to eating and when I get back to work, I spend the next 45 minutes eating a casual lunch while I'm working so, tricking my mind again (which tends to become easily obsessed with statistics and numbers), I have a 1 hour 45 minute lunch break every day because my brain thinks that eating equates to lunch break, regardless of if I'm sipping on a boiling pot of soup while I'm coding.

So the gym itself.  You're going to need some supplies.  I won't go without the following:

• My kit (duh)
• A towel
• A water bottle
• Some source of loud music
• Decent shoes

Not too much, really.  But, let's step through these:

Kit - goes without saying.  I prefer shorts to tracky bottoms.  Plus, the horror of my milk-white legs and hypnotically jiggling backside gets me some elbow room on the machines.

Towel - Jesus Christ.  I've tried going to the gym without one a few times (I don't always remember it) and it's a miserable experience.  Not only is it gross for the guy that has to use the machine after you and pretty unsanitary too, there's no substitute.  I've tried paper towels, yesterday's work shirt or just my gym shirt, nothing else cuts it.  Hell, even if you've fallen behind on the laundry and have to use a floral tea towel.

Water - I can't drink when I'm working out because I cannot circular breathe and I would drown.  Some people can run and drink, God knows how, but I need a good gutful of water after 15-20 minutes otherwise, just to be graphic for a moment, my sinuses start backing up and I get a throat full of mucus.  But you've got sweat to replace, so there's that too.  I prefer to bring a bottle than to use the drinking fountain, it just seems... more sanitary and convenient, y'know?

Music - here's a controversial one.  I've read that some people swear by it, some think it throws you off your pace.  I hate working out without it, if only because it blocks out the trendy music on the tannoy and the constant "HNNNRGGHHH" from the weight area.  Getting a dedicated, up-tempo gym playlist really helps me a lot.  Get some songs for picking you up when you're completely tapped out, songs for that endurance section in the middle, whatever you need.  And the less you're aware of your own heavy breathing, the less you feel like a sexual predator!*

*Unless you're into that.  In which case, I'm going to need you to stay the hell away from my gym.

Shoes - I like the pair I got from Up and Running.  They're damned expensive but they're real durable and they check out your running style to see if you need anything to correct your gait.  I run on the insides of my feet, so now my shoes have raised insteps.  Helps me a lot.  If you don't want to commit to expenive running shoes, grab a beaten up pair of trainers.  If they're comfortable, you're on to a winner.


Then the routine.  For the first 7 weeks, I did nothing but cardio and tried to go for distance rather than intensity.  Start at 15 minutes on whatever machine you like, add a minute more every time you feel like you're not being challenged.  Thing is, it's a nice start, not too high intensity and I found it pretty good for beefing up my lung capacity which is totally a big deal.

I like a treadmill-cross trainer-stationary bike combination myself.  Get the intense stuff out of the way first then cool down.  I realise I'd benefit from a rower session too, but it plays merry hell with my back.

People will say that you should work some weight training in.  You totally can, it'll help, but I dropped a stone this year without lifting a gram so if you want to stick to the cardio for a bit, I reckon there's no harm done.  Besides, the pain you get after a session of weights can be a little hard to deal with at first, especially if you're stiff from cardio already.

I'm now trying a regime of interval training on the treadmill, high intensity on the cross trainer and then stationary bike if there's time follow by a bit of weight training.  They do say that you burn off more calories while idle with muscle.  Helps to get a bit more protein in your diet if you're going to bulk up and it does play a bit of havoc with your weight, but there are definite benefits.


I guess the last bit is the people.  You get a handful of stereotypes in the gym, some good and some bad.  The way I see it:

• Regulars - the people who actually want to get fitter and sweat a bit.  You'll know them when you see them.  They're not always overweight, they sure can be, but they tend to look serious and tend to be wearing sensible clothes. They're more than happy to stay out of your way and they're never a problem.
• Gym bunny - men and women, I tend to find it's mostly women.  The people who come in revealing designer outfits, wear designer fragrances and in the worst cases, actually have full makeup or carefully done up hair.  They're usually in with the early evening crowd and they almost always travel in packs.  I can only assume that they're in the gym to attempt to mate with others of their kind 'cause they never seem to so much as break a sweat.  Thankfully they're not too much of a problem, they rarely commit to one activity for more than 5 minutes at a time.
• The hulk - pretty much exclusively men.  Female specimens exist, and hot DAMN they're terrifying.  On their own, they're just fine.  They'll jump on a weight training machine or the free weights, do their thing and be on their way.  In groups of 3 or more, they can tie a machine up for half an hour or more as they take turns to yell at each other and do reps.  With the relative lack of weight machines but excellent variety thereof in most gyms, it's a waiting game, really.
• Socialites - if you're going to use the gym to go for a half hour walk and have a really good chat with your friends... y'know, it'd totally be cheaper to just start a walking group.  See some of the countryside or whatever.  I've nothing against training with friends, but when you've been in a cooldown phase for more than 5 minutes, I've got to question the rationale.
• That one guy who keeps dropping something really heavy in the weights area - because seriously, what the hell man?  We can hear that in the changing room and I fear that one day you may finally break through the floor and into the core of the earth.

But really, so long as you get consistent exercise, it works wonders.  I feel like a new man.  Something that challenges you with every session (and I mean really challenges you, push your limits but don't exceed them) speeds up the process immensely, but little and often's great too.

