Audio 1

So my wife is out of town and I have some serious time on my hands, so I set up the mic and hit record. The following may in fact be so scatterbrained as to be impossible to listen too, but I have yet to avoid my own embarrassment, so I will not start now.

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Yet again a short convo with a friend of mine brings something to the front of my mind that I have left out, but when I think on it has a huge impact on what I am doing. When I spoke with her last she brought up being jealous of certain things that other people were able to do and that weight seemed to prevent her from enjoying. When I stopped and thought on it for a bit it occurred to me that I have referenced it holding me back in many areas but hadn’t really explored the idea on its own thus far. I think a lot of it came out in the post regarding the swimming parties of my high school days, but there are a lot more recent examples that I think are more telling of the kind of walls you put up when you get uncomfortable in your own skin.

I think it’s important to make sure to spell out that I do not believe anyone was ever excluding me, or looking down on me, or showing me any sort of negativity because of my weight, I am in fact the only one who separates myself out. This past Christmas my immediate family got together for a few days. It was a lot of fun, we all hadn’t been together in a long time, and it was fun to get everyone together for once. I have always felt a little separate from everyone; it’s just part of my personality. I was a basement dwelling loner growing up, and that is still pretty prevalent in my personality, but I can’t help feeling like the odd one out when my Dad and brother’s in law are all in the same room. My dads in good shape, and my brother’s in law are both really skinny, even if I got rid of all my body fat I still think I’d be bigger than either, and while I don’t think the three think about it, I know I do whenever we’re all together. I feel like I’m that fat kid who the fit kids tolerate, but at the end of the day I’m not really part of the group, just the clown that’s tolerated for comic relief. I can guarantee none of them actually feel that way, but when you live so long looking in the mirror and not believing the person looking at you is who you really are this is part of it.

When the camera’s come out you feel obligated to be the clown (I would probably be the clown anyway but I would like the choice), or you just do whatever you can to escape the lens. When there is pretty much anything going on you’ll find a way to decline being involved because you don’t want to be the third wheel to their good time. In truth they probably actually want you around, but you can never just be comfortable.

On that note my friend mentioned something to me she noticed. I have/had a tendency to inject an unnecessary laugh after everything I say. From what I hear that has mostly stopped. Until she said it I had no idea, but once I was made aware, I in fact did not seem to need the little chuckle as a period to me sentences. I don’t think that is a product of being overweight, but a product of insecurity, which in my case stems from how uncomfortable I am in my body. With my continued efforts to lose the weight I am finding a noticeable increase in my confidence.

One thing I don’t do very much anymore is stack myself up agaisn’t every other man I know. At that same Christmas get together it occurred to me more than once that my wife was the one among the siblings who drew the short straw and got the fat spouse. I couldn’t help thinking she probably looks at my sisters and wonders why she got the guy who enjoyed cheeseburgers way more than a mountain bike. She wouldn’t think that way either, but you feel like you’ve let people down when you’re always letting yourself down. When you know you shouldn’t eat the large fry, but temptation wins out in the short term, and you feel like a slob in the long. So when you see how other people don’t seem to have a problem staying south of 200 you can’t help but be jealous. Whether that be of their confidence, bodies, lifestyle, or whatever doesn’t really matter. It’s just a symptom of knowing the person of in the mirror falls short of what you know you should be.

Workouts 2

Taking a short break from all the heavy stuff I wanted to talk a bit about a recent work out breakthrough I had. I have talked at length about the “wall” I run into when I am working out, and how it can derail almost every effort to improve myself. I have been able to break through several of these barriers, and with a bit of determination I will continue to do this. However, while working out a few days ago I stumbled on a very interesting problem I have with working out, particularly as it relates to strength training.

