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When I started my diet on January 1st, 2010 my goal was to drop 30 pounds.  When I accomplished that I set a new goal of getting my abs back, staying healthy and feeling good.  Now all of those are somewhat nebulous, but I think they are good and attainable goals.  The problem will be knowing when I’ve gotten there.

Lets start with abs.  I don’t think I’ll ever look like good old Leonidas over there, and I’m OK with that but I do want to get rid of pretty much any excess body fat I have, gain some muscle and then maintain it indefinitely.  The problem is that the more I learn about health and nutrition the more I learn about how to stay healthy as opposed to learning to cheat the system to get to specific body composition goals.  Of course I don’t think you really have to cheat the system to get to where I want to go but the long way is always harder.

How will I know when I’m?  Visual inspection, of course, and the pinch test, but there is no hard and fast cut off where I can say, “Yes, this is it.”  I will have to rely on my judgement and not get neurotic about it so that I can get where I want to go and not kill myself trying to get to some mythological point of Spartan glory.

Staying healthy and feeling good are truly amorphous goals, and really impossible to quantify.  I think that I’m there on these now, but they are maintenance goals rather than destinations.  I am constantly terrified that what I’m doing isn’t the right thing and that the diet I’m on isn’t going to work in the long run.  I look at all the other fad diets that people have used, and the Standard American Diet and vegans and all the hocus pocus out there and I see how people are horribly unhealthy and I wonder if what I’m doing is right.

To the best of my knowledge I’m doing the right thing.  I am hitting my goals and I am not killing myself to do it.  In the end I’m doing all I can with all of the information at my disposal.  Isn’t that the best any of us can do?

They say that it’s important to have goals and I agree.  That means once you reach your goals you need to set new ones.  I’m not sure that this is always possible to have goals that you can attain as opposed to maintain.  The problem is how to deal with maintanence goals without becoming neurotic.

I’m not sure I have a solution to that right now, but I’m working on it.

Francis Pottenger Jr. had a lot of cats. He wasn’t a crazy cat person or anything, he was just a doctor who was trying to get some more information about how to help  people.  His experiments were pretty simple, and I think his findings are interesting.

What Pottenger did was he fed cats different foods.  In a couple of different studies he fed cats 1/3 raw food and 2/3′s some kind of prepared food.  The control was always 100% raw food.  One group got cooked food, and another set of groups got milk of various quality.

In all cases where the cats ate anything other than raw food or whole un-pasteurized un-homogenized milk they suffered serious degeneration.  This wasn’t really shocking to me because cats are carnivores and all that.  What was shocking to me was how the degeneration flowed down through the generations of cats.

Cats on these diets had all sorts of problems, and their children and grandchildren had even worse problems.  Really, the kittens in the study bore some striking similarities to what’s going on with kids now.  Asthma, poor development, personality problems…if they had been obese it wouldn’t have been similar it would have been identical.

After three generations the cats who were eating sweetened condensed milk were in the most serious trouble.  I think that is a good analogue for the crazy amount of sugar we’re feeding our kids and ourselves.  Sugar is the enemy, and everyone needs to know this. (more…)

I make no secret about being American sports centric.  I can’t help it.  I was raised here and even though I played soccer a bit as a kid I am not steeped in it like all non-Americans seem to be.  It took a South American to convince me that the sport was worth watching, and once I started to understand the sport I saw the beauty in it.

The world cup brought that beauty into sharp focus for me, and the true focal point was the play of the Uruguayan squad.  They weren’t the most athletic team, not by half, but they were skilled and they played with heart, or garra.

The garra, the heart, was what sucked me in.  How can a little country of 3.5 million people compete with the world powers of soccer?  It boggles the mind that this proud little country punched above their weight and played their way to a fourth place finish.  There was no game where they were blown out, there was no game where they were out played, there was no game that didn’t affect me and there was no player that personified the beauty of Soccer, and of Uruguayan Futbol than Diego Forlan. (more…)

I couldn’t say it better myself, so I’m not even going to try:

The Iron, By Henry Rollins:

I believe that the definition of definition is reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself.

