“Time is a luxury you don’t have…”

Bullsh*t!

When Khan Noonien Singh said the above line to James T. Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Kirk didn’t just lie down and give Genesis over to Khan. No, he used his creativity and initiative to give himself more time.

When someone tells me (and I’ve told myself this) that they don’t have enough “time” to devote to getting in shape and losing weight what you’re really saying is that you lack initiative.

Seriously.

Some of you may be upset to hear that and want to argue up and down with me, but it’s a fact. When you tell me that you don’t have time to work on your health, you’re lying to me, and worse than that, you’re lying to yourself. Let’s do a little test shall we? I want you to get up from reading this and go into your bathroom and look in the mirror. When you get there, I want you to say out loud to yourself one of two things: “I don’t have time to take care of my health,” OR “I lack the initiative to take control of my health.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Good, you’re back. Okay, now I am going to break you all into three categories: Group One is composed of those of you who were truthful and said that you lacked initiative. The second group is composed of those who just lied to their own faces and continue to claim that they don’t have enough time. And the third group is composed of people who didn’t actually get up to perform this activity.

Group one, you can stay here. The other two groups, you guys can go watch that rerun of that show you’ve seen a million times while you scarf down some Doritos--I can’t help you guys. Seriously, I can’t. No one can. If you aren’t going to care about your health and take the time to do so, why the hell should I care? Why should anyone care? YOU are the only one who can make the change. If you don’t want to make the time or rather “switch” the time spent doing something wasteful to doing something meaningful, then more power to you, have a good life.

But if you’re in Group One or if you just WANT to be in Group One, that’s an important step. It shows that you are willing to look at yourself honestly in order to make a change.

When I finally faced the fact that I had been trying off and on since college to lose weight and get in shape, it occurred to me just how much time I had wasted in those intervening years. Twenty-something years is a long time to keep attempting to get in shape. What happened? Is it the old chestnut “life got in the way?” No, honestly, I can’t say that. Yes, I got married and had kids, but getting married and having kids does not preclude living a healthy life. I just lacked the initiative.

Some current research is showing that exercise does very little to aid in weight-loss and that the greatest factor in weight-loss is eating less and controlling your portions. (cite: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30826120/ns/health-fitness/ )

For those of you who claim to have no time to lose weight, this is GREAT news. Because eating less requires NO EXTRA F’ING TIME IN YOUR DAY! Seriously.

Picky but easy to please

Some people may call me a fussy eater because there are lots of foods that I don’t like, but in my defense, I’m very low maintenance because, of the foods I DO eat, I can eat them all the time and not get tired of them. I use this to my advantage now.

Let’s take a look at some adjustments I’ve made. There was a time in my life about 20 years ago when I was eating a Quarter Pounder w/Cheese Value meal every single day for lunch. That’s around 1,200 calories in one meal. This past weekend, I purchased a pack of raw chicken thighs from Rouse’s grocery store for $6.43. There were 10 thighs in the pack. On Saturday, I put them all in a pan, drizzled them with a little oil and sprinkled some Cajun seasoning on them. Then I baked them at 425 degrees for 45 minutes. During the cooking time, I cleaned up the house. When they came out of the oven, I let them cool before putting each one of them into its own Zip-Loc bag. Total time spent interacting with food: 15 minutes, tops. (I’m not including cooking time because I was doing other stuff then.) Now, during the week, I’ll just grab one or two of the baggies and bring it for lunch where I’ll pop the thigh in the microwave for one minute.

Or… I could not bring lunch and instead, use the 30-minute break I get for lunch to run down to McDonald’s or Taco Bell, stand in line for 10 minutes and then drive back. Time spent doing that at lunch: about 15 minutes each day, and I haven’t even eaten yet. So, if we break it down for an entire week: Getting fast food versus baking my own:

Time used--Fast food : 1 hour, 15 minutes; Chicken Thighs: 15 minutes,

Calories consumed--Fast Food: 6,000 calories; Chicken Thighs: 800 calories

Money spent--Fast food: $30; Chicken Thighs: $7

So, over a work-week, I have saved: 60 minutes, 5,200 calories, and $23.

(figures based on nutritional information for Quarter Pounder Value meal and raw chicken thighs)

Yeah, it’s because you don’t have enough time. Keep telling yourself that.

Eating less does not take up any extra time in your day. It does not require a babysitter. It just requires initiative… and a little bit of creativity.

You can believe me, or you can go spend the 8 hours watching TV that the average American spends each day watching TV (source: Nielsen Research). With TiVo and series online and DVD sets, is there any reason you have to watch things “right this minute” any more? Trust me, you’ll have plenty of time to watch TV when you’re recovering from that bypass operation. Get up and take a walk. If you MUST watch TV, then stand and jog in place or jumping jacks or anything while watching. But DON’T tell me you “don’t have time.” Nope, not going to believe it. You don’t have initiative yet.