Let me give you a little background of what I’ve been doing to give this discovery a little context. For nearly 3 months I have been doing the strength training portions of p90x in conjunction with my bike riding and running. I do a workout every other day. For those of you who have ever put yourself through one of these workouts you know how terribly painful they can be. The first time I tried to do the program I got so exhausted, I was worthless after about a week. When I decided to bring strength training back into my workout plan I figured p90x was the way to do it. No need for big weights, no need to buy a bunch of equipment. So I started, I kept logs of every workout, every rep, and weight, and I made just to eek out one more rep than the previous weeks workout whenever it was time to repeat one. I did this for two months, it was ridiculously hard. I got stronger, I got better, and I was able to increase the amount of reps I could do on a given workout substantially. I was even able to pull off some unassisted pull ups and chin ups after about a month in a half. So why now, in the 3rd month, are my reps way down?

When I started the 3rd cycle I realized something that I had really known I was doing, but chose not to acknowledge the first few months. I was not doing the work outs correctly. I’ll give you a few examples. When I was doing push ups I would do them fast and shallow. I wouldn’t go down quite far enough, or keep my back quite straight enough, making them just a bit easier than they should be. If I was doing curls I would let my arm swing back a bit so when I curled I would have a little momentum to help me out. If I was doing chin ups I might let myself all the way down so my feet could help me spring up. There is a phrase that people throw around at AA meetings “Fake it till you make it,” looking back I think that’s exactly what I was doing.

I hate doing p90x, it is not fun, it hurts, and it leaves me exhausted. However, I made myself do it every single day for the last 60 days regardless of how I felt about it. I didn’t always put in the maximum effort, and I may have been cutting corners on individual work outs, but I finished all 24 every time. I think what happened a week ago was the slow transition from the fake it to the make it stage. While I was doing the “chest and back” work out I was doing the push ups and thought to myself “you’re really not pushing yourself on this, if you’re going to do this you might as well work as hard as you can right now and make the time spent worth it.” It occurred to me that if I didn’t push myself to my limit on every individual exercise I was wasting all those hours I was putting into the workout. The result was nearly halving my total rep numbers. I may have been able to post big numbers when I was doing the workouts wrong, but when I did them right, I couldn’t do as many, so the time commitment didn’t change, but I could feel the change the next day. My chest and back burned like it was the first time I did the workout.

This mentality has infected the rest of my workouts. I have cut back on the weight in my bicep workouts in order to do every workout without flailing. It may not be best for my ego in the short term, but I think it will pay off down the road. I am doing half the crunches I used to as well, but I am making sure I can feel every single one. It makes the work outs much harder, but now that has gone from being negative in my mind, to not exactly positive, but definitely heading that direction.

19.

The fear of the lord. The phrase is thrown around a lot in Christian circles, it shows up in Proverbs and is supposed to the beginning of wisdom. Fearing the lord is wise, but I went past that in the months after I lost my friend to be afraid of God, and there is a world of difference between fearing the lord, and being afraid of him.

I think what it goes back to are several of the things you learn as a kid in a church going family. The power of prayer is something that is talked about in sermons, Sunday school, and pretty much all Christian venues. Let me just make a quick note before anyone gets the wrong idea, I am Christian, I do believe in God, I do not believe that the several crisis of faith I had or continue to deal with make less of a believer, so when I refer to Christians I am not pointing fingers I am in fact part of that group. Anyway, prayer. The phrase that comes foremost to my mind when I think of prayer is “knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” The idea that the squeaky wheel gets oiled. What was never said, but sort of assumed was that if you pray hard enough, long enough and enough times, God will listen. When you are very young it feels like God sort of a genie figure and if you want something bad enough and ask long enough he’s going to make it happen no matter what. The unfortunate consequence of growing up with this mindset is what happens when prayers seem to go unanswered or something happens that is almost the exact opposite of what you wanted.

When it is something that seems to have little impact, lets say your young and want your soccer team to win, if you don’t you can tell yourself you just didn’t pray hard enough, or maybe a kid on the other team prayed harder. However, when something bigger happens, and you’re a little older it starts to get harder to deal with the unanswered prayers. Maybe someone in your family has cancer, and you pray ten times a day with all the sincerity your heart can offer, but time goes on, the tests keep coming back positive, you pray harder, and it just keeps going downhill. When that happens the first time everything you were taught about prayer gets shaken. Now if you’re older and have taken more time to study and learn about God you may be able to tell yourself that it is part of Gods plan and you just don’t understand it, or that you never really believed hard enough and because you didn’t have that unshakable faith God didn’t answer your prayer, but what if you do have that faith, and you say that prayer, and you go to sleep with a burning faith that God has heard you and has given you the peace in understand that he will answer you, and when you wake and all that peace and faith gets hit with a wrecking ball?

