Day 15. The importance of support

I was out to eat and had ordered a veggie burger. It came, and while Andrew and Meg across from me split a burger in half I had a whole one all to myself. After snacking on some of their fries, I ate half of it in about two minutes. Then the other half stared at me.

“You want me. I’m just as good as the other half. Better, even. If you wait until later I’ll spoil. I’ll be a microwaved mess. I’ll be a poor excuse for a mess. You’re a bit drunk. It’s allowed.”

I turned to the table and said, “I’m debating – do I eat the other half or not? It’s telling me I should.”

Meg’s response was, “Go for it,” which is typical as she didn’t know the three week build up of how making this choice would be admitting failure.

Andrew was in a different position. I carpool to work with him every morning, and he’s the only person who I vent on about my desire to eat more. I know how trying listening to a guy talk about that can be, but it fills my head, and we have an hour’s worth of conversation to fill on a daily basis. He gets to hear everything.

“Don’t do it, Jeremy,” he said.

“Let him eat it,” Meg said.

“You don’t understand. I’ve been listening to him bitch about dieting and exercising for the last two weeks. He can’t eat that. Today we were in the break room at the same time and he said if I wasn’t there he was going to take a cookie. He can’t play both sides.”

“But it’s so tasty,” I said. “I’m going to break. Look at it. It’s so good.”

He looked up at me disappointed, “You can’t.”

He was right. I couldn’t. I left the meal feeling light and like I ate exactly the right amount. I’m a terrible dieter and the first to admit it. What makes the difference between success and failure is the small victories like this one. Without Andrew there to say no, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Instead, I’m left with a cold soggy excuse for a burger for dinner tomorrow. It makes me proud.

 

Day 14. But it’s expected you’ll fail

My knees are hurting. It’s no excuse, but it’s the one I’ve got. There was a person in the video with a fake leg. I know someone doing P90X who’s knee has been shattered. All I have is a throbbing pain. I’ve heard some do surgery for a patella like mine, but I’m more a physical therapy guy if given the choice. There is no choice unless I go to the doctor, and I have no plans to do that. It puts me in a position where I know that exercising is going to make my knee crack, and instead of watching my muscles grow, I’ve started worrying about my joints breaking. I’ll do some extra knee warm ups to help me out, and hopefully if I baby them, don’t put too much of a shock on them, and make sure I’m using good form I’ll be all right.

My diet’s in shambles, my energy’s depleted without coffee or food, I gave up on the Kenpo halfway in when my knees couldn’t take it, and I’m having trouble waking up in the morning. None of that bodes well. If I can pass 30 days, I can do 90. The truth is, there are a 100 little excuses like my knees. The trick is to keep going regardless.

 

Day 13. It’s perfectly normal to be mediocre

I’ve reached the point where I normally give up. From the start I knew this would happen. After writing the entry yesterday I didn’t end up eating those two pieces of pizza. Instead I ate 18 inches worth of free subway sandwich with two cookies to boot. I had a four pieces of chocolate today, a bagel, a piece of cake and a massive tuna melt sandwich. This morning after almost not doing the exercise at all, I got half an hour in and my knees gave. I had to stop, and they’ve been a constant pain for me since then. I’m wondering if I’m able to do this, and if I should have them checked out by a doctor. I know I’d worn them to shreds in the past by running wrong. The failure of exercise reinforced this three day streak of horrible eating, and I’ve reached the point where I knew I would.

This was supposed to be a blog about me facing down all odds, fighting against who I am and proving to myself that I’m able to achieve something greater than I ever have before. This is not “An exercise in futility” or “An exercise of failure.” It’s hard, but it’s possible. I’ll have to shift my focus and lay off the knees. I need to hone in. I need to recommit and remind myself why this is important. It’s proving to myself I’m capable of more than the average.

For the last three days I’ve slipped, and I honestly have no idea if I’m able to finish. I might repeat the first month, and actually be able to get through the exercises the second time around. I’ll have to learn how wake up. How to cook. How to push myself. I’ll have to learn how to commit.

 

Day 12. It’s important to be optimistic

Weekend Started with Pancakes and Booze

Things I’ve eaten in the last two days:

• A piece of cake
• a bagel and a half
• an omelette
• pizza (plan to eat two pieces tonight)
• apple cobbler pie
• Kugel
• A lot of chicken
• Challah and other varieties of bread
• 5 or 6 shots of rum
• some wine
• some beer
• a pancake with blackberries

Now, the negative way to look at this is by saying I’m failing at my diet. I don’t see it that way because this used to be my normal diet. This weekend I felt guilty with everything I ate, and know that come tomorrow I’ll be back to my new eating habits. This is no longer the norm, only the exception. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I’m failing at my diet.

 

Day 11. A day off

I took the day off. Shabbat hit and I decided to proclaim it my day of rest. I did the yoga, but ate a full meal at lunch time, and drank last night until I was happy. I had dessert at lunch, and woke up with a hangover. I just ate a second piece of bread. Tomorrow I’ll return to the diet as planned, and I realized just because it’s Shabbat doesn’t mean I can take a day off. Assuming that the average day makes me an arbitrary one point better, if I take one day off a week, it sets me back three days. The first day I lose a point. The second I get it back. Only on the third am I up one again. I don’t know if that’s exactly how it works, but in my head that makes sense. In other words, taking one day a week off potentially halves the results. It’s unacceptable.

