Certain people have
made an incredible impact on helping me improve my fitness – and
life –and here the first two, Amir and Steve, assisted me. Amir, a
colleague at the hotel with about 20 years of life experience on me
helped me figure out how to begin in a safer manner. In fantastic
shape himself and deeply knowlegable about exercise and diet, Amir
provided guidance, and particularly encouragement, that proved
invaluable. Every step of the way, he helped me stay focused and
pushed me along, while trying to help me not do anything too moronic,
and keeping my goals realistic. His value as a mentor could not be
overstressed. Then there was Steve. Close friend in the same college
fraternity, we’d both been rather huge guys who loved fried foods
and ate far too much of them, and were of comparable weight. We now
would both freely admit we collectively looked like hell. We were
talkative and had our own, shall we say, distinct senses of humor. We
ran the nitty gritty details of our fraternity that nobody else
wanted to deal with. We weren’t the in-crowd. The difference was,
in the time since I’d left Madison, Steve had dropped a crazy
amount of weight and was now near-unrecognizable. He ran and lifted
on a regular basis. He’d made a few major lifestyle changes which
might have helped nudge him along differently than mine, but it
didn’t matter – he absolutely knew what he was talking about and
had run this route before. I called Steve up and told him about my
decision, and he was absolutely ecstatic. We discussed how I should
get started for no less than two hours, and he said he would buy me
“The Idiot’s Guide to Strength Training” and a Blender Bottle.
To my surprise, they came a few days later. The book provided me the
basis for figuring out how to have workouts that were productive in
any sense, and hopefully how not to break my arms and legs at the
gym. Also, Steve, Amir, and others warned me that I was potentially
endangering myself by keeping to such an extreme calorie deficit.
They urged me to eat a bit better, but not starve, either, so I eased
more food back into my diet. Frankly, without Amir and Steve’s
assistance and examples, I’m not sure I ever would have gotten
started. If I had independently, I'm certain it would have ended very
badly.
I began following
the advice in the “Idiot’s Guide” to the letter and went to the
gym initially as much as possible – four to six days a week. I
lifted light weight with machines mainly, and incorporated some
cardio in the form of the elliptical. The first few days working on
the elliptical were incredibly painful, especially for my knees. I
could barely walk afterward, on the verge of tears. Desperate, I
recalled my doctor’s advice about leg lifts and tried them
immediately after. Doing those exercises felt even more intensely
painful for a few minutes, but I could walk more easily afterward,
and they got easier before long. I focused far more on the cardio
aspect of things than the lifting, which I despised. I worked my
endurance up to being able to spend an hour at a time walking on the
elliptical with high resistance. I found a radio podcast I loved, and
used listening to it as motivation to stay at the gym working out. I
began making some progress. And my back pain started easing off,
slowly.
Within just the
first month or two, between the crash diet and intense efforts at the
gym, I dropped somewhere between 15-20 pounds, and kept it off. I
felt a bit better physically. My family was clearly shocked and
pleased that I’d gotten my ass into gear so unexpectedly. Not a
very private person, I kept blasting out updates to the world on
facebook and in conversation, maybe trolling a bit for encouragement
and attention, but mostly proud of the work I was doing, and
unashamed to share it. People started making comments. I felt better
about myself.
Since the moment
I’d decided to make a change, improving my fitness had become the
centerpiece and focus of my life. Still, I didn’t take the next
step of sacrificing in other parts of my life to embrace that change.
For the next nine months or so, I fell into an odd pattern of
attempting to balance my social life, work, and the gym. When I had
nothing going on, I’d try to get to the gym as often as possible –
four, five, six times weekly, and go all out as best I could.
Simultaneously, for the first time, well, ever, I began having a more
active social and dating life. When I was dating someone, or trying
to meet up with friends more frequently, or started getting to know a
new group of people which was happily occurring much more frequently,
I’d devote a good amount of time to getting together. That would
totally rock my sleep schedule and leave me beat – no time to work
out, so fitness went right out the window. I just didn’t think
about it for some time. That created a situation where I willingly
plateaued my progress for weeks or months at a time. In those first
eight months of mindfulness, I probably only consistently kept to the
gym for more than two weeks at once maybe five or six times. I can’t
really say what would bring me back to the fitness fold every time.
Sometimes it was a slowing of the action with nothing else to do, but
also at times a resurgence of significant pain, or the realization
that I hadn’t lost any weight in three months. When I thought about
it, I acted on it.
The scale readouts
gradually descended, as did my expectations for what was an
acceptable weight. For months, maybe five or six until summer, I
hovered around 230-235 pounds, which, compared to 255, wasn’t too
bad! It made a significant social and physical impact, so I accepted
it for that time. Then, I kicked the gym up again and got down to
225, which lasted for quite the long time, probably another four
months, until the autumn. Progress felt slow – maybe 30 pounds in
eight months – but it was progress all the same.
I also didn’t do
much about my diet during these months, besides eat less. Since I’d
been warned off of eating far too little and this accidentally
killing myself through starvation, I made sure to eat what I
considered enough. I still ate a lot of crap. I sometimes took into
consideration my doctor’s recommendation to eat at the same places
– but just eat better! Or, what I perceived to be better, meaning
really only less fried foods and fewer grains. I still hit up all the
fast food joints frequently but did my best, when I thought about it.
It helped that I had dated Mary, a woman who was working on improving
fitness and heightening weight-loss, and had come incomparably
further in her progress than I had. And although I hit one of those
plateaus while with her during the summer – and probably
unwittingly derailed her diet once or twice by insisting we eat
terrible foods and insanely delicious Mexican churros and Italian ice
in her neighborhood – she gave me some ideas about how to eat
better and maximize my activity. Further, it seems she planted the
idea deep in my mind that I would be able to take up running at some
point, which would, apparently, prove rather important.
So proud and happy for you Matt! Would you mind if I shared this on my blog?
ReplyDeleteDavid M.
Thanks, David. Absolutely, please do.
ReplyDelete