As I mentioned on Sunday I was on a clothes buying frenzy this weekend. There were several reasons behind it. One was, as Kim duly noted, the fact that I have the fashion sense of a color blind lemur. Another reason was tougher to come to grips with. A lot of my clothes, including the few pieces that could be considered tasteful, no longer fit. I have, for lack of a better term, become fat.
Well maybe more like pudgy or a little wide around the midsection. For those wondering at the moment I am 6 foot 1 (just like the Liz Phair song) and 210 pounds (just like the…ok, don’t have a witty pop culture reference there.) That puts my Body Mass Index in the Overweight range. At 227 pounds I would be considered obese and I need to get down to 189 to be back in my healthy weight range. So yes, I am closer to being obese than healthy at the moment, which is a rather frightening thought.
It is really difficult for me to even get my head around the idea of being overweight because for most of my life I was the exact opposite. When I finished my sophomore year of college I weighed 145 pounds for a BMI of 19.1. This is somehow considered healthy on the BMI chart though trust me it wasn’t. Unless being able to see your ribs and collarbones is the new definition of health. I was happy when my metabolism slowed down enough that I could get into the 160s but things just spiraled out of control from there.
This obviously leads to a slight problem when it comes to clothes. I know what I used to wear and since I cannot bring myself to admit that I am anything other than a skinny, lanky kid I end up buying clothes that are several sizes too small for me. Hence nothing I own fits right or looks good on me so I had to redo my wardrobe to address the current state of my body.
Now my goal is to get rid of a lot of this weight. I really need to get down to 190 as I am really carrying too much weight. I cannot pull off the argument that most of my weight is muscle unless I have somehow created the most powerful midsection in the world. I was on a good exercise kick earlier this year but I lost the momentum and have spent most of the past few months on the couch enjoying the entirety of the Hostess brand lineup (I even bought a box of Ding Dongs for crying out loud.) This will have to change and change in a hurry.
At some point I’ve come to the realization that I am no longer a kid. Now on some levels that just means that buying vintage Star Wars action figures may not be the best use of my income. But mainly it is a result of my coming to grips that my body does not act like it used to. I can’t bounce back from a late night like I used to. Injuries take longer to heal. Weight stays on more than it should. I am at that last portion of my life where I can make wholesale changes to my physical makeup and make them stick. I really need to do so. Ideas / advice from the commenters out there?
2 comments:
You've already got this figured out given your Hostess comment, but when they say "diet & exercise" 90% of it is diet. Neither will work alone and one can compensate for the other, but if it came down to a fight of the more importants, diet would win. Sure at 18 we could eat 4lbs of Taco Bell and not get fat, but now fast food, large amounts of beer, cookies et al will show no matter how much time you spend on a treadmill. Long story short: put diet and exercise together and it'll work guaranteed (just add discipline) The simplest way to look at it is that if you consume more calories that you expend, you'll gain weight, other way around and you'll loose weight. Period. It's very straightforward to figure out how many calories you burn. 30 seconds on Google and you can find the formula. Plug in your stats and there you go. Eat less than that and make the calories you do eat as healthy as possible. I dare say Ding Dongs are off the menu.
What you need is a goal that you can work towards. I'm not talking about getting to x pounds by a certain date. I mean something more tangible. How about a mini-triathlon?
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