January 2nd, 2010: Muscle-Bound Log 14: A Shift in Perspective

I was ready to discount 2009. It was a bad year professionally. I’d made little to no forward movement on my novels, and was spending every day waiting for responses. That was 52 weeks of holding my breath day in and out for some news… any news so long as it was positive. And what was worse than nothing? The rejections. They were mostly positive in their “thanks, no thanks,” but each one hit harder than the last and each felt like a setback measured in months… years. By the end of it, I couldn’t see myself getting published… ever. I’d lost sight of my dream and as much as I hated to admit it, the success of some of my friends was burning a hole in my stomach.

     I was very ready to bury 2009. Preferably with a double tap to the back of its head.

     Then I went for my fitness assessment.

     They measured me, pinching skin with cold callipers and girding me with measuring tape. They rattled off numbers and handed me the verdict.

     I was… stunned. Flabbergasted in fact. I was at 16.8% Body Fat. I’d begun this program back in April with nearly 36% Body Fat, and since then, I’d lost nearly 20% of my fat.

     I’d set 16% as a goal several months ago, but I didn’t think I was anywhere near that. More so, that put me at 1.8% away from being in the category of a pro-athlete. And I was undergoing advanced weight training now, so my Fat Ratio goals suddenly shifted from 16% down to about 12-13%.

     With that single moment, 2009 turned around. It wasn’t any less rough, but I suddenly realized that I’d accomplished something I never thought I’d see. I was so focused on my success as a writer that I’d almost overlooked my accomplishments in my health.

     That brought me to the second realization — that I’d allowed things to coast by, with no real drive toward a stated goal. My triumphs this year came from me taking an active hand in my affairs. If I wanted to see results, then, for 2010 or whatever came after that, I’d have to work with a goal in mind and not just fire off something and hope for the best.

     What does this all mean? Epiphanies are fine, after all, but there has to be carry through, right? Honestly, I’m not sure yet. But I’m happy for 2010, because whatever 2009 turned out to be, for better or worse, I contributed to my circumstances. Like they say about computers and technology… Garbage in, Garbage out. Now let’s see what I can apply from my diet to the rest of my life. Because I don’t plan to sit on the sidelines anymore. I plan on turning hope into ambition.

     So, to date, this is where I stand:

                   April 6   December 31             

Weight:            282 lbs   210 lbs

Fat %:             36%       16.80%

And where would we be without some pictures?

And two more!

Happy New Year, everyone. I know I plan to have one.

Posted in Muscle-Bound | Comments Off

August 19th, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log 13: Keep the Path Lit

   It was a rough two weeks for me at the end of July… probably the roughest of the year so far. I can go to some pretty dark places in my head, which is why I guess I’m a horror writer first and foremost. But that dark place is filled with cannibal sensibilities, and it’s all too easy to devour the better parts of myself and leave behind the nasty, unsavoury bits.

     In the past, in the grip of these moods, I’d indulge one of my vices to excess as a form of escape. Over the years, I’ve evolved by adapting my coping mechanisms and eschewing certain forms of stress relief until only a couple remain. The one germane to today’s log is the vice of food.

     For two weeks, I wanted to drown my sorrows in food. To eat until the rough edges got smoothed away. I didn’t, though, and while I’m happy that I dealt directly with the issues instead of using food as a passive-aggressive proxy, it wasn’t a “yay me” moment either. At least, I’m not looking for that reaction.

Instead, I noticed another benefit to maintaining a routine (diet and exercise in my case): Good habits become a coping mechanism for the stress. Huh… who knew? I’m always worried that I’ll “fall off the wagon,” but I’ve discovered that the things I used to crave before have diminished and it’s no longer a matter of falling off the wagon as wanting to stay on.

While attending World Con a couple of weekends ago, I spent the evening at various room parties surrounded by chips and chocolates. I even sat down next to them, feeling a détente cordial had been reached. They wouldn’t woo me with their sweet and salty voices and I wouldn’t devour them hand over fist like Godzilla eating his way through Tokyo. The urge was gone, and while I can sometimes feel it crop up, it’s nothing more than a pang now. Easily ignorable, the short-term promise of taste easily overcome for the longer benefits of health.

So, between World Con and an angry end of July, I survived. My diet and my exercise remained intact because they were good, positive routines in my life that I wanted to maintain. And I came out from the storm feeling more accomplished and in better control. 

