I’m Sorry, Ray Charles

Hit the weights, Jack, and don't you talk back–do more, do more, do more, do more.
Hit the weights, Jack, and don't you talk back– do more.
What you say?
Hit the weights, Jack, and don't you talk back no more, do more, do more, do more.
Hit the weights Jack and don't you talk back–do more.

Woah, woman, oh woman, don't treat me so mean,
You're the meanest personal trainer that I've ever seen.
I guess if you say so,
I have to pack ma gym bag and go. (Right now)

Hit the weights, Jack, and don't you lose track–one more, one more, one more, one more.
Hit the weights, Jack, and don't you lose track–one more.
What you say?
Hit the weights, Jack, and don't you lose track–one more, one more, one more, one more.
Hit the weights, Jack, and don't you lose track–one more.

Well lady, listen lady, don't ya treat me like I’m strange.
Just because I pay for personal training in change.
If you keep making me do lunges fifty-five times,
I’m gonna keep paying you in nickels and dimes.
But, I guess if you say so,
I'll have to pack my gym bag and go. (Right now)

Hit the weights, Jack, and don't you talk smack–do more, do more, do more, do more.
Hit the weights Jack and don't you talk smack– do more.
What you say?
Hit the weights Jack and then come back some more, some more, some more, some more.
Hit the weights Jack and then come back for more.

* * *

Well, started the weight training like I said I would. For some reason, the weights all seemed heavier than they were last time I did it.

And those big muscle-head dudes don’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. Like when I asked one of them to spot me… five bucks.

And the looks they gave me when I was doing my set of curls with the little pink dumbbells…

Oh well. Back for more pain today.

x

I Could Tell You What I Weigh, But Then I’d Have to Kill You

Weekly weigh-in: 225.0
Loss: -2.1
Total loss: 66.5 lbs.
Emotion: Mo better

Don’t worry about the title of this post; I was just trying to get your attention.

Not much fret about this week. My broke-down back is on the mend, and I was in the gym every day except yesterday (including a big double workout on Thursday). The Dow Jones Sweat Index was up 77% over the previous week.

My eating wasn’t spot-on–I still can’t always get a handle on those little handfuls or nibbles or tastes. My guess is that I consume a lot more calories than I realize with this crap-tastic behavior, but it’s just tough to rein in.

The problem is that, these days, my margin for error is much less. I’ll get it under control though… and my workouts will intensify this week, too. I’m getting close to where I want to be and would really like to see if I can make another big push in the next couple of weeks.

This post blows. Maybe a joke will liven it up. Okay, what did the bra say to the hat? You go on ahead and I'll give these two a lift.

Speaking of uplifting, 225 represents a pretty big milestone for me. It’s the last weight that I actually felt I was at my “ideal weight.” I’m not sure I believe this is the end of the road any more; I now think it’s at the upper range of what’s acceptable for me. This time, I feel like there’s work left to do.

I’ve concentrated 100% on cardio activities to get the scale spinning, but I told myself that at 225, it would be time to incorporate weights and other non-cardio types of exercise. In some ways, I’ve been dreading it because it’s another fresh start. In some ways, I’ve been looking forward to it because… well… it’s another fresh start.

Fall is right around the corner and the holidays are crouching behind a big rock, ready to pounce on us like they always do. Let’s make a big push and get some good work done before 2009 finally goes down the crapper. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to end the year with a bang.

Googles of Fun

One of the best purchases my father Horace ever made was a brand new set of World Book Encyclopedias. When I was a young Sh*t, I spent hours and hours with those books, researching subjects I was interested in, discovering interesting facts about the world I lived in and killing spiders.

I remember thinking back then, “Wouldn’t it be cool if all this information was indexed in an easy to navigate system, and furthermore, wouldn’t it be awesome if everyone in the world could access it and add to it?”

I distinctly remember discussing my ideas with my buddies Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and they thought it was the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. Sergey said I was an A-hole, and I said he was an A-hole squared, and it went back and forth like that until I called him an “A-hole googoled.” Knowing he was outclassed, he ran home crying, with Larry tagging along looking like he was about to crap his pants.

Now, I’m not saying those two jerks stole my idea and name and ran with it. However, it’s a fact that Sergey was such an A-hole that he didn’t even know what the term “googol” meant.

A googol is the large number 10 to the 100th power; that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros in decimal representation. The term was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta (1929–1980), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, when he was nine years old. Kasner popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination. Other names for googol include ten duotrigintillion on the short scale, ten thousand sexdecillion on the long scale, or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier long scale.

The true irony is that I used Google to quickly gather that information about “googol”.

I was thinking this week how much easier Google makes my life when I was farting around with another parody song after hearing Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” while on the bike at the gym.

Fat Pants Fever

Well they filled my closet up, wall to wall,
Ugly things that came from the Big & Tall.
I really hate wearin’ what I wore.
I hope you know I don’t wear ‘em any more.