That is the position I found myself in the morning of my friends death. I believed God heard and would answer, I believed more completely than I had anything before or since. Being a good Christian boy however, I didn’t believe I could be angry, it somehow was all in His plan I just didn’t understand. I told myself that he had answered my prayer, I asked him to make my friend better and that now he was in heaven never to suffer again. While I believe that’s where he is to this day, that is not what I prayed for, and if that’s what I thought was going to happen there would’ve been no sleep that night. AS the days went by and I thought more and more on it, I felt the anger bubbling under. Believing I could not direct it towards God, because what he did had to be right that little spot of anger grew and grew, and I directed it inward more and more, hating myself and finding reason after reason to despise myself, this remains with me even today. The other result was slowly but surely growing afraid of God.

It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean, but I will do the best I can. Basically what I started to think was that because of some flaw, something inherently dirty of evil in me that when I asked God to answer my prayer with every fiber, He would take it as an opportunity to teach me a lesson. That I was actually inviting divine ire by drawing His attention, this notion seems incredibly self important now, but at the time I couldn’t understand why He would give me that peace and thrash it to pieces less than 8 hours later. Why He would seem to hear my plea and then take my friend.

I still struggle with bringing things to the Lord. I feel as if by asking for something I am inviting a world of trouble down. Laying it down at His feet is something I have not been able to fully do since that day. I envy those who can give it to God, allowing the worries of the world to slide off and letting God take up the weight that would crush them otherwise. For me, every time a new item of stress falls at my feet, I just toss it on top of the growing mountain and try to grind it to dust myself. It creates a stressful environment. Praying about things that really matter to me is something I have to consciously force myself to do. When my wife became pregnant, it was exceedingly hard for me to ask God to watch over her, to protect her and my wife and make sure they were both healthy and happy. The only thing I could think is that by asking and drawing attention, I was inviting the devastation of birth defects, still birth, or complications for my wife. I did pray for them during the pregnancy. I prayed everyday. In the delivery room with my wife the day Jordan was born was the scariest thing I have ever gone through. Not so much for the trauma of birth, but rather because of the fear for my wife and my child. I was still scared that one or both of then would suffer horribly for my short comings as a Christian.

I don’t believe this is what the bible teaches, or the way God intends his children to live. I do know that I am not the only one who struggles with this fear however. It’s hard not to when you believe there is an all powerful, all knowing being watching over you and everyone else, whom loves you more than you can fathom, and still lets the most tragic portions of your life occur. What has begun to occur to me at this point in my life is that I am not the only one affected by the tragedies in my life. My friend’s death was a tragedy for a huge number of people. The ripples of his loss have undoubtedly touched thousands in thousands of different ways. For me it was nothing but hardship and pain that forced me to grow up faster than I wanted to, but I have no way of knowing the effect it had on everyone else. Where people ended up as a result for good or ill, how it may have changed the course of someone’s life, and where they’ll or I will end up as a result. In the short term of tragedy all I can see is the pain and rage “I” feel. In the long term I have no idea. I am still working on having the faith to leave that to God.

Looking Back 1.

Before I get into this religion, depression, and stress thing, let me just say I am not sure that this is at all related to weight gain, weight loss, or much of anything I have been talking about, what I do know is that it’s a huge part of my life and I am pretty sure that it is tied in with my self image and thus my overall health, anyway. Thinking about writing about God and the events let lead to my very real anger with him, I find my hands getting a little shaky and my chest getting tight. I do not like to relive or think about that aspect of my life, I prefer to completely ignore it in fact. I don’t mind spending long hours talking with anyone about a wide range of religious topics, but I do not often want to get into my own. Most days I will tell you I know what I believe, if fact the first 4 times I wrote this sentence it just said “I know what I believe,” but when I really think on it that’s a lie. There are certain truths I believe in that have never once changed, but there are a lot of things in relation to those beliefs that have been shaken, torn down, ripped away, or vanished overnight.