My reward came in the form of my latest fitness assessment. So, to date I’ve seen the following results:

          April 6    July 15   August 18        

Weight:   282 lbs   245 lbs   235 lbs

Fat %:    36%       25.20%    23.40%

Lean Body Mass (lbs)

          180.48    183.26    185.76 lbs

Fat Body Mass (lbs)

          101.52    61.74     49.24 lbs

   And next week, new pictures of my progress. Stay tuned.

Posted in Muscle-Bound | 1 Comment »

July 22nd, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log 12: Failure by a Thousand Cuts

   Last Wednesday, I was left feeling ambivalent by the results of my regimen and mystified by my reaction. I’d undergone my fourth fitness assessment at the gym, which marked a little over three months of my new direction in health and conditioning.

     The overall results included millimetres lost from all different angles, and a drop of 2% body fat, putting me at 25%. That’s down from my original 36%. Mentally, I was hoping for 24%, which would have put me at below (or healthier than) the average. Then, I discovered that I’d also lost 1.8 pounds of muscle.

     That robbed my sails of wind. A month ago, my trainer warned me that I was entering a phase where I’d be fighting to retain my muscle mass. We’d changed the program to increase the fat burning, but that muscle loss represented two-thirds of the previous month’s hard training.

     “People would kill for your results,” Matt, my trainer, said as a consolation. Yet, I still couldn’t shirk the feeling that I’d somehow failed. And then, Matt hit me with the next bombshell… a drop of forty grams of carbs from my diet (but an additional protein-exclusive meal), increased cardio and the warning that this was going to fatigue me. It was the end of the honeymoon period in my relationship with the diet, he warned, as we would ride this new program to my target weight.

     “Great,” I thought. All the feelings of energy and wellness, the muscle growth, were going to vanish. Instead, I’d be more tired and I’d be trying to squeeze in a 7^th meal each day into a diet that was already disrupting my schedule.

Mentally, I’d started setting myself up for unhappiness and grousing about it. Worse, I started vocalizing those complaints, and a strange thing happens when we bitch about things… we get ourselves worked into a greater frenzy over something, often, without dealing with the problem itself.

     Over the last few years, I’ve realized that it is within my nature that when faced with an obstacle or obligation, I complain or manufacture excuses ahead of the problem to feel less guilty about backing down. I pre-justify failure and do so in the use of language. Someone invites me to a party, and I say “I’ll try” to avoid making a commitment. “Let me think about it,” “Maybe, we’ll see,” “I’m not sure,” are all a part of my vocabulary to offset responsibility and they are words I want eliminated when used to avoid commitment.

When I complain, I also set myself up to be the victim. “I am a casualty of circumstance,” or so I’d like to believe, because it’s a way to bow out from under the weight of accountability. And I get pity, which is a terrible attention getter and a lousy way to score in bars.

     I realized my approach to the loss of muscle mass and the news of a change in my routine was enough to trigger a need to seed my language and approach with escape clauses. And while they might seem like inconsequential things, every avalanche is a culmination of billions of tiny snowflakes. A process of failure through a thousand small cuts.

     When I’m faced with these situations, when the challenge is frightening and the effort to surmount it is taxing (even if just in anticipation), I remember something from The Last Lecture’s Randy Pausch:

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!  

     Some folks may consider it an unfair adage, but the fact is, I know which side of the brick wall I want to be on, and complaining about it or establishing a pattern of defeatist language to protect my ego isn’t going to get me there. That’s not to say it won’t be hard going, or that I don’t miss pizza and snacking casually on junk food… and chocolate. I miss eating tomatoes and I miss sweets and I miss cheeses and butter. But I don’t need them. What I need more is to prove I can do this. My health demands it, and so does my ego.

     And frankly, I’m looking forward to the inevitable: “You lost how much?!? How did you do it?”

     Why?

     Because I can’t wait to tell them: “Through hard work.” I deserve to be on the other side of that brick wall and I’m willing to put in the effort to prove it.

Posted in Muscle-Bound | 1 Comment »

July 19th, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log 11: Let Me Paint You a Thousand Words

This week’s instalment of Muscle-Bound is late because I wanted it to correspond with my birthday. Today, at 11:25 AM, I hit 43, and the impact wasn’t as bad as I expected. Allow me to explain. When I was younger, my aspirations were as follows:

1)     Publish my own novels/fiction

2)     Lose weight

3)     Get in shape

Sure, there were more things than that, but they were on the forefront of my thoughts. The “write my own novels” was always there, burning a hole in my ambitions and marking the line where I distinguished success from failure. When I was in my 30s, I swore I was going to get my own novel published by 40. Now I’m 43, and surprisingly, I feel nothing remotely close to failure for not having done that yet.

