The (Dis)Advantages of Putting Your Brain in a Jar

I find it interesting how after a few years of throwing caution to the winds, not bothering watching what I ate, worrying about my health or getting any exercise to speak of, I have jumped back on the proverbial band wagon (not the lap band wagon, as I've already mentioned that lap band or gastric bypass surgery was too sci-fi for consideration) after yet another wake-up call from my physician and reasserted learned food and exercise basics that have helped me lose 50 pounds, almost three waist sizes and, with the addition of weight training, have started to improve my skin tone and musculature. But I find it interesting that both circumstances, for worse and now better, have involved putting my brain in a jar.

When I did this after abandoning my last weight loss effort, my old routine involved sleeping in as late as I could in the morning, getting ready for and going to work, then coming home to decide whether to have rice, potatoes or pasta with a whole rotisserie chicken and box of Oreos for dessert. Like the cookies, I was double stuffing myself back then, and when the sugar kicked in it was time to surf the 'Net or lie in bed and watch TV until I fell asleep. I was also waking up every hour or so to urinate because my body was doing its valiant best to eliminate the sugar I was mindlessly pouring into my system, and then I'd glug down more water or soda due to the dehydration I was causing. I wasn't thinking for any length of time about how heavy I was becoming, how tired I felt or what I was doing to my body; that would have required effort. I was hibernating the best way I knew how with an occasional flare of self-awareness.

It required a trip to the doctor's office (which I was avoiding because I wasn't taking care of myself) to make me take my brain out of the saccharine solution it was floating in and put it back in my head to think about what I was doing. I must admit the previous 2 1/2 years of daily walking must have paid off because I managed to only put back 97 of the 173 pounds I'd lost, and the doctor's scale provided some motivation because I thought I weighed 10 pounds more than I actually did. After blood tests I was put back on five different medications, told to monitor my blood sugar daily and lose 10-15 pounds before my next visit in two months. After about four months of following his orders and my own, my blood pressure is great, my blood sugar is just below the range it should be for someone who's had diabetes as long as I have, and my energy level is much higher which, these days, it needs to be.

As you can see from my second blog entry, I am presently on the go every weekday from 7 am to 9 pm from walking to driving to working to driving to walking to working out. There is some variation on the weekends, but I try to start my day with at least a full walk and go to the gym right afterwards, and it's nice to be able to veer from the weekday schedule. Now that I'm eight pounds within reach of my second goal to weigh 320 by Halloween, have been gradually increasing repetitions and weight in my strength training routine, and have been literally going "bargain basement shopping" by taking smaller-sized clothing out of storage I now fit back into and giving my larger clothes to charity so I won't have them to fit back into, I am gradually feeling the need to put my brain back in the jar.

Before you think I'm packing it in (and packing the pounds back on), let me explain. After having used my brain again to reeducate myself on how to lose weight, to read fitness and weight loss books for motivation, to chart my strength training exercises, to remember doctor's visits and when to take my medications and blood sugar readings, I have trained myself to do what I need to do and have done it well. It took quite a bit of thought to figure out how to make all of this happen and to convince myself, and then my body, that I could do it, and now that I have recircuited my brain to know what works best for me, I need to put it back in a jar so my body can continue to do what it needs to without so much continuous input!

I know now to meet my final goal and lose 28 pounds before the end of this year, I need to keep doing what I have been doing which has worked beautifully so far. I also know that once I reach that goal, I will need to use my brain again to figure out how to continue walking, working out and eating properly to a lesser degree than the present pace I've established to maintain what I've accomplished. However, that's all in the future right now, and in order to get to that bright, sparkling achievement in three months' time, I have to get through today first.

Right now, I'm blogging during my half hour for lunch before I go back to balancing the budget for my department for the next four hours. Then, I have about a 40-minute drive home, need to shop for groceries and withdraw my rent to bring to my landlord, feed my cats and eat a little something before I suit up for a half walk at the track and a full upper body circuit at the gym. I'll get home about 9, fire up the VCR to tape a couple of shows while I fix dinner and then finish this blog entry before I climb into bed and go to sleep. It all seems doable when I've written it out on my blog for your (hopeful) reading pleasure, but that's the condensed version. Brought to you by My Brain in a Jar.