When I was a sophomore in high school I lost one of my best friends. This was the first real assault on my faith I can remember. The loss is not something I can convey in a simple way, so forgive me if this drags on, but I want to say what I mean. The loss is something that still hurts, still something I can honestly say I think about at least once a day. It is hard to believe its getting close to a decade since it happened. This friend was one that I grew up with, without getting overly descriptive of my hometowns streets he more or less lived in my back yard. I have pictures of us when we were both babies. Our friendship had some rough patches growing up, lets just say I am not the best friend to have, but regardless of any nonsense or fighting we got into on Monday by Tuesday it didn’t matter. About the time he got sick we were in a period of our friendship when weren’t as close as we had been. I still hung out with him, still talked to him, but we had entered high school and he had a large group of friends in our class, while I was hanging out with a few kids in other classes, but mostly kept to myself. Looking back I think I got frustrated with him for not being such a big part of his peer group. I was jealous that he was finding all these new people while I was pretty much restricted to the guys my sisters knew, and wasn’t really able to fit in with most of the kids my age. I guess I never thought he was going to be able to friends more fun than me, young, arrogant, and stupid (me).

When he got sick the friendship we had was as strong as ever. The first time I heard about what happened to him, his first symptoms, I assumed that it was something that would be resolved in a few days, some pill, or some surgery that would take care of it. I did no believe for a second that it would be anything remotely serious. You don’t when nothing serious has ever happened before. As the days passed and we learned more and more about what was really happening, it phased me not at all. This was my friend, in my little town, and nobody my age ever had anything serious, and if they did they beat it and in no time everything was back to normal. My little sister had several problems and the doctors were always able to take care of her, it was scary but she was always able to get the help she needed, and it wasn’t going to be any different for my friend. I hung out more with him in the few weeks leading up to losing him than I probably had in the previous 6 months, and I thank God for that. We talked about the girls he had crushes on, we talked about getting better, he never had a negative thing to say about what was happening to him. He was ready to get better from the day he got sick.

I hate writing this. A day came when I had to go into work for a few hours and when I was walking home, I walked passed his house on the way home and was going to stop in and say hi, but as I came up on the house, all the lights were off, no one was in the house, not thinking to much on it at the time, I went home. When I got there my mom told me that there had been some problems and they had taken him by ambulance to the hospital. I didn’t think too much on that, he was going to be ok, I knew that, everything always turned out. So I got a shower, did my homework, and went to bed. That night I prayed more intensely than I ever had that God would protect my friend and heal him, so he could get back to being himself. I think I could tell you that prayer word for word now, but what is sharper even than the memory of that prayer is the feeling I had after it. I had never felt so assured after a prayer before or since. I was 100 percent convinced when I went to sleep that he was going to be ok.

When I woke up the next morning I felt good. I headed upstairs to get a shower. I remember seeing my mom. I don’t think she fully gasped when she saw me, but she had my dad come over as well. I wont get into everything they said, though that memory is far sharper than I like as well, but standing there in front of me they told me I had lost my friend, that he had gone in the night. I want to be able to describe what happened to me when they told me that, but I don’t think I can. I wasn’t ready for that level of loss, I felt betrayed, I felt broken, I felt so angry at the loss and at the feeling of peace I had not 8 hours earlier. There is a lot more of this story to tell. It changed the way I love the people in my life, it started a chain of events in my faith that are still playing out. I still love my friend, and I still miss him, I wish he could’ve met my wife, and held my daughter. I will continue to think about him every day, and one day tell my kids about him, and God willing see him again somewhere down the road.