My challenge to you, (for those of you still reading because you are the ones who want to have initiative), is to get a piece of paper and each day this week, write down something that took 20 minutes that you could’ve spent doing something else and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

Examples: “I did not have to continue watching “Suite Life on Deck” after my daughter left the room.” “Farmville.”

My guess is that you’ll find several times that you can switch to more productive and healthier activities. And 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week is a good start. You could walk a fast-paced mile in 20 minutes.

I used to think I didn’t have enough time, but I just hadn’t realized that I had all the time in the world. You don’t have to agree with me, but, you know, I’m just a guy who’s been there…

My first

Let me get a few pounds off my chest

Now that I have embarked on this weight-loss goal, people seem to be either cheering me on or complaining about how annoying it is for me to be so successful and chipper about it. I’ll admit that I can be annoying with the whole situation, but I wanted to get a few things off my chest.

First of all, a LOT of people are telling me what they can’t do. Okay, so I decided to make of list of things I can’t do. I love watching “The Biggest Loser” each week. I find it inspiring to think that these people can change their lives. That being said, let me get to the list:

1.     I CAN’T afford a personal trainer. Not going to happen.

2.     I CAN’T hire a dietician to plan out and prepare all my meals for me.

3.     I CAN’T get to the gym every single day.

4.     I CAN’T workout for three hours at a time.

5.     I CAN’T stop eating things that taste good.

So far, sounds reasonable. But then here are more that I find much more important:

6.     I CAN’T continue to live as a diabetic and be obese.

7.     I CAN’T continue to disappoint myself in how I feel about my health and weight.

8.     I also CAN’T change other people or make them want to live healthier.

Now, to the things I CAN do…

I CAN educate myself using the Internet and books in order to set up my own training.

I CAN cut back on eating and portions.

I CAN get to the gym whenever I have the time.

I CAN workout efficiently in the time I do have.

I CAN limit my indulgences.

As for 6 through 8, did you know that I used to pretend to look at pictures of me? It’s like when someone says “here, smell this.” You know it’s going to be something awful, so I always pretend to take a whiff just to appease them because it gets them off my back. I did the same thing with pictures. If my daughter or anyone took a digital picture of me and immediately said “Look at the picture I took,” I would actually pretend to look at the picture. I would NOT look at it.

Seriously, here I was in my early 40s and I was avoiding looking at myself in pictures because I had never known what it was like to be a healthy-weight adult.

My Conversation about Dinner with Andre

About a year ago, a friend of mine named Andre and I were having a contentious discussion on facebook regarding the obesity epidemic and weight loss. My argument was that it was far cheaper to eat fattening foods than to purchase and eat healthful foods. This went back and forth for a while. Unbeknownst to Andre, I had actually gone to a local Wal-Mart and taken pictures using my iPhone to record the price labels of various foods in order to prove my point. I found that I could find a loaf of white bread for 89 cents while the cheapest whole-wheat version was $2.49. I found that brown rice was about twice as expensive as white and that you could buy 4 cans of Spaghettios for the same price as a box of fresh baby spinach. But I never used this information. The discussion died off. Why? I guess I was so focused on proving my point that it never occurred to me that “So, what if I am right? How is this going to help me lose weight and get in shape?” It’s not. I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t cost, but overeating that had gotten me into the shape I was in.

Around the same time, a couple of friends of mine from college were posting on how well they were doing with healthy living. That goaded me into trying a little harder. So, my wife and I decided on a lifestyle change. We were going to live and eat healthier. I decided that the date we’d start would be Aug. 8, 2010. That was the day before the new school year and I could track my progress and see how far I got in one school year. We were fairly well motivated. But then, two weeks later, I went to the doctor and was diagnosed as having Type II Diabetes. Well, that helped motivate me even more.

So, I had to come to grips that I was making excuses about how I was obese. I realize it’s very difficult to admit to yourself where you’ve gone wrong. That being said, I guess I recognize now when other people are making excuses and those are the ones who find me annoying, because I tend to point out that it’s just an excuse. I used to be the one making excuses, if not to others then (secretly) to myself, about my size. It wasn’t until I developed a different mentality (with the help of my friend John) that I was able to approach weight loss more successfully. Before, I had an “all-or-nothing” mentality: that once I had derailed from eating healthily and exercising, I gave up completely. Now, I take a healthier attitude that it’s okay to go slowly sometimes and regroup.