Now that I've done everything in the last paragraph and am at home at my computer, what you didn't read before is the fact that I'm not a mathematically inclined person and although I can balance the budget, it is a painstaking process I'm not well-suited for. You didn't read about the stop-and-go traffic I sat in on the way home trying to remain awake, the inane conversation in the bank line at the supermarket, the banter running through my head at the track that I finished walking in the dark, the fatigue that would have set in if I had allowed myself to think about the 18 exercises I performed during my hour-and-a-half circuit at the gym. You're not reading about these things until now because if I don't put my brain in a jar and give too much creedence to all the things I do and deal with on a daily basis (as we all do), I run the risk of becoming overwhelmed.

If I don't take it one walk at a time, one planned meal at a time, one set of exercises at a time; if I don't pace myself and recognize when I need to slow down, take a break, or be careful not to injure myself; if I look in the mirror or step on the scale and don't like what I see there and fail to remind myself this is a process that takes Patience and Fortitude (just like the names of those two majestic stone lions out in front of the New York Public Library) to achieve gradual results; then I stop taking care of myself and all my time, effort and energy goes to waste as they are reversed.

Putting your brain in a jar can be a help or a hindrance. I can put myself into a fugue state where my weight, health and life can spiral out of control by not thinking about them, or I can put myself into a fugue state where I can regain control of my weight, health and life by not overthinking about it. I opt for the latter these days and will keep the jar handy for that purpose.


The Witching Hour approaches and I'm off to bed. Weekly weigh-in is tomorrow: wish me luck. Good night, Woof, Blessed Be, and welcome to October!

Thursday Night Weigh-In: A Nice Round (?) Number

Hello, gentle readers. I'm happy to report that two weeks after gaining a couple of pounds for the first time in five months since I started my weight loss efforts and staying the same weight last week, tonight I managed to lose those two pounds and another one to spare. I now weigh 328 and lost a total of 50 pounds! It did require getting back on track with my regimen, but it paid off.

Good night, Woof, and Blessed Be!

A Time of Balance

As of 5:18 pm EDT today, the Autumnal Equinox will be upon us. Equinox is a word meaning "equal night" and is one of two times a year when day and night are in balance (the other being the Vernal Equinox around the third week of March here in the Northern Hemisphere and, conversely, right now in the Southern where spring is starting). The sun's light will be shining directly on the Earth's waistline, the equator, and from that point forward sunset will be coming a little faster until Daylight Saving Time ends November 1st and 9-to-5'ers will be walking out into darkness after work.

As I mentioned at the end of my first blog entry, I am a Witch. Stood in a salt circle naked almost twenty years ago and self-dedicated to the Gods as a priest of the neopagan religion of Wicca and therefore consider myself to be a Wiccan Witch of the East. By the way, I am a male Witch, not a warlock (a derogatory Old Scottish term for "traitor" or "oathbreaker"). In this context, Charmed actually got it right as their warlocks were demons and evildoers of either sex, but these days, no matter what Bewitched told you, men are Witches, too.

In Wicca, the Autumnal Equinox is also known as Mabon, one of the eight Celtic Sabbats (solar festivals) and the second of three harvest festivals. In the Greek tradition I follow, Persephone, daughter of the Goddess Demeter, the Mistress of Grains and Fruits in their Season, was abducted and brought into the underworld of Hades to be the bride of the God by the same name. As Demeter searched in vain for Her daughter, She withdrew Her bounty from the earth and people began to die. Zeus finally demurred and said Persephone could return to Her mother as long as She ate nothing in the underworld, but Hades had tricked Her into eating six pomegranate seeds (talk about watching what you eat, huh?) For this reason, Persephone was bound to return to Hades' realm six months out of the year, and as Demeter mourns annually for Her daughter we have Fall and Winter until Her bounty returns to the earth along with Her daughter in the Spring (Vernal Equinox). It is a time for reflecting on balance, giving thanks, counting your blessings and preparing for the impending dark and cold.