Completely.

When I was young I had no sense of myself. All I was, was a product of all the fear and humiliation I suffered. Fear of my parents. The humiliation of teachers calling me “garbage can” and telling me I’d be mowing lawns for a living. And the very real terror of my fellow students. I was threatened and beaten up for the color of my skin and my size. I was skinny and clumsy, and when others would tease me I didn’t run home crying, wondering why.

I knew all too well. I was there to be antagonized. In sports I was laughed at. A spaz. I was pretty good at boxing but only because the rage that filled my every waking moment made me wild and unpredictable. I fought with some strange fury. The other boys thought I was crazy.

I hated myself all the time.

As stupid at it seems now, I wanted to talk like them, dress like them, carry myself with the ease of knowing that I wasn’t going to get pounded in the hallway between classes. Years passed and I learned to keep it all inside. I only talked to a few boys in my grade. Other losers. Some of them are to this day the greatest people I have ever known. Hang out with a guy who has had his head flushed down a toilet a few times, treat him with respect, and you’ll find a faithful friend forever. But even with friends, school sucked. Teachers gave me hard time. I didn’t think much of them either.

Then came Mr. Pepperman, my advisor. He was a powerfully built Vietnam veteran, and he was scary. No one ever talked out of turn in his class. Once one kid did and Mr. P. lifted him off the ground and pinned him to the blackboard. Mr. P. could see that I was in bad shape, and one Friday in October he asked me if I had ever worked out with weights. I told him no. He told me that I was going to take some of the money that I had saved and buy a hundred-pound set of weights at Sears. As I left his office, I started to think of things I would say to him on Monday when he asked about the weights that I was not going to buy. Still, it made me feel special. My father never really got that close to caring. On Saturday I bought the weights, but I couldn’t even drag them to my mom’s car. An attendant laughed at me as he put them on a dolly. (more…)

This is directly lifted from Robb Wolf. Check him out, he’s pretty awesome.

Also, friend of the blog Marisa Mezs reacquainted me with this elegant summary.  Check her out too!

SUMMARY

All of the lean meat, fish, seafood, eggs you can eat
All of the non starchy vegetables you can eat
Plenty of fruit
Moderate healthy fats
Moderate nuts and seeds
No grains or cereals at all
No legumes
No dairy products (eggs are meat)
No processed foods – make it yourself!
No sugars. Agave, organic honey, molasses, pure spun golden sunshine….it doesn’t matter. They are all equally bad for you.
No artificial sweeteners. These are not food! Creepy laboratory products with sketchy safety records, artificial sweeteners have been shown to produce an insulin response.

Delicious details after the jump: (more…)

I started this diet, which some might call drastic or crazy or stupid, on the first of the year.  At that time I was close to 240 lbs, working out like crazy but eating everything in sight.  I was in great shape, though in hindsight a little over trained, but on this crazy cycle of working, eating, working out, eating, watching tv and eating more.  I wasn’t really happy with the results of my training because even though I was performing fairly well I was chubby.  I was also having a hell of a time getting up in the morning or feeling excited about doing anything. All in all, life was kind of dragging me down which is a bummer since life is basically all there is.

Enter the Paleo Diet.  I had flirted with it once back in June and I lost 10 pounds.  Those pounds came back gradually when I reintroduced neolithic foods (in great quantities) to my diet.  That was part of the reason for my general funk.  I felt like I was working out as hard as my body would allow me to but a large part of the results I wanted were just flat not showing up.  Reasonably there was no way I could work out any harder so something else needed to change for me to effect some kind of different outcome.  A lot of the people at the gym I used to work at were on the Paleo diet more or less permanently and they had all gotten great results.  It had worked for me in the past, so why not give it a try again? (more…)

I haven’t read as many books as I should have in my life. Being an English major in college sapped some of my love of reading, and after that I went through a long period of reading for fun.  Not that reading for fun is a bad thing, I just wasn’t heavily criticizing  the books I read at the time.

