That’s how I look as of today, the start of Week Five of this journey. I’m a simple pound lighter than I was the last time I checked in, so little by little I’m making progress.
Before I get too deep into this, I want to take a moment to address the whole “camera phone self-portrait” issue. People who know me know that I am not a fan of people whose only pictures of themselves are much like the one I took above, or taken of their own face with the camera held at arm’s length in front of them. My theory has always been if you’re the only one who wants to take a picture of you, you probably ought to think about that. Still, the picture you see above took me six tries to get right due to aim, shaking hand, etc. It figures that the only one worth posting had me making that face in it. I suppose it’s karmic retribution for all the things I say about people who do that regularly. That being said, I now applaud your aim and steady hand, but I still think you need to pump the brakes a little on those.
Now let’s get back to why we’re here. It was a pretty good week for me, despite the fact that I only shed one pound. As far as exercise goes, last week was week four of P90X2. For those of you unfamiliar with how the program works you do three weeks of different exercises followed by a week called “recovery”. It’s yoga, low-impact cardio, etc. It allows you to heal from the previous three weeks of workouts as well as prepare your body for the beating it will be taking when you start up again. On Monday, we started Phase Two, which is Strength. I was VERY excited about the prospect of getting back to the other side of the gym where the weights are, as the stretchy cardio yoga stuff isn’t really my cup of tea. A necessary evil, especially for someone like myself who is trying to shed the layer of fat engulfing his muscle, but still not for me. As it turns out, Phase Two not only ignored the weights but was far more difficult than expected. The first workout is called “Chest+Back+Balance” and absolutely kicked the ever living snot out of me. Things like doing push-ups on four medicine balls and every kind of pull-up known to man and some, I believe, created by extra-terrestrial sadists. We plowed through it, though, and I am still sore enough to prove it. Tuesday was “Plyocide” which is more of the lovely cardio stuff I adore, and Wednesday was a basic cardio day (elliptical for me).
I skipped Saturday’s workout because I was involved in something called The Tomato Battle. It’s kind of a traveling version of Spain’s La Tomatina. The Spanish version starts with people trying to climb a greased pole in order to knock a ham off the top. Once the ham hits the ground the battle begins, and 40,000 people hurl tomatoes in the streets. The version at Irvine Lake was a bit different. There was no greased pole but there was a beer garden and a costume contest. It all started cleanly and innocently enough:
After being led into a caged in area (on asphalt, no less) full of over-ripe tomatoes (the waiver clearly says they are not fit for human consumption, which makes it okay to waste them) we proceeded to get beaten mercilessly by tomatoes. The first one to hit me was in the face, getting rotten tomato juice in my eye. The battle went on for a while and, when we emerged, we looked like this:
We smelled awful and if you’ve never tried to clean ungodly amounts of tomato out of your hair I recommend you don’t try. It’s not easy. It was a great experience and I definitely got some exercise doing it, but I don’t think I’ll be making that trek again.
As far as my diet is concerned, it was pretty good. I made another batch of Sunday Crock-Pot stuff for lunch, this time altering it slightly. I put a bag of frozen spinach in, some chicken breast tenderloins, a tub of fresh salsa, a small can of green chiles, some habanero sauce, and some other spices. Turn it on to low, wait eight or nine hours, and package into Tupperware for the week. Tasty and healthy, for sure.
Dinner is always a bit problematic for me, as it’s right after my workout and I try to stay as healthy as possible. I have a fairly busy social life, though, so eating in isn’t always an option, especially if I want to avoid eating right before I go to bed (which I do). I try to keep it as close to the guidelines I set up as possible but it’s not always easy.
While I’m happy that I have lost the weight I have it’s going far too slowly for me. It seems to me that, like the poor construction crew building the second Death Star, I need to “double my efforts”. I’ve been thinking about going full blown Atkins again but I’m afraid of the post-diet consequences, which is how I ended up here in the first place. Still, even instant gratification is often too slow for me so I feel like I need to do something differently. I just need to figure out how to best go about it.