Since I started my regimen in April, I've enjoyed warm weather, the occasional cooling drizzle and sunlight until 8 p.m. that has made it possible for me to walk and catch up on my reading on the walking track after work for months, but now I notice that by the time I get to the far end of the track, no light remains for reading and I am walking in the dark towards the lights of the commercial district on the way back. The weather is cool but still warm enough for shorts, the cicadas and other nocturnal buggies are chirping away and the moon is an archer's bow in the sky, but pretty soon it's going to be a lot colder and darker out here and it's time to start thinking about how that's going to affect my routine.

Perhaps it's time to invest in a pair of headphones because it looks like I'm going to have to trade my book in for a video screen on the treadmill at the gym soon. I'm not a big treadmill fan because I like to feel as if I've gotten somewhere from all that walking and I appreciate the fact that I'm walking the track at my pace rather than walking the pace of the track rolling beneath me. I guess it'll be nice to catch up on some shows, to know how many calories I've burned and my pulse rate at a glance, but I do prefer the outdoors to the gym.

With less and less sunlight to produce serotonin along with those endorphins, a touch of Seasonal Affective Disorder (isn't that SAD?) may also become an issue. I thought perhaps the tanning booth at my gym would provide some benefits of sunlight I'll be missing getting to the gym under cover of darkness later on, but apparently the light wavelength is different. Cravings for comfort foods like sweets and starchy foods also accompany this year (welcome to the holiday season!) and since I'm the human kind of Bear rather than my quadruped brethren, I don't have the option of hibernating for months at a time and living off my fat stores; lucky bastards! If you tell your employer you'll see them after hibernation in the Spring, they tend to stop being your employer.

So, what's a Big Bear to do to reach goal by the New Year? Here's my list of progressive resolutions:

1. Walk the track in the morning and evening for as long as the weather permits and soak in sunshine while it lasts. When the nose is froze and the ears feel like they'll fall off, get thee to a treadmill.

2. Get to bed earlier for plenty of rest. One of my favorite TV shows is Chelsea Lately, but as implied in the title it's on at 11 pm, my bedtime in the darker months. Luckily, my parents had me genetically altered before birth for tallness and aptitude with technological devices (traits neither of them possess), so I'll start setting the timer on my VCR to tape shows for earlier viewing the next day.

3. Acknowledge a moderate need for comfort food. Luckily, even though I'm a diabetic, visions of sugarplums don't dance in my head more than "bowl" foods during the dark half of the year: chicken soup chunky with meat, egg noodles, carrots and celery; beef stew chunky with meat, potatoes and carrots; substantial, stick-to-your-ribs, hungry man meals that warm your insides as they fill them. Every once in awhile, I need a no-holds-barred meal to remind how good food is, tastes and makes me feel to replenish myself on every level. Then, I can go back to my well-balanced food choices (by the way, in this blog you will never see the word diet unless is comes before the word soda because I'm not on one, they don't work, and to me diet is just "die" with a "t" at the end. You feel like you're dying while you're on one and once you come back to life by ending it you gain back the weight plus (+), which is where that "t" at the end comes in.)

4. Keep the holidays wholly. Halloween (Samhain, the Celtic New Year to us Witches), Thanksgiving, Yule/Christmas. There are a lot of holidays on the way, and with celebrations come feasts. So when holiday foods are laid on the table once again, I will partake of dishes I don't have every day within reason and celebrate along with everyone else. Then, leaving the leftovers elsewhere, it's back to the gym the next day to use all that caloric energy to walk and working out.

5. Sleep in my sweats and socks. This will make it a bit easier to leave the womb-like comfort of my toasty-cozy bed in the morning, shove on some sneakers and be halfway to the gym before it dawns on me that I am actually going there (especially before dawn).

6. Keep up the Good Work, hold myself accountable when need be, and keep on blogging about it!

Good night, Woof, and Blessed Be!