I suppose I’ve skirted my mid-life crisis, but I’ve remade myself and changed my attitudes so often that I’m not who I was a year ago, five years ago, a decade ago. I’ve had mini-crises, and in those years, I made promises to myself that I’ve kept:

1) I stopped making jokes at the expense of my friends.

2) I brought my temper under control and get less frustrated at matters.

Two simple changes have made me like myself more, and while weight loss and weight training remain an ongoing process, I’ve managed to keep this promise of a healthier me so far as well. And I’m happy with it, which is one of the reasons why I’m content to be 43.

But getting back to being published by 40 (and then 41, 42 and 43), there’s a realization that came this past year. An internal cease-fire, if you will, between id, ego and super-ego. Some people could say I hit my goal by getting five novels published for Vampire, Warhammer 40K and Dragonlance, but that isn’t the reason for my sense of… peace. While I’m happy for what I wrote and what those novels taught me, I still have my own stories to tell.

See, 43 has become an arbitrary figure in terms of my career and my path. Previously, I saw my early 40s as an indication of personal failure if I didn’t get novels sold, but against what milestones was I measuring that assessment? My friend Joe Rose was murdered for being gay and he was in his 20s. My friends Eric, Emru and Dean, and my mother all died of cancer before their time. I have seen friends failing to health issues at a young age and, conversely, spoken over the Internet to my 92 year old grandmother in Cairo. So why am I assigning an arbitrary year and an arbitrary age to my success? I may die tomorrow, or I may be around to see what life in 2060 is like.

  The fact is, I’m a healthier 43 year-old than I was a 35 year-old. I don’t know what the future brings just like 6 months ago I didn’t know I’d be 40-pounds lighter. My age is subject to what comes next… to what I do next.

     In the 43 years that I have lived, I have been inside the Pyramids, Petra and Pompeii. I dove for my Scuba exam, 35 feet down and without a tank to rescue a diver. I have walked through locust swarms and seen albino cockroaches swarm a man. I watched a lake of oil burn. I have stood in the middle of Ste-Catherine’s Street, a snowstorm blotting out a blacked-out and near abandoned Montreal at night, the snow piling dunes of white against the ghostly buildings… and felt my breath stolen at its beauty.

     Forty-three years. That’s one hell of a prelude… I can’t wait to see what the rest of the show brings. So, for my birthday, I offer you all the following piece of advice:

Live today like you have a tomorrow.

And peace….

Posted in Muscle-Bound | 2 Comments »

July 8th, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log #10: The Milestone

    “So what would you do if you hit 250 pounds?” Jean asked. It was a hypothetical question, but for reasons that surprised me, I smiled. Not at what I would do, but at the notion of being 250 pounds. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I really wanted to lose weight. I’d accepted being 285, but acceptance wasn’t happiness and the thought of 250 pounds cheered me up.

     Now I’m not saying that sometimes in life we don’t make due with what we have, but in this instance, that wasn’t good enough. I was smiling at the hint of 250 pounds, and that hit me harder than I expected. It felt much like someone with an addiction who finally admits to the problem. A light goes on, and it burns and soothes in that same moment. It’s relief and it’s struggle alike. It is epiphany, and I hadn’t realized I was that unhappy about my health, about who I was, until the moment articulated it for me.

     But let me backtrack a sec. If you don’t know who Jean Carrieres is or why I mention him often, let me fill you in. Jean gave me my first gaming contracts for roleplaying games when he worked for Dreampod 9. He gave me my first videogame contracts too, and he’s been one of my most ardent supporters. He’s also my best friend, and has tolerated me in my lows and at my heights. And he’s always been honest with his opinions, delighting often in playing Devil’s Advocate. You’ll never get away with much in his company.

     Before Jean moved to Chile for work (which I keep spelling with an “i” instead of an “e” for some strange reason), we had a candid conversation over dinner. I was talking about all the things I wanted to do if I was in better shape, waxing whiny you might say, and he confided in me that he was worried about my weight. It was the first time he’d ever admitted his concerns over it. I wasn’t a happy person either; I used to be more optimistic and upbeat. Less neutral as my friend Rebecca once pointed out to me. But that part of me had gone away, forever it seemed, and I wanted it back. I wanted to feel happy, satisfied in what I was doing and in myself. That’s when Jean asked the question, and it became part of the inspiration behind this move to improve my diet.