A short topic change

There is something that was brought to my attention inadvertently by my loving wife. When I started this blog is was very much intended to be a spot for what the header says its for, to more or less unload some of the things that are banging around my brain. Lately that almost exclusively revolves around my current adventure to enduring real and lasting change in my overall food intact and energy expenditures in order to stay healthy for years to come. However there is some things that are conspicuous by their absence. I have talked in limited ways on the depression I have suffered, but have never real got into the source. I have also never got into the downward spiral that has had a lasting impact on my life that is my struggles with religion and my personal relationship with God. Finally I touch on stress frequently but I don’t believe I have gone into this enough.

What I find so interesting about these things being so very absent from the blog is that they are so tied together in my life and will always either act as the fuel I need to bring me through the toughest situations, or the weight around my neck that drags me down a hole I dug.

I am not sure how to get into any of these topics individually or in fact how to explain how intimately they all tie together. I think there is a real good chance that I as I get into this I am going to spiral into some pretty wide ranging topics, frequently get off point, and likely confuse anyone reading it more than anything else, but I also think I really need to get some of this spelled out in a way that lets me really understand my own brain a little better. The entire time I have been making changes to live a healthier and better life I have been telling myself what I need to make the changes stick is honesty, I can absolutely not lie to myself. So it freaked me out when I realized that not only had I never written about this (do know that there are certain things that have happened to me I would never put in a public forum) but I had never really considered the impactions just for myself.

I am now talking in circles. The next however many posts it takes I am going to be trying to work my way through this mess, I have no idea whats going to fall out of my head, but I am hoping to get a better grasp on what makes me tick. If you happen to get some sort of insight into my psyche that I seem to be overlooking feel free to let me know.

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Another story from the high school years has been banging around my head the last few weeks and I figured I might as well put it down here, or else keep dealing with past embarrassments. This one spans my late sophomore through my senior year and the main problem with this incident was finding anyway to avoid my peer group seeing me without a shirt on.

A girl that went to the school in my front yard decided to start throwing parties about the time we all got drivers licenses and much to my dismay she lived at the local lake community, water side no less. This sucked because what it meant was that any party that took place between the months of may through September would most likely involve swimming. I actually love swimming, I really like being in the water, always have, but I hate taking my shirt off. Due to the myriad of issues I have discussed before this was not something I would do willingly. So I had a wide variety of plans and excuses to avoid this. That is why I tended to have a injury that I was unwilling to show anyone occur shortly before these get together so I couldn’t get into the lake. I would frequently show up late, sometimes waiting till they were midway into whatever movie they picked that night just to avoid the lake. Sometimes I just wouldn’t show up at all.

The reason I bring all this up and why it has been kicking around my head lately isn’t because this was particularly hard on me, but rather because of two things. The first is that it illustrates how I frequently limited my social interaction and fun because of weight, the second is regarding another person who also went to these parties and had a blast.

To the first thing, it is really stupid how much even I wouldn’t do just because I assumed all eyes were on me because I was what could be called husky at that age. Not even close to as bad as I got in recent years, not really that bad at all looking back, but it stopped me at so many corners from having the fun I really wanted to and doing a lot of things I would have otherwise enjoyed.

The second things really ties in with the first. There was another guy that came to almost all these things and he was quite a bit chubbier than me at the time. However, he had absolutely no reservation about losing the shirt and diving right in. Enjoying the party from start to finish. He in fact never had reservations, if it was a game of shirts and skins I dreaded the later, but this guy didn’t bat an eye. He knew he was a bit on the heavy side (he wasn’t fat, neither was I at the time, but chubby for sure), but it just didn’t interfere in his life.

This is the real problem anyone with weight issues has to deal with. This is what I believe has more to do with my steady weight gain than almost any other factor. The mental muck up this causes can range from a stumbling block to a solid wall, preventing me from living my life, which lands me alone at home, sitting around and heading for some kind of food to comfort my frustration at not being part of anything. If I had a free pass to change something about myself, I wouldn’t speed up my metabolism, I wouldn’t ensure that my muscle remained rock hard forever, I would kill the part of my brain that made me believe that everyone in a room was starring and scrutinizing me. Pretty self centered mindset when you think about it.