Turkey Vultures and Turkey Meatballs: Walking, Working Out and What's for Dinner

Hello again, gentle readers. Today I'd like to give you some idea of what my exercise and food regime is like on a typical weekday. The alarm goes off at 6:30 and I feed my little familiars:

Nyx (left - sister) and Nox (brother - right): my cats

Fluffy (black) and Bubastis (tabby): my sister kittens

I let the kittens and cats out to play for awhile, and about a half-hour later with the cats back in the house I hop in my car and drive three minutes to the Riverwalk, a beautiful walkway that snakes 1.7 miles from end to end with tenth-of-a-mile markers along the way. Since I walk to the end and back, it's almost a 3-1/2 mile walk, and since it's rare that I can find someone to walk with at 7 am, I bring a book with me.

I use the wooden fence to my right as a guide, and when other walkers stop me to ask how I can read and walk at the same time, I tell them as long as I'm not walking into the fence, I'm doing fine. The reading entertains me, takes my mind away from counting tenths of a mile, and if I need to process something on my mind that requires some inner dialogue, I leave the book in the car. Of course when I do, the other walkers say "What, no book today?"

On one of the outcropping towers to the left during the summer months, a wake of turkey vultures perch on the metal railings to air their feathers and crap on their legs (which actually provides a cooling effect called urohydrosis; thanks Wikipedia!) Besides wondering whether the one vulture perched on a pole in the center is some authority figure and watching their impressive wingspans as they ride the thermals high above the river, I also wonder if anyone were to drop in their tracks on the track whether those scavenger birds would happily descend upon the hapless pedestrian and pick them clean, giving us all incentive to walk and keep walking. Carry on, carrion! ('cause nothin' really matters...)

Anyway, after my morning trek I head home, get ready for work and make a couple of sandwiches (three slices of ham and one Swiss with mayo and mustard, or tuna and mayo, on whole wheat bread; found out the hard way when I started brown bagging it how quickly white bread can spike your blood sugar). My breakfast is a wheat bagel with butter, lunch is said sandwiches with a small bag of barbecue or sour cream and onion chips, and for the afternoon slump around three, I grab a granola bar from the vending machine. For cost effectiveness, I bring a two liter bottle of diet cola to work with me to wash it all down with.

When I get home in the afternoon, it's time to feed my familiars again and give them some pets, love and fresh air before the sweats go on and the cats go back in the house for their own protection. Then it's back to the Riverwalk, but depending on which circuit I'm doing that evening at the gym, I walk half or all of the track and back six days a week.

Before I head to the gym, let's have a little lesson in workout words so some of you will know what I'm talking about. Very basically, my exercise routines consists of repetitions (also known as "reps"), and a rep is one full range of movement (for example, one rise and fall of a push-up is one rep). The number of reps you do before you stop to rest is known as a "set." If you do 12 push-ups and stop, you have done one set of 12 reps. All of the sets of different exercises you do in one workout session is known as a "circuit." That's all you'll need to know because that's all I wanted to know.

On the nights when I do a full upper-body circuit (3 sets, 12 reps each of four exercises each for chest, back and shoulders and three exercises each for biceps and triceps), it takes me about an hour and a half so I only walk 1.6 miles on those nights. The next night, I do a leg and stomach circuit (3 sets, 12 reps each of 8 leg exercises and 3 abdominal exercises) which takes about 45 minutes, so I walk the full 3.4 miles on those evenings. I need to alternate these circuits every other day because the goal when you are weight training is to work the muscles to exhaustion in order to tear their fibers and then, as you rest those muscles for about 48 hours before your next workout, the fibers heal back stronger and the muscles develop. Another little lesson in case you didn't know.

These last two paragraphs were learned from Idiot's Guide To books and exercise routines I was given by a trainer when I finally joined a gym about five years ago, and I'm hoping to make this blog informative to those just starting out with weight loss or exercise as well as entertaining to everyone. The first time I lost weight, I followed someone else's food plan. The second time, I added walking to the mix and created my own food plan. This time around, hopefully the last time, I added weight training in hopes of maintaining my weight when I reach my goal of 300, tightening up my skin and gaining some muscle which actually burns calories at rest!