Someone at work (jokingly, I suppose) said that I probably “cheat” when I am at home and no one can see me. She said this after I had pointed out that someone or another had put sweets in the teachers’ lounge every day for a week.  But as I explained to another co-worker, I am not denying myself. I will still eat an occasional treat…but that’s the BIG difference. It’s OCCASIONAL. Not all day. Not every day. And on top of that, it’s worked into my plan. I can eat something just for enjoyment every now and then and work it off during a nice 60-mile bike ride. But my point in this is that, I can’t cheat (one MORE “can’t” to add to the list)--because, there is someone with me every second of the day that I don’t want to disappoint any more. He’s there watching me and he knows exactly what I eat every…single…time. He used to be afraid to look at himself at reflections in glass surfaces when walking down the street, but now he checks himself out in the mirror at Walgreens. He watches what I eat and how much I work out because he knows that he feels better when I’m on track. He’s not going to let me “cheat” because he enjoys the compliments he gets from the noticeable difference in his appearance and attitude. From here on out, I can’t cheat because I’d be cheating on ME and no one else. That’s the difference. That’s what matters. That’s who I don’t want to disappoint.

Ice Cream Tastes Sooo  Good

I can tell you that I have eaten chocolate ice cream 3 times in the last 3 months. Each time, I had about ½ a cup of ice cream. Many of you may know already that I have a pretty good memory, but it’s not my good memory that allows me to know that I have had chocolate ice cream 3 times in the last 3 months.

First, let me give you a little history, it seems that in my wife’s family there runs a gene that makes the bearer of that gene prefer chocolate ice cream almost to the exclusion of any other flavor. Her parents have the gene, her siblings have the gene and she has the gene. She has also passed this gene down to our two children.

I find chocolate ice cream to be merely “o.k.” I much prefer ice cream with a little pizazz….something with hunks of stuff in it. I like to enjoy a big spoonful of ice cream as it melts in my mouth to reveal a small tidbit of something sweet and crunchy to chew. That type of ice cream, with names like “Cookies and Cream,” “Pralines and Cream,” “Butter Pecan” and so on, is like having a bonus or a treasure in every bite. Meanwhile, the family likes regular ol’ chocolate. Blue Bell Dutch Chocolate, to be exact.

Soooo… in the past, when I would shop for food at the grocery store and would decide to get ice cream, I would have to get something everyone liked: Dutch Chocolate, but I also wanted to have something I’d enjoy, so I would purchase the half-gallon of Dutch Chocolate AND a half-gallon of whatever else struck my fancy. If it was a new flavor, or one I hadn’t seen before, it was pretty much guaranteed I would buy it to try it out.

Okay, so I get the two half-gallons of ice cream home. Now, there are 4 of us in the household: two parents, two kids. Since the other 3 in my house were not going to be eating whatever flavor I got, that meant that they were all sharing the half-gallon of Dutch Chocolate while I was eating the entire half-gallon of the other flavor on MY OWN. That meant that after three or four days, when the secondary flavor was gone, I, alone, had consumed all the fat and calories associated with that ice cream. Could I tell you then how many times I had had ice cream? No. It all blurred together. Ice cream was not a “treat” but part of my habit of just eating constantly.

Since August 8, 2010, my wife has been the one who buys ice cream. She has only done it a few times and it has been, of course, Dutch Chocolate each and every time. I have done my best to resist eating it each time she buys it and have done really well. I have portioned it out into a small cup and eaten it. But now, when I eat ice cream, I can savor it. It’s an actual treat. It sticks in my mind and doesn’t just blur together with thousands of other desserts. And THAT is why I am able to remember that I have had ice cream 3 times in the last 3 months.

Visceral Reactions

I have posted a temporary “before and during” photo set. I call it temporary because I am not yet comfortable enough to post the “real” before picture(s) and I am not close enough to my goals to post an “after” picture yet. The real before pictures are very, very unflattering. And before I can post those, I have to be assured with myself that I am as far away from that look as possible. But here’s my goal before I reveal the pictures: My goal is that when you DO see the real “before and after” pictures, you’ll have to pick your jaw up off the keyboard. I want the other members of your household to come running up to you asking you “what were you screaming ‘holy shit!’ for?” I want you to be talking about it the next day at work.

In other words, I want my transformation to be the most amazing thing you see on the Internet that day.

So, to those of you I’ve annoyed recently, I’m sorry. It’s just that once I reached that point where I realized that I was 43 years old and had never known what it was like to be a healthy-weight adult, I knew I had to make the change. It’s an exciting time for me. I feel so much better about life and my health. I guess I am a bit overbearing when I want to share how much better others would feel if they started down the same path. But like I said above, I can’t change others. I can only work toward improving myself. If my progress inspires you, I am happy for you. But you don’t have to take my word for it…I’m just a guy who’s been there.