Let's add yet another weight loss blog post to the Internet!

I've always had problems with weight loss.  I had it cracked a while back, when I was working in a 4 man support team and got a lot of exercise walking from building to building.  Admittedly having a dirt cheap company gym helped.  I remember most of my struggles, though.

It probably started in middle school.  I went from being a skinny, sickly kid to a pretty vastly overweight one.  I think the worst of it was at around 16 when I hit 16 stone.  Health reasons aside, being the fat kid in high school isn't really great for your self esteem, but whatever.  I think I maintained this for a few years but I'm not sure, I've always had the ability to completely block out things that might distress me, so I guess I just didn't pay any attention to my weight until I was... 21?  Yeah.

The big day was coming and I was offered a sky diving experience by my mum who, until then, was sure I was afraid of heights.  This was based on a bad experience on a large slide in Nottingham.  In reality I didn't care at all, agreed to it and probably removed a good 5 year's from my mum's life for which I apologise.  She is morbidly afraid of heights.  Her and my dad burned through all the camera exposures before my chute even deployed.

But I digress.

One of the requirements was that I needed to be below 200lbs.  14 stone 4.  Don't ask me for kilos.  I spent a few months exercising, building up from 2 sessions a week to 3.  That seemed to do the trick, but I did have kind of a physical job which no doubt helped and I reached my goal with time to spare.  One of the best things I've ever done.

I put some weight back on during my last year of university (I think better when I eat.  Always have, it reduces my mental fatigue and improves my attention span).  I graduated, got my degree and settled into a nice, easy 3 months of unemployment.  I looked for jobs, attended interviews and played Team Fortress 2.  However, my dad transferred his gym membership over to me, so with nothing else to do with my day I'd spend a happy hour and a half every other day working out.  It was the most structured, organised fitness regime I've ever adhered to and motivation wasn't a problem, I was unemployed, apart from going for a 5 minute trip to the dole office I really had nothing better to do than mail out CVs.

I don't know how much I lost.  I reached 13 stone 10 (186lbs, I guess) and for the first time in my own memory I was starting to become happy with how I looked.  Sappy, ain't it?

I got a job, moved out and started to live alone.  Again, wonderful experience and I learned a lot, but I wasn't managing my meals well (I found out what 6 months of not eating fibre is like.  Protip: don't ever attempt this) and I was working overtime at a desk job.  I was under the impression that I didn't have time for the gym, seeing as I was working from 9 'til sometimes half 6.  I'd go home, cook, surf the Internet for 2 or 3 hours and sleep.  Not surprisingly, I gained about 2.5 stone up to 16'6.

So I guess that's where I was at the start of this year.  I dabbled with a gym after work but couldn't really commit.  I made too many excuses to not go, I think.  However, somehow I've managed to convince a wonderful woman to actually marry me and now the wedding plans are actually beginning so I think, like sky diving, I've got a decent goal in mind.  I need to be able to wear a suit without looking like some kind of bearded penguin.

Plus the palpitations at night were getting to be kind of a drag.

It's strange though, 7 weeks later and I'm still feeling good about slimming down.  It's not often that I can commit to a diet for this long and still feel good about it.  Much as I hate to admit it (I prefer to think I can do these things on willpower alone), a tangible goal does seem to have lit a very welcome fire under my arse.

Started this year at, I think, 105 kilos.  I've realised since that my scales do lbs and they do kilos, but the lbs are measures out wrong.  I'm now, 8 weeks into the year, down by 6 kilos.  Not fantastically fast loss but it doesn't need to be, just so long as it stays off.

I spent a bit of time today looking up weight loss inspiration and came to the conclusion that what other people use for inspiration is a bit too pink and fluffy for me.  I don't want to join a club that'll support me, I don't need to see pictures of artistically arranged aubergines (alliteration's awesome, aye?) and I really don't need motivational pictures assuring me that I can do it.  I can, yes.  Part of the problem is that I ususally, for whatever reason, resist that kind of encouragement.  I can motivate myself, but unless I'm feeling genuinely defeated, hearing other people trying to encourage me sometimes feels really patronising and I do realise that this is a terrible approach, especially when people are being genuinely supportive, but it's not a deliberate thing.

Although if people wanna tell me I look fabulous today then that's fine, because fabulous is a great word and we should all say it more often.

I'm keeping an eye on the scales every morning.  I know people say you shouldn't, but I like to make sure that I'm not slipping and I like to consider the day a success if I've at least maintained.

So a weight loss blog?  It's not original, that's for sure, but if I do somehow succeed then it'd be nice to look back some day, see how well I did, how I did it and such.  If it helps anyone else then sure, that's great.  And I mean that with no hint of sarcasm.  However, if I do lose weight, it's going to be for me and my partner, not for anybody else.  Unless I do some kind of sponsored slim.

No goals in particular.  Once I'm happy with how I look, I'll take it easier on the diet but keep up the exercise, I think.  Seems sensible.

I'll post sometime later, perhaps.  Fridays might be good.  Silly things, the exercise I'm doing, foods I'm eating, motivational stuff that I've got going on... y'know, that fluffy encouragement stuff that I've said I don't like.

I never said I wasn't a hypocrite.  Hopefully I can at least be a skinny hypocrite.