This week I went off my diet for Shabbat. Next week will be even harder as I’m staffing a retreat, but I’ll pull through. At the moment I’m less concerned with the diet, and more concerned with the state of these entries. I know I wouldn’t read them, and that’s a problem. Just like the exercise, they’ll take a few weeks to really warm into.

 

Day 10. Fasting

I’m a fairly religious guy, and twice a year I do 26 hour fasts. The first 20 hours are never a problem. I drink a lot of water before it starts, load up on carbs and proteins, and my body slowly works through them. By about lunch time (they both start at sundown the first day and go through 3 stars in the sky the next) I start to get hungry. The hunger lasts for a while, but at around 4 o’clock I’ll hit another high where I’m not hungry, but now have lost some energy. By 7 o’clock the energy is gone, but worse than that I start to get a headache. By the time I’m able to eat at 8, I’m not even hungry. I’ve just lost my energy and the idea of food is foreign.

In a way this diet has made me go back to that same feeling. A lack of energy. A headache. The constant yearning for food. It’s making me think I might be doing the diet wrong.

Or maybe that’s how it’s meant to be.

Or maybe it’s my job.

In the car ride back from work, my carpool-mate asked why I’m doing this diet if that’s how it made me feel.

“Because it gives me energy,” I started to say, but realized that was wrong. I’m about to eat, but I realize this is not going to get easier. Next week I cut out coffee. Hopefully that will help with my ability to diet. We’ll see.

—

Note: I told myself I’d write every day. I plan to stick to that, but if that’s going to happen, I’m going to need to start having something new to say each day. I can’t imagine anything more dreadful than reading a blog about how someone’s having a tough time dieting and exercising, and I’m worried that’s what this is becoming.

 

Day 9. Burn Out

Part of what excites me about this whole process, other than the idea of getting fit, attracting women, becoming a ninja, etc. etc. is the notion of sticking with something that takes up an hour of my day for 100 days straight.

Sketch page from that week.

During the summer after graduating from Syracuse I had some free time between my trips to New York. The initial weeks I spent on forming lists of places to apply to and improving my website, tweaking my portfolio, printing business cards, and other equally dull activities that have filled up far too much of my life. About five weeks in I told myself I’d draw for 12 hours a day. I did. In that 5 day period I improved more in drawing than in a usual two month period. By the end I knew exactly what it would take to get better at cartooning and how I’d need to spend another 1000 hours before I even came close to where I wanted to be. It was only 5 days, yet I knew the very best spent their whole lives in that mode.

I couldn’t do it. I burned myself out, and I accomplished almost nothing in the two weeks that followed.

I constantly set massive goals with no precise deadline, and no chance of success. These next 90 days are different. I have a specific guide to show me the way. All I need to do is jump along to a video for an hour. When phrased like that it couldn’t be simpler. I don’t just want to be a ninja. I want to prove to myself I can do anything.

 

Day 8. Today it starts for real

Yesterday the pull up bar arrived. I put it together last night. The half of the session where I sat watching the screen as I half assed pulling a band back and forth is gone.

Yesterday I cheated on my diet. I ate four times as many nuts, an apple and strawberry’s, and had a chicken lunch and tofu dinner both drenched in sauces. I easily had 40% more calories and 30% less protein than suggested.

The idea of a shake still confuses me.

For the last 40 minutes I’ve laid in bed reading up on boingboing instead of starting.

I had given myself a practice week. It ended yesterday. All of the excuses I attributed to that don’t work anymore.

Today it starts for real.

Gross.

 

Day 7. Food Porn from Vonnegut

I was thinking of this short story a couple days ago. It’s from the book Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. This is his copyrighted work and if anyone has a legal problem with me posting it here, I will take it down immediately. Alternatively, if anyone hasn’t read the book –  go buy it or get it from your library.

Dirty Movie by Kilgore Trout

It was about an Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.

They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.

They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were reallydirty, and Don replied, “As dirty as movies could get.”

This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.

It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.

So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn’t any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the Planet: 

THE END

It was all faked, of course. There weren’t any pears anymore. And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway. It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.

Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour and a half–soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples. And then the father put the cat and the dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.

After a while, the actors couldn’t eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.

The audience went wild.

When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn’t actually deliver these goodies, of course.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.

And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake. (pages 59-61) Breakfast of Champions

 

Day 6. I was once a martial artist

When I was a kid I did Karate.

It was only for an hour, but I learned quite a bit.

For instance

• Karate involves little more than kicking and hitting repeatedly.
• Despite popular perception no actual fighting is involved.
• The philosophy side is entirely gone by the time it reaches the rec room of the Maplewoods Aquatic Center.
• People that are bigger than you can beat you up.
• Learning this skill would take years. Not weeks, as I’d hoped.

I look back on that hour, and think of just how much I wanted to do Karate before actually trying it. When I got there, it couldn’t have been more of a disappointment. It was everything I hated from a meathead leading right down to needless repetition. It was basically gym class. I’ll grant it’s possible I just had a lousy teacher.

I bring this up because I just went through day 6’s exercise, Kenpo, and it’s the second time in my life I’ve ever done a martial arts work out. Notably, Tony is a far cry from anything I might consider a martial artist – he’s not Japanese or over eighty or bearded or triangular straw hat wearing – a far cry. There was no philosophy, the entire time consisted of a bunch of hitting and kicking, and it was still led by a meathead, but this time I got it.