     The 250 milestone itself wasn’t as important a target as the sense that I could be thinner and healthier. And happier. Make no mistake, I will never use terms like better-looking or more attractive when it comes to my weight, because I’ve been loved through thick and thin, literally. And I find beauty in people who are heavier, so my decision was one of health and not vanity. With that tangent out of the way, last week (after being on this program for three months), I hit 249 lbs and I’ve been set to wondering… how should I celebrate this milestone? And not in a way that’s typical to me. In other words: Let’s go out and eat! Or I’ll throw a party. I always do those things. It’s time to change that up and to keep some of those promises I made to myself. I am happier and I am feeling much healthier. Now it’s time to apply that energy in a direction to celebrate… and celebrate in some fashion before the end of July. So let’s hear it:

If you hit your ideal weight to be active, what would you do to celebrate?

I want to hear what you have in mind and hopefully, I’ll have a story to share myself before month’s end.

Posted in Muscle-Bound | 5 Comments »

July 1st, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log #9: Production vs. Productive Capacity

   When I unwrapped Jean Carrieres’ Christmas gift to me, I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d been talking about “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and when Jean believes in something, he brings his friends along for the ride. Now I’m not much of a fan of self-help books, but there were some elements of Stephen R. Covey’s work with which I agreed. There was also something that struck a chord with me, the notion that you had to balance production with productive capacity.

     In other words, it wasn’t just about producing results, which is how we live our lives (always about the outcome). It was about finding a way to produce while maintaining the machines on that production line… in other words, how we care for ourselves. Focus your output on producing all the time and, eventually, the machine breaks down from neglect. There has to be a balance or the entire operation crashes to a halt.

     This became a significant epiphany for me, because I felt that if I were a factory, I was indeed faltering. My foundations were cracking, my support beams were rusting, my machines were breaking down, and my production would soon dwindle and evaporate. As a writer, I was so focused on getting the words written that I was grinding my engines to dust. What then? I burn out? I wait to repair the damage and feel like I’ve fallen behind? I heal and stumble into familiar routines and bad habits?

     Something had to change, and I knew that if I wanted to continue writing (producing), I had to take care of my body and my mind (productive capacity).

     It was at that point that I reached a decision. I’d been going to the gym sporadically, my three times dwindling to two or even not at all for weeks in a row. Already 6 months had lapsed on my year-long membership and I was no closer to healthier or happier. That’s when I decided that exercise was no longer something I’d “try” to fit in, which usually meant when it was convenient (and which meant it was usually inconvenient). I changed my habit so that the morning belonged to the gym. That’s when I normally wrote, but now, I was splitting my time between production and my productive capacity. My sometimes-a-week-habit became four times a week… for ten weeks in a row from January to April. That was when I decided I had it in me to go full bore and hire a trainer.

     It took a while to get over the guilt of sacrificing what I considered critical writing time for exercise. We writers can be a masochistic lot, delighting in our personal negligence, but the gym was every bit as important as my work. Actually, I now consider it a part of my workday. My job is to write and that means ensuring my muscles get the exercise I need and that my brain is vital and active. An assembly line doesn’t run on its product alone, but on the maintenance of its machines and employees as well. That’s part of the job.   

     I’ll admit, though, that it hasn’t been completely smooth. Before, I’d write in the morning and procrastinate on the gym until it was too late to go. Now, since I’ve allotted the morning for exercise, I’ve fought to retrain myself to write in the afternoons. After all, I did it with the gym, so I can do it with writing. Some days are good and some are a struggle, but then I suppose that’s the balancing act that comes with any full work day.

Posted in Muscle-Bound | 3 Comments »

June 24th, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log #8: Dieting Dangers

   We had houseguests for the last two weeks, family I haven’t seen in ages, and my diet was thrown into a bit of turmoil. I didn’t cheat, but something happened that was perhaps worse. I ended up by missing meals here or there out of the six daily meals I’m supposed to eat.

     The result? I went down from 255 last week to 251 this morning. That’s not good. That’s about four pounds in a week, and the body’s reaction to that is to hoard your fat, leading to weight loss plateaus. The body believes it’s in crisis, and it saves fat until the crisis is over. In addition, the body will cannibalize your muscles, meaning I’m in danger of undermining my efforts to be healthier, fitter. And this morning, I was feeling rundown and tired. As someone dieting, my job isn’t to shirk responsibility, but to accept more of it to ensure I lose the weight properly.

