This title could have been a lot more pessimistic or disappointed; thankfully I managed to stick to spirits on my night out on Saturday and the walk home balanced me up quite nicely. Friday was a bit of a binge but again walking too and from work – and it was a leaving meal for one of my colleagues so if I’d gone over a little I wouldn’t have been too upset about it.
Monday: 232 calories [Gym]
Tuesday: 12 calories
Wednesday: -11 calories [Gym]
Thursday: 14 calories
Friday: 136 calories
Saturday: 71 calories
Sunday: 221 calories [Airsoft]
Weekly Total: 675 calories
Weight: 248lbs.
As ever positive numbers are calories left over to remain within diet and negative numbers are calories over the diet. So a brilliant week! Despite concerns I might have had during it. I am especially pleased with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday but Saturday is also pretty damn good.
A number of people have told me that I don’t need to balance my calorie numbers so closely to 0 and having a couple of hundred calories left over each day would only help rather than hinder the diet. I had tried to explain why I was trying to run at a 0-point balance
1) This would be true if I wasn’t already on a pretty restrictive diet (for my weight). If I eat too little then the diet will fail (or crash). I am on a advised dietary limit of 1670 calories a day (before exercise) and if I go below 1200 calories too frequently my body will ‘crash’, going into a fat-retaining starvation mode. The metabolic rate slows down, fat burning is decreased and losing weight becomes very difficult – also any calorie increase leads to near-immediate weight gain, which is why diets often fail; literally because people don’t eat enough, get depressed and binge so end up putting on weight. Ergo, I need to eat a certain amount of calories for the diet to work.
2) Exercise costs calories. If I want to exercise – which I do, as it helps lose extra weight – I need to put it enough energy to fuel my body for it. If I eat 1600 calories in a day, for example, and do 500 calories worth of exercise those calories are spent, gone as dust upon the wind. This would drop me to 1100 calories for my daily in take, below my minimum intake. The energy for that exercise has to come from somewhere, and my limit of 1670 was set for me to lose 2 pounds a day without any exercise. If I exercise as well, great – I’ll be able to start using calories for muscle fuel and growth and eventually become a chiselled and perfect image of manliness. While I’m working my way there I need to avoid driving myself to exhaustion by not properly fuelling those efforts; exercise is good but requires energy and fuel, not just motivation and effort.
3) Part of the point behind this diet is that it’s my diet and why it’s easy for me to keep to it – IT’S MINE! For me, by me. Sure, a 1 pound a week goal would be less intense and might mean I don’t have to exercise so often. Yeah, it is statistically proven that people who take on harsh diets give up on them more. I like exercise, having started to do it regularly, and I failed every statistics class I ever took so I feel breaking a statistical rule is in my nature. I’m actually enjoying this, even though it can be difficult – perhaps because it is difficult – and it is succeeding. I’m not telling anyone else to take up dieting in the same way, and nor am I saying this is the categorical best to diet and/or lose weight. This is working for me the way I’m doing and that is probably the most important part of any diet – that it works for the person using it.
So I’m dieting harshly and balancing strictly to set a norm or habit, to re-condition my body in such a way that I don’t carry extra weight equivalent of nearly 50% of my ‘ideal’ body weight. No, it won’t be easy – obviously 7 stone is a lot to get rid of – but I have tried gentle or gradual dieting in the past and it doesn’t work. People who have seen how I approach problems would probably use words like ‘direct’, ‘drastic’, ‘dictator-like’; I’ve found for me to maintain focus and motivation with a project I can’t slowly whittle away at the project the whole time and instead have to hew great sections out of it.
There’s probably a message about my psychological disposition in there some where, but I’m okay with that. This approach also gets the job done faster in this case, and I’d rather put more effort in now and benefit earlier than take it easy and have slower results. I’m not going to lose my motivation for this because I carry the remaining six and a bit stone – approx. 84-88lbs – of it with me wherever I go. I’m not going to give up because it’s difficult, I’m not going lie to myself when I let myself down and I’m going to keep going even if I get temporarily demotivated. My attitude is I can do this. I’ve done it for three weeks and, in the fashion of people who make horribly naïve yet sweeping generalizations everywhere, I am going to say I will be able to keep doing it.
And now I’ve said that quite publicly I’m going to have or admit to being an embarrassing failure. Even more motivation.
Also for those of you wondering what on earth Airsofting is, it’s like paintball without the paint; I regularly go to places with friends that allow – nay, encourage – us to run around and shoot at other human beings with replica weapons. If you think it sounds redneck, google. You’ll be gratified to discover you’re correct, it is quite a redneck sport. Worse is that some times you get people who take it too seriously and forget it’s a game, or take it too seriously and have serious insecurity issues. This should make a sport that’s dependant on the honesty of its players pretty terrible but it seems to work out okay most times.
When we played this time there was only a very minimal element of unsporting behaviour so it went rather well. I found I was much better able to run around for longer periods and at what I suspect were faster speeds than I used to and in one game I almost managed to run around the entire bunker without pausing for breath, somewhere between 200-300 metres which may not sound like much but when you’re carrying a gun and something about the size of a cardboard box and about 5-10 kilos it adds up – especially when you know there’s a dozen people behind trying to gun you down. That kind of stress can really wear your nerves down. It worked out, after some deliberation with my friends about the quality of the exercise, as 1000 calories worth for 4 hours of play but I think I may have underestimated somewhat based of research after the event. Either way, thoroughly enjoyable and definitely a good day all around.
However, explaining to people at work why it looks like I got attacked by a swarm of bees of participate in some sort of Fight Club is less than ideal. Especially when my arms are cramping up something awful and when I hear someone behind me I panic and think they’re about to shoot me.
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