So, after about two hours of walking and weight training, I haul my sweaty self to the supermarket. I shop on a nightly basis since I'm never sure what I'm going to want for dinner. I tend to buy a lot of prepared or pre-cooked meals because when it's 9:45 and I haven't eaten yet, these foods or whatever was on the rotisserie that day is ready to heat and eat when I bring it home. I know I'm going to want meat; some kind of noodle, rice or potato; a vegetable in a low-fat butter or cheese sauce; and some sugar-free ice cream with or without sugar-free hot cocoa mix to add flavor and texture. The ice cream gives me a treat at the end of a long day and has been a staple of my weight loss efforts since WW '91 (see first blog entry for reference).

Tonight's dinner was beef tips in gravy with wheat egg noodles and a microwave pouch of Brussels sprouts in butter sauce, and I just got up and ate half a container of sugar-free Edy's Fudge Tracks ice cream: yum. One of my favorites is turkey meatballs, which are lower in calories than beef meatballs, heat in about two minutes and can be added to noodles or pasta, eaten on their own or as a cold snack before a workout on nights when my energy is flagging. Pre-cooked sliced chicken is also versatile and easy for the same reasons.

So, here is one Big Bear's exercise and food plan that has lost me almost 50 pounds in the past five months. I may eat more than some people, but I also exercise more and there are benefits to being a guy when it comes to weight loss. As long as one counteracts the other and enables me to lose a couple of pounds a week until I reach my goal by the end of this year, if it ain't broke, don't fix it! If someone is shocked by what or how much I eat or thinks I could improve my plan in some way, I tell them they are always welcome to give me some of their unsolicited advice. All they have to do first is walk the 5 to 7 miles and work out for 1-1 1/2 hours with me. Haven't had anyone take me up on that offer yet.

In the interest of full disclosure, I gained two pounds two weeks ago and still knew where to find them during this week's weigh-in. With a stomach bug that required a trip to the ER, a cold rattling my chest and a vacation that threw off my regular routines, my energy has recently gone into rest and recuperation.

Sometimes, when I'm upping the weight on the plate machines (those torture device-looking machines where you put a metal peg under the amount of weight you want to lift during the exercise), or adding a couple of reps to each exercise every six weeks to progressively challenge my muscles, or had a larger than average weight loss the week before, the scale doesn't budge the next week. Sometimes, you just need a night off, whether you need to relax, get some extra sleep, have a prior engagement or just need to have some fun. Sometimes, you just need to get some takeout, or your mom cooked your favorite meal and you want thirds, or you're out to dinner with friends and those boneless wings look damn good!

Those are the times you are allowing a necessary release of pressure, giving yourself a delicious or relaxing reward for all of the discipline and hard work that you've been putting into yourself for weeks, and giving yourself some perspective. It's been my experience that if you don't allow yourself such freedom every once in awhile, you run a risk of self-denial and resentment that can bring your efforts crashing down as hard as your ass falling off the wagon. The Greek God Apollo tells us to "know thyself" and "be moderate," but every once in awhile you need a night out with Dionysus, too.

Until next time...Good Night, Woof, and Blessed Be.

Introductions are in Order

Hello, gentle reader(s?) Please allow me to introduce myself...boy, that was a great song. My name is John, and I'm taking my first tentative step into the blogosphere as prompted by a co-worker of mine who's done the same recently in blogging her pregnancy and the impending birth of her first child. We are both pop cultured individuals who help keep one another sane in a hostile work environment (overworked, underappreciated, you know the story) through occasional emails, and she suggested I blog about my weight loss efforts which is a primary aspect of my life right now (among others) so, here we go.

Unlike the other weight loss blogs out there (of which I've read zero), this blog is going to be saturated with many rather unique aspects of my personality (multiple aspects, not multiple personalities). I'd like to share this blog with you in hopes that my musings outside the mainstream of weight loss thought and process will help me achieve the goals I set for myself, and I welcome your feedback, advice and support and hope to provide the same in kind. If something I write here inspires you, makes you think of things from a new perspective or ticks you off, please leave a comment and we'll discuss. If you have a fundamental (or fundamentalist) problem with who or what I am, however, you see that Next Blog button up on the top of the screen? Click on that and see where the blog Wheel of Fortune takes you (away from here).

That being said, here's some brief background in no particular order. As I said before, my name is John, I live in New England in a first floor apartment with one tabby and three black cats. I'm presently an executive assistant for a non-profit organization, have a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. My parents have been married for 46 years and live 10 minutes away and my sister, divorced with two young sons, lives 20 minutes away.