     That’s the key that diets should be stressing… the responsibility of losing weight smartly, not quickly or by “any means necessary.”

     I mentioned in the previous Muscle-Bound log how dieting and exercise were normally about the results and not the process. This is one of those times when the process is critical, because how you get from A to B is often more important than just reaching it. Unfortunately, many diets today prey on the results and not on the journey.

     I believe the Cookie Diet is one of these culprits. One of the gym trainers told me about a woman who was on a Cookie Diet; she came into the gym to train and fainted… because the diet she was on barely left her with enough to function. She had no reserves or strength to go through a work-out. The cookies only allot you a maximum of 800 calories a day, followed by a single meal of lean meat and a cup of vegetables. Your minimum is supposed to be 1200 calories a day. There’re also no exercise guidelines for cookie diets because you’re already shocking the body through deprivation. And that could lead to the ever-feared rebound effect that most of us suffer through when losing weight… gaining your pounds back plus interest.

     Diets that promise quick results may sound enticing, and me losing 4 pounds in a week may seem appealing, but it isn’t. I screwed up. It’s a short-term, short-sighted method that does more damage than good. I swore to myself that this change in my lifestyle was a change for the better. I want to hit the point where I can maintain this food program with two cheat meals a week to eat with friends or family. But the minute I swore to make this a lifetime initiative, I had to remove the need for short-term success, and weight loss on its own is a short-term goal. Even if it’s only losing a pound a week, it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.

     The current plan I’m on has worked well, but not if I undermine it. I eat six times a day, with all six including 30 grams of protein, four of them with 50 grams of carbs and two of them with 5 grams of fat. I don’t mix the fat and the carbs, but I can throw in as many vegetables as I want. Excluding, of course, high sugar veggies and fruits like tomatoes, carrots, peas and corn. I eat fruits in the morning after my work out for a quick sugar boost, but that’s it. The diet is designed to feed my lean muscle mass, to help me accelerate my metabolism so that I’m burning fat through activity. More importantly, muscles still burn calories at rest, and today my 8 pounds of added muscle burnt an additional 800 calories while I sat in front of the computer. That’s not even counting the pre-existing muscle mass I’ve strengthened.

     But this works only if I feed my body the proper fuels and combine it with exercise. If I short-change myself on either diet or exercise, I’ve effectively thrown a monkey wrench into the works. Worse, I’m in danger of having taken a step back.

     I spent today eating what I should. Turns out that cutting certain foods isn’t difficult… it’s including the six meals into my day that takes effort. But I have to do better, for my own sake, because I can’t turn back and I won’t fail. That’s all there is to it and I’m tired of starting all over again.

Posted in Muscle-Bound | 4 Comments »

June 17th, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log #7: Failure

     No, I haven’t failed. I’m actually still going strong. But as someone who believes that the journey is often more important than the goal, there’s something strange to be found in weight lifting and dieting. Often, the training and food regimen are all about the results and rarely about the journey.

     Even though I’ve tried to switch it around, with the experience being a large part of why I’m doing this, there’s still the thought of a goal to be reached and won. There’s still the thought of crossing the finish line, and that brings a smile to my face even though I know I’m doing this for life. So that brings me to the middle sister of success… failure.

     We are terrified of failure. It paralyzes us from acting in the first place sometimes, and it becomes the silent excuse, the one people never express. I experience minor surges of it when I come to my weekly weigh-in, or I do my monthly fitness assessment. I scrutinize ever inch of my progress and I doubt my gains. And I’m left believing that somewhere along the way, I backslid or that what I’m seeing isn’t accurate. Further out, the fear manifests as another failed diet and another return to my weight plus the interest I’ve accumulated. I’ve rebounded before and I’ll rebound again, my fear tells me.

     A friend called me brave for what I’m doing, but the fact is I’m not a brave person. I just try to do brave things (sometimes just to spite myself). But fear of failure remains one of my demons and I know most people share it as well. If given the choice between it and never trying in the first place, how many of us would opt for the latter? How many of us would prefer never to have tried?

     If you knew you were going to fail, would you try anyways? Is it the result or the experience that matters?

