| Friday, October 5, 2007 |
19:56 - The first rule of Fat Club is, you do not talk about the first rule of Fat Club
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In Part 6 of an ongoing series of things to put on my personal résumé, I can now state that I have been a set of Before and After photos.
This is me last summer:
And this is me now:
That's after dropping about 55 pounds since late February. I just crossed the magic 180 boundary, which means I can at least take a breather now.
I don't think I've seen the 170s since my freshman year of college, in which I mysteriously lost about fifty pounds purely due to the intensity of the workload (or at least that's all I can conclude, Caltech being Caltech, and the "freshman 15" usually meaning something somewhat different). And aside from that one brief window, in which I wasn't really paying attention to such things except as an idle curiosity, I've been in the neighborhood of 210 since I started high school.
Yet I've kept records:
As you can see, sometime in February, during a Friday-night dinner, I decided that the pizza on the table didn't have to be a volume-eating contest; four slices are just as tasty as eight. A chico burrito at La Costeña will satisfy me as long as a regular one, and if it doesn't, there's yogurt and stuff in the fridge for later in the afternoon. 93%-lean ground beef makes yummy burgers just like 80% does, and pickles are calorie-free.
The upshot is that with that realization, plus a regimen of beating the crap out of myself at the gym every night (one to two 500-calorie cardio sessions on the elliptical machine, each of which takes 33 minutes, coincidentally the length of a South Park plus an Aqua Teen Hunger Force, or alternatively a Lileks Diner episode, plus freeweights every other day), I'm now down from 38-inch pants to trying to come to terms with stepping out of the 34s that are pooling around my ankles and buying 32s.
It's weird going to the mall and actually buying clothes for once in my life. Clothes that are designed to look good. T-shirts that cost more than shoes.
T-shirts in medium.
Now comes the next phase, which is to see how sustainable this is. I'm eight months in now, and I haven't missed more than ten or fifteen nights at the gym—and I believe I've made up every single one of those with a double session the following night. Well, except for a period in the May-ish-June-ish middle—extra credit for those who can spot its elusive presence on the graph—when I was, oh, driving a Lotus home from New York. And hosting a friend here in San Jose where there's In-N-Out. And floating on a schooner in Penobscot Bay. You know—the kind of thing where there's a bunch of unavoidable lobster and gloppy burgers to be eaten, and no gym in sight. There are sacrifices that must be made.
Afterwards, the downward trajectory wasn't quite so steep, and these last couple of weeks have been shallower still. But it's all part of further realizations, such as that with retuned taste buds deployed and at the ready, it's possible to take up hobbies like high-end chocolate tasting and cheese snobbery, without completely sabotaging the overall effort. Kept at a sane intake level, like making a single square of Lindt Excellence 70% last for 20 minutes, these things contribute very little to one's caloric intake, while making life measurably richer.
Ahh. 179.6.
Now if you'll excuse me, it's Friday night. There are steaks waiting, as well as some Burrata di Andria that just arrived. And I wouldn't want to keep it waiting.
UPDATE: Sorry, no rose petals, whoever it was that asked.
And burrata cheese is everything they say it is.
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Brian Tiemann
