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     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.

     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.

     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.

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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….

     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.