I see my 43^rd birthday approaching, and I’m hit with the worry that my own novels won’t see print (so I likely drive my agent crazy with questions). I see the various pant sizes and clothes that I’ve worn over the decades, and I worry that I can’t maintain what I’ve started (I’ve been here before, will I be here again?) I worry about things that I have no right worrying about, and then I worry about the fact that I worry too much.

     What keeps the fear at bay isn’t the success, though that helps tremendously. It’s the knowledge that I’m trying, so I guess the answer to my own bolded question is: It’s the experience that matters to me. Step by step. What helps is a sense of hindsight, the ability to look back on what I’ve done and take measure of the whole.

I used this approach with my writing, to remind myself where I started and where I’ve come with it. I recently realized that I have to do the same with my weight training. This occurred to me after the results of my last fitness exam. The trainer told me I’d gained about 2.5 pounds of muscle, as opposed to five pounds the month before. Instantly, the nagging doubts raised their voice in chorus and I wondered where I’d faltered. I hadn’t failed, but was I succeeding?

     Up close, it looked like depreciable returns on my investment, but I forgot to look at the larger picture. In two months, I gained eight pounds of muscles. That’s 800 extra calories a day that I’m burning, and it took both months to get here. Without the last month, I’d still be at five pounds of muscle, not eight. Fear makes it hard to see the forest from the trees, but you can always step back and take a wider angle of the view.

     So, I approach my 43^rd birthday and I remind myself that 43 isn’t the finish line any more than today was. Not as a writer and not as someone watching their health. When I hit 43, it’ll be the culmination of all the steps I took. It’ll be the sum of trying, failing, succeeding and ultimately learning because I chose experience over failure.

     And now, I’d like to share with you the results of the diet to date.

                April 6^th        June 15^th

Weight          282 lbs          258 lbs

Fat %           36%              27%

Lean Body Mass  180.48 lbs       188.34 lbs

Fat Body Mass   101.52 lbs       69.66 lbs

      And since pictures speak louder than words: 

 

 

Posted in Muscle-Bound | 23 Comments »

June 13th, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log #6: Thirty Seconds of Grace

     My muscles quit before I do and the weights come crashing down. I barely stop them from striking the other plates, thus sparing my fellow gym goers from those obnoxiously loud bangs of dropped weights.

     And I begin counting… a thirty second reprieve before I start the next set.

     05 Seconds: The ache in the muscles floods out and I breathe out my racing heart. As I sit on the chair, I study my fellow weight lifters. There’s a few clusters of conversations happening, mostly people who’ve been training together and seeing one another for years. It’s a friendly atmosphere and it isn’t hard to coax a nod or a smile out of someone. I already know a few people by name and they know me enough to bump fists. Not my greeting of choice, but when in Rome, don’t piss off the Romans.

     10 Seconds: My breath is returning to normal and I take in more of my surroundings. Kneeling on the floor is a woman I like to call Supergirl. She’s in her 50s with a decent physique… trim and muscled. She’s extraordinary in one way, though, in how she “lifts” weights. She pulls the cabled grip down to her chest and then lets it jerk her back up again. She clears the floor by at least a foot each time before her weight pulls her to the ground again. When she does seated leg lifts, her legs stay where they are (pressed against the bars), but her pelvis shoots out until her back is straight. I wonder how she manages to be in shape when her form is so poor.

     15 Seconds: My body is relaxing but I move a little to test the diminished strength in my muscles. The next set will definitely be harder, so I will my muscles to drain out the lactic toxins so I can get through my next set without grimacing and grunting like a prehistoric porn star. Meanwhile, I spy another of the gym’s unique personalities. His hair is cut and sharply parted in a style best suited for the 1930s. He’s slight, but well muscled. On the street, you’d dismiss him as a bookworm; here, at Monster’s, he lifts a mean weight and is defined enough to show it. He wipes down machines with the Kleenex from the box he carries around, and he trains with gardening gloves. I also discover he’s a Historian and I suddenly want to talk to him some time.

     20 Seconds: More familiar figures wander by. I nod at those who look up. And I smile at the gaggle of four or five guys. They’re my age or older and they’re always laughing and cracking jokes. They’re there in the morning for 2 or 3 hours, and they gravitate towards the fit women. They’re a gym drinking game in the making… take a swig if one of them is chatting up a girl. I bet their workout would be done forty minutes earlier if they focused more, but then the gym would be too grim, too business-like without their casual airs.

