Fat Guy

Trying to lose 100 or more pounds.

Progress, not perfection

March 15, 2011 in Fat Guy by Ben | 3 comments

Since it’s my place, I’m gonna talk about, um, me. Just for a touch, and then I’ll get back to music videos and jokes and funny cartoons I find out on the interwebs.

I’ve been working pretty hard to lose weight. OK, on my scale I’m working “pretty hard.” I haven’t signed up for a boot camp or the Biggest Loser or anything, mostly because I’m on a budget so there just isn’t an opportunity. Also because my schedule has to remain freakishly flexible sometimes and if there’s anything I dislike more than paying for a class that I may or may not be able to afford, it’s paying for a class I may or may not be able to afford and then not being able to attend because of a sick child or a soccer practice or something. So, I’ve been pretty much solo (along with the fine support at SparkPeople, who are fine folks indeed).

This means my progress has been pretty slow, heh.

I know this sounds like an elaborate excuse for being heavy, but it’s not, I’m just rambling about what I’ve been doing. So here’s the progress: Since last April I have gone from 289 pounds to 257. I now lift weights three days a week and walk around 6 miles a week, spread out over several days. With spring weather and better conditioning my walks are getting longer, too. Since last June I’ve dropped five inches from both my waist and hips and two inches from my thighs (replacing fat with manly muscles, I’m so sure).

Progress I have left to go: sixty pounds and about another five inches each from waist and hips. I don’t know any other measurements, let’s just say ‘proportional’ and leave it at that. So at this rate it’ll take another two years. At the end I just want to be fit and healthy. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Now what I’m not sure about is why I feel like writing about this today. I think it’s because I’m feeling stronger in so many ways, but still have such a very long way to go. Not just physically but emotionally and in my relationships. Maybe that can be another post at another time.

I need to remind myself once in a while that it’s a journey. A very. long. journey.

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Weight loss – I’m doing it wrong

February 25, 2011 in Fat Guy by Ben

Listening to my music player, I had a sudden flash of inspiration. If I wanna be thin? I just need to become a rock icon.

grammys2011_mickjagger.jpg

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Access to a computer makes me over share

February 24, 2011 in Fat Guy by Ben

Something is bugging me, in a way that only my convoluted brain can properly follow.

When I blew up the theme to my blog (last week? the week before? Dunno) I lost all the crap I have spent years putting here. Little things like colors and fonts; links in the sidebar (like my badge for the boobiethon, I’ve been volunteering and/or donating for years and years, it’s like gone as if I don’t care about the boobies. Trust me, I care probably more than is healthy). So much wasted time, lost in a careless mouse click.

So I start putting things back. I found a ‘cost of war’ ticker for the bottom, a widget for twitter and last.fm to put in the side bar. You know, it’s the little things. I don’t have a ‘pretend celebrity girlfriend’ for the footer because (and I’m a little ashamed of this) we actually broke up along time ago, when she had a baby with her husband or something, I was just too lazy to update the picture and/or find a new pretend celebrity girlfriend (meeting pretend people is SO time-consuming).

OK, maybe I should stop my rambling and get to what I really came here to write. I lost all the header pictures that I used to rotate on extremely random intervals at the top of the blog. Pictures of my dog, my kids, the beach, “stuff.” The only picture I could find was of the shirt you see, which is one of my running shirts. In case your eyes are like mine and you can’t figure out the cropped out bits, I’ll spell it out: “Running: Not better than sex, just more often.” As you may have guessed, there’s a story about this shirt, too, and I don’t think I’ve told it in a while, so here it is.

Ahem. There is a neat little company that makes running shirts (they used to make shorts, too, and men’s singlets but don’t any longer) called One More Mile. This company is really cool, and no, they don’t ask me to say that, I’m a very happy customer and have a lot of shirts and the afore-mentioned shorts from them. I love their stuff (my first shirt from them, which says “Sorry, I’ve got to run” is finally too frayed to wear) and when I started running 5 years ago this is where I got stuff to reward myself for not collapsing as often when I tried to make it around the block.

(get to the point already)

This cool company also runs a slogan contest periodically (there’s a t-shirt shaped link from their home page, upper right, helpfully called “click here for SLOGAN CONTEST”). You submit a funny slogan, and people vote, and if you win? You get an item with your slogan on it and they get to use it in the store if they want.

You know where this is going, right?

Yes, I’m the person who submitted the slogan you see above. And yes, the shirt was FREE. (woot!) And finally, cuz oversharing is one of my specialties, yes, at the time I was running a lot more than I was having sex. I used to say that I ran because it was my one chance to hear some heavy breathing and break a sweat.

Well, lemme tell you, that ain’t the case right now. Not in the slightest. Maybe it’s time to submit a new slogan…

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Weight fun

February 2, 2011 in Fat Guy by Ben

I’m trying to eat better and exercise more and eat, well, less and maybe not drink so much and avoid run-on sentences and get more sex and more sleep.

Not surprisingly, I’m having mixed success.

I’m on SparkPeople. I log food and exercise and mood and fun stuff like that. I’m eating a lot more salad and a lot less ice cream.

So guess what I did? Take your time, I’ll wait.

What did you guess? Did you guess I bought a pair of jeans 2″ smaller than the ones I usually wear? You did? Here, have a cookie. I’m not supposed to eat it. So sorry that it’s really only half a cookie, you don’t mind the bite marks, do you?

Anyway, the jeans fit. Snug, but no doubt they fit. But chicken shit that I am I didn’t wear them to work today, thinking well, maybe I can lose a little more weight and then they will fit even better. And it’s a little odd to call anything with a 42 inch waist ‘smaller’ but there you have it.

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