I am not in the shape I really want to be in yet, I haven’t hit my goals, but I have come a good way towards them, and what I am learning is that losing weight has nothing to do with this part of my brain. I still assume everyone is looking at the fatty (IE ME), I am terrified of anyone catching a glimpse of me with my shirt off, which is the reason why I run almost exclusively at night or have to put medical tape on my nipples (prevents chaffing on distance runs) when removing my shirt would be much simpler and far more effective. The truth is there are a few people out there who would notice my not completely fit body, most likely people like me who fixate on body image, but they would forget it just as fast. The truth is my mind is the only thing really holding me back.

About a week ago I went to a waterpark with my family, this is a big fear of mine. I can never decide what is more embarrassing, going shirtless or being the dude with the shirt on in the pool that lets everyone know you’re to embarrassed to take it off. What I decided was that it was going to have work the same way as controlling my eating habits and work out habits, to make any kind of meaningful change I was simply going to have to change. So me and my farmers tan went for a walk. The first ten minutes on the lazy river with my wife and baby nearly gave me an anxiety attack, but slowly I realized that I didn’t really care of someone whose figure wasn’t exactly perfect went around in a speedo, then I needed to just enjoy my time with my family. I never got comfortable exactly, but I did have fun, and managed some time in the wave pool and a ride or two with the wife, shirt not included.

Workouts 1

This is a detour from the typical post I throw on this thing, but as I have been running more and more it seems that something has been coming up so much in my mind its worth writing about. With luck putting in writing will help get it out of my brain, thus eliminating the war that is ranging over my will power ever single time I work out.

I noted two post back about how I have recently learned that I can in fact run again, and thanks to a combo of barefoot shoes (oxy moron?), and less fat to haul around, I am finding that I am capable of running for greater distances than I ever believed myself capable. My body is able to deal with the miles without to much complaint, and recover fast enough to do it again the next. However, I am getting off topic, what I am more concerned with the battle that goes on mentally whenever I run.

When I decide on the mileage I am going for before the run I am fired up, it isn’t going to be a problem and I am going to knock out the miles without event. This is what I tell myself every single time I get ready to go. Lets look at the 6 miler I did last week. I hadn’t gone that far before and I was determined to do it this time, and knew I could. Until I was about 100 yards into the run that is.

The first mile is always an argument in my brain. It starts pretty quickly with me asking myself why in the world I think I need to run that far. I come up with several good reasons pertaining to weight loss and overall health as well as achieving personal goals. To which I am happy to inform myself 4 miles would most definitely suffice to meet those very same goals, and while six may be notable it is completely unnecessary, and boy I would like to avoid the soreness I am most definitely going to endure as a result. When the argument starts I am firm in my goal, but about half way into the second mile I have decided that 4 miles will actually be fine. It will still be above my calorie burning goal and six will just suck, why even bother.

This decision typically lasts until I am mid way through the 3^rd mile. It’s strange. It may be what people always referred to as runners block, but I doubt it as I am far to aware of the pain in my legs, and my labored breathing to be in some trance, and the fact that I am having an involved conversation with myself about it also indicates that I am not exactly rising above my physical limitations. The fact is by the time I get within a half mile of my recently revised goal that stalwart attitude I had before the run starts to assert itself subtly. It typically begins with me thinking how I am not going to run six, but I am almost done with 4 and I could totally make it another mile. I don’t have to or anything, but I could if I wanted. Maybe what Ill do is just start in on a 5^th mile and run till I don’t feel like it. It could be 100 feet or another full mile, but I already met the goal anyway so why not? My brain thinks in run on sentences fyi. The stalwart sides keeps the give up side distracted with this line of thought so long I typically finish the 5^th mile before I realize it, and if I am gonna do 5, I pretty much have to do six.

What is so ridiculous about this is that it does not matter how far I am going. If I decide to do six it happens, but it also happens if I decide to do 3, its just more of a cliff notes convo because my brain doesn’t have the luxury of all that extra time. Its very annoying to have to change your mind so many times whilst doing something you’d really rather never do in the first place, but maybe now that’s it written I can start to get past this latest manifesting of my OCD tendancies.