     25 Seconds: After glancing at the fifty-something overweight man (white) in sweats, wraparound shades and ratty, beaded dreads poking out from under his baseball cap, I check the weight on my machine. I make a mental note of how much to decrease it by on my drop set. Part of my new routine is to punch out 8 to 12 reps at a high weight and then immediately drop the weight by half and do 10 more. Dropped sets are a way of getting the most burn out of the muscle, and burn it does. I feel like a wimp when someone walks by and sees me grunting and sweating to granny weights, but I still do it. Monster Gym isn’t about measuring yourself up against other people. It’s about being there and putting in the effort. The misconceptions of elitism are mine, and I’m glad this gym has mostly dismissed them.

     30 Seconds: Time’s up. Time to get back to work… but my muscles are still starving to breathe. I cheat and start counting to 10. Ten more seconds almost seems like another lifetime….

Posted in Muscle-Bound | No Comments »

June 3rd, 2009: Muscle-Bound Log #5: Everyone Knows

It’s amazing how, when it’s time to lose weight, total strangers become experts on the matter. Everyone has their approach and pet theories; once you admit you’re following a meal plan or exercise program, people you just met feel comfortable telling you about themselves and their philosophies when they might not even say “hi” to you on the street.

I’d finished my first workout with Marshal, one of my trainers, and I received my diet plan. With it came a list of supplements to help in… well… supplementing my diet. I had a lot of shopping to do. At least 90% of the food in my fridge was no longer healthy during this phase. Goodbye tomatoes and tomato-based products… I couldn’t afford the sugar spikes. Bye-bye mayo and peanut butter, our mutual love of fats could no longer sustain us. And then there were things I had to buy like “bitter melon” and “gugulsterone,” which was either a supplement to stimulate the thyroid or a sterone to the 10¹⁰⁰ power. So off to shopping I went, blinking at half the names and wondering what sort of wonderful side-effects I could look forward to.

It took two stores to find the supplements I needed, with my father for company. He was interested in my diet and I in his senior’s discount card. At the first store was an employee who was also a yoga-enthusiast (enthusiast meaning he felt comfortable enough criticizing my approach to health). After he heard me ask about a “fat burner,” he immediately launched into a spiel about yoga, martial arts and the growing obesity issues of current generations. That, at least, was better than this one time I asked about a product called “Creatine” and the store employee told me I didn’t need it because it retained water and that I was already “big.” Seriously? Me being overweight means you get to turn off your own internal censors?

Needless to say, I found little help at the first store, and opted for the second store where a more tactful employee discussed his body building experiences. One conversation was informative and pleasant, the other condescending.

Make no mistake… I know I’m fat. Not overweight, not pleasantly plump, not chubalicious… well, okay… chubalicious is fine, but I am fat and I refuse to treat it as an insult. And if someone treats me with disrespect over it, it’s not my failing, it’s theirs. That said, in the politics of health, you’ll find people genuinely interested in your well-being and eager to involve you in the process. And you’ll find others who treat fat as a mistake, as gross negligence on your part, and an opening to reprimand you with “friendly” advice. In some ways I can’t fault them for that attitude, not entirely. With all the noise out there, it’s hard knowing what works and why, so when someone finds something that does work, they champion it under the assumption that if they could do it, you can too.

The fact is that there are hundreds of diets from the scientifically sound to the cult approach to health (with techniques that border on psychological reprogramming and faerie dust). And yet, we are so diversified as human beings that some techniques work for some and fail for others. Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, Atkins, the South Beach Diet, Weight Watchers, the Cookie Diet (shudder), Subways… all of them have their success stories and all of them have their failures. Kirstie Alley, who was spokeswoman for Jenny Craig for three years gained 83 pounds after leaving the program. “But she didn’t maintain it!” some of you might assert, to which I say the program was still a failure because it didn’t help her change her attitudes about (or approach to) food.

In the end, the diet shouldn’t be a burden. It has to be a responsibility, a willingness to treat it as a lifestyle change for the better. The trick, however, isn’t on following the most popular programs. It’s on finding the one that works for you. Now, if friends ask, I’ll gladly tell them my own steps and how it’s made me feel, but in the end, I’ll encourage them to take whatever combination of diet and exercise works for them. Just, please, if you are going to try something, go into it with your eyes open. Read, research and make sure there’s a sound and scientific approach to your method. Consult an expert and look at the promises. And remember that as with all things, if a diet sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

Posted in Muscle-Bound | 2 Comments »