Physically, I'm 39 years old, 6'2", and as of tonight's weigh-in (which happens every Thursday night at the gym wearing a T-shirt, shorts and socks with my keys in one pocket and my wallet in the other), I now weigh 331 pounds. To date, since I began walking, working out and making better food choices back in April of this year, I have lost a total of 47 pounds (I actually lost 49 pounds so far but after last week's vacation I found two of them again and kept them this week). Since that's my only gain in the past five months, I think I'm doing okay.

For those of you who did the math, I weighed 378 pounds when I went back to my doctor this April, and after a physical exam and blood tests was reminded that losing weight, along with five medications, would be a good idea for my Type II diabetes and hypertension. I will go into my exercise and food routines in later blog entries, by my progress so far has been great and I hope to drop a couple medications after another blood test this October. In the meanwhile, I am writing here as a stopgap measure to keep momentum towards my end-of-year weight loss goal: to weigh 300 pounds by January 1, 2010.

This will be my third (and hopefully last) major weight loss effort. I was a fat kid who started compulsively eating when I was about 12 and continued to do so until I weighed 338 pounds at age 21. I joined Weight Watchers with my mom in 1991 (yep, she's an emotional eater, too), and after sticking to their pre-Points program and going to weigh-in meetings every Wednesday to be inspired by our counselor, Candy (!), I lost 19 1/2 lbs. my first week, 120 altogether in the next eight months, and then took a picture standing beside a woman in the group who actually weighed what I had lost! I lost a woman! I looked great in my tux at my sister's wedding but I kinda looked like a deflated inner tube underneath, and when I asked my counselor why that was after I'd lost so much weight, she said "Well, you have to exercise, too." I know I was naive back then, but I don't recall any mention of exercise while I was there, just working the food program. And since I couldn't imagine eating by their food program for the rest of my life and was required to get to 188 pounds to attend maintenance meetings for free, my mom and I quit, made a beeline for the nearest KFC, and in the next two years I gained that woman back plus another 25 lbs.

About six years later after my first relationship ended, I consoled myself up to 454 pounds and managed to be diagnosed with Type II diabetes right along with my mother. My doctor suggested gastric bypass surgery but I felt that was too sci-fi for me and I needed to get myself under control. I started painfully walking a quarter a mile a day to THE SUNDAE SHACK (though I actually never bought ice cream there) and back to my apartment, and by progressively increasing my walking and cutting down on what I was eating, I lost 173 pounds over the next 2 1/2 years and got down to 281 pounds before...I again stopped walking regularly and eating properly. Not quite sure why that time, but I crept back up to 380 pounds, which I guess was my set point because I hovered there until this April.

So, in this first entry, I would like to explain why I call this is "A Big Bear's Blog". I became an emotional eater because I realized I was homosexual at about 12 years old and began 10 years of shame and secrecy in dealing with my sexuality. I have since "come out" to family, friends and more recently co-workers, and although "chubby chasers" have shown interest in me in the past and I was a member of Girth and Mirth, an organization that caters to large men and their admirers, I self-identify as and am attracted to Bears.

Bears, who originated in San Francisco in the mid-eighties during the AIDS crisis, hearkened a return to "men who love men who are men" with all the masculine trappings as an alternative to the effete, gym-toned, shaved and coiffed majority of "Chelsea boys" and "twinks" that dictated what was in vogue and acceptably desirable for gay men at the time. Another archetype was born of a masculine, bearded, hairy MAN who walked his talk and appreciated the company of his fellow men. I have always been attracted to and aspired to be this type of man, and about three years ago a Southern Bear, five states away and 11 years my senior, found me on the Internet, came to visit, put his paw print on my heart and we've been in long-distance love ever since (with occasional conjugal visits).

Well, the Witching Hour approaches (oh, yeah, I'm a Witch, too, but we'll talk more about that later). I hope you enjoyed this first entry and will come back for more. Thanks for your time. Good night, Woof, and Blessed Be.

Big Bear at the Bronx Zoo, 331 pounds