As my college days have faded more and more into memory, I’ve become more selective about the books I read and that’s allowed me to come back to a more critical view of the works themselves.  I’m still not as granular in my criticism as I used to be, and that’s a good thing because it allows me to enjoy a broader spectrum of work.  Given that, when I heard that Blood Meridian was praised as one of the 20th century’s best novels I thought I’d take a whack at it.

My thoughts after the jump: (more…)

“Always Burpees”

3 Rounds, (1:00 rest between rounds), of:

10 Pushups
5 Burpees
10 Squats
5 Burpees
10 Situps
5 Burpees
10 Pullups
5 Burpees
10 Thrusters (95/65#)
5 Burpees
10 Kettlebell Swings (53/35#)
5 Burpees
10 KB Sumo Deadlift High Pull (53/35#)
5 Burpees
10 Knees to Elbows
5 Burpees
10 Box Jumps (24/20#)
5 Burpees
10 D-Ball Slams
5 Burpees
1:00 Rest

Average time for the tennis crew was about 33 minutes, rest included.

Having boxed for eight years and now, working in a gym, I see a lot of people working out.  I feel like there are a select few who look at their workouts the same way I do, and the difference comes down to effort. Now before I go off on a tirade and sound like an even bigger asshole than I normally do, I’m going to preface this a little:

Everyone has off days.  No one gives 100% every time they work out.  Some days are a struggle for whatever reason, and sometimes just showing up to work out takes more effort than a full effort normally would.  I have off days, days I don’t really try and the like, and I’m not trying to say I’m better than anyone.

That being said, lets get down to business.

I look at every workout as an opportunity.  Your body can only take so much, your mind can only take so much and your social and personal lives can only take so much.  Given this you only have a limited time to get your workout in.  Now regardless of how long you can manage to schedule for that workout I think you’ll agree that the time you spend at they gym is precious.  If that’s true, why do so many people half-ass that precious workout time?

It doesn’t make sense to me.  For me each workout is a test.  If I get done with it and I feel like I could have done one more rep, or could have gone one second faster, I feel like I’ve failed that test.  I want to wring every ounce of effort out of my body in the time I have.

It’s not just that the amount of time I have in the day to workout is limited either.  There are also rest days to consider, and the fact that time in general is slipping away.  If I give less than 100% in my training, then I’m not improving and that’s a wasted day.  Those wasted days add up, and none of us are getting any younger.  All of this is, of course, compounded if you’re training for an event, say a marathon or a fight or something.

I’m not sure what drives me to work as hard as I do.  Part of it is innate, I’m sure, but a lot of it is learned.  I remember a fight I had where I went into the ring not in shape.  I was tired after the first round, exhausted after the second and dead on my feet in the third.  That feeling stuck with me, and it drives me.  As awful as I felt then, even though I won, I basically promised myself never to be in that position again.

I’m sure there are easier ways to learn that lesson, but I just don’t know how to teach it.

I’ve been working out like a fiend lately, and when I work out a lot I tend to eat a ton because I’m sore.  It’s been no exception in the last few months, and despite my nearly constant exercise I’ve been putting on the pounds.

It’s simple math really, even if you burn off a thousand calories working out, and two thousand just being alive you’re going to gain weight if you eat four or five thousand a day, and that’s what I was doing.

Not to mention, I’ve been making pretty terrible choices about the types of food I eat.  In no diet is Chocolate Peanut Butter Haagen Das a good acceptable, especially not after eating three steaks with sweet potato fries.

I’ve been learning a lot about nutrition at my job lately, and basically I know what I have to do: Paleo.  If you read my blog before my hosting crashed (twice) you know that I did the Paleo Diet once for a month earlier and lost ten pounds.  I felt pretty good on it, and once I’d been doing it for a few weeks I pretty much stopped having cravings for sweets and bread.

This time I need to lose 30 pounds, maybe 40.  It’s a long way to go, and I’m typically not good at things that take a long time to do, but I’m determined to get there.  Even if I can get rid of ten pounds, it will help me.

So here’s to willpower, I’m going to need it.