They gave me fat pants fever (waaa-wa-waaa)
Fat pants fever.

But that wasn’t enough for an entire post, so I Googled other Ted Nugent songs, thinking I could replace them with silly names to fill out the post. Such as…

• Just What The Doctor Ordered (Phentermine)
• Free-For-All (at the Old-Way Buffet)
• Dog Eat Dog (Suprisingly Low in Points)
• Motor City Madhouse (Must Be Weigh-In Day)
• Paralyzed (by Hunger)
• Stranglehold (on my Scale)
• Baby Please Don't Go (Back for Seconds)
• Wango Tango (Mango Fandango)
• Wang Dang Sweet Poontang (Insert Your Own Joke Here)
• Yank Me, Crank Me (You’re the Best Personal Trainer Ever!)
• Homebound (Got No Business Going Out to Eat)
• Give Me Just A Little (Dessert)

I put it all together, but then got sidetracked by a bunch of Ted Nugent facts. I had no idea the guy was such a whack-job. Apparently the rock-and-roll legend has kind of reinvented himself as an archconservative, conservationist family man.

• His book Ted, White, and Blue made it onto the Top 10 of The New York Times Bestseller List in its first week.
• He played Skunk Tarver in the 2008 film, Beer For My Horses as Skunk Tarver.
• He had a relationship with a 17-year old Hawaiian girl when he was 30. He became her legal guardian in order to comply with laws regarding relationships with minors.
• He is on the board of directors of The National Rifle Association, although he usually goes hunting with a bow and arrow. He eats everything he kills.
• Nuge's take on free-range chicken, from his book Kill It and Grill It: “Free-range chicken ain’t free and that ain’t no range. Venison is free-range. Pheasant is free-range. The almighty Ruffed Grouse is free-range. I’m free-range. Chickens are incarcerated. . . . If it can’t get away, it ain’t free-range and I ain’t interested.”

So now I know all these interesting facts about the Motor City Madman. I even know that Nugent’s nickname is the “Motor City Madman.” Google makes it easy to find all these facts, but I can’t say it’s always a time-saver; I spend hours going down crazy paths and nonsensical by-ways while on my searches.

Maybe what I’ll do is use Google to find a good set of World Book Encyclopedias to use instead of Google from now on. I think I won’t waste so much time if I go back to the old-school set of books.

Plus, we’ve got a lot of spiders.

x

I’m Sorry, Bobby McFerrin

Here’s a little blog I penned,
You might want to read it well, my friend.
Don’t worry, eat healthy.
If your weight has caused you stress.
Eating badly and in excess.
Don't worry, eat healthy.

Ain't got no veggies on your plate?
Feel like you’re carrying too much weight?
Don't worry, eat healthy.
Trouble eating all your fruit?
Those Fiber One bars making you toot?
Don't worry, eat healthy.
Look at me I’m healthy.
Don't worry, eat healthy.
Here I give you my blog address…
When you hungry, visit me.
I make you laugh and be healthy.
Don't worry, eat healthy.

Ain’t got no ups, you just got downs.
Stick with me, and we’ll lose those pounds.
Don’t worry, eat healthy.
Cause when you do it
I think you’ll find,
You’ll see a little less on your behind.
Eat healthy, be happy.

The Time of Our Lives

Tick tock, tick tock.

Do you feel the rush of time slipping by like I do? I felt it more acutely when I was at my heaviest, but even now I sense the drumbeat of the calendar and feel cheated by the senseless waste of all those lost days.

That’s exactly how I feel now: that days and weeks and months (and, let’s face facts here… years) spent wrapped up in that uncomfortable and unfashionable fat suit was precious time that I squandered and have no way of getting back.

I mourn those spring days when I couldn’t run around and enjoy the breezy springtime, pity those once-in-a-lifetime moments with my family where I sat on the sidelines and watched good times being enjoyed and lament all those times I let my weight make me feel like less of a person than I was. I regret that I felt defined by my greatest weakness.

I’m fortysomething now, and once you make that turn to the back nine, you grasp with a little more clarity the fact that we don’t have all that much time on this earth. William Penn said “Time is what we want most, but... what we use worst.” I think it takes a bit of gray hair up top to fully get a handle on that.

I play basketball with some young cats, and they often seem tickled (and somewhat perplexed) by the fact that I still hoop so competitively and so often. I explain it to them like this: “We’re both at Disney World on a bright sunny day. For you, it’s 10 o’clock in the morning and you’ve got all the time in the world to do anything you want. For me, it’s thirty minutes before the gates close and I want to get in every ride I possibly can.”

I feel that way about the big picture, too. About life. There’s quite a bit I still want to accomplish, and up ‘til now this weight has been a big roadblock holding me back. Maybe it has been for you, too. For too many of us, it’s the anchor that makes us give in to the hardships and the hopelessness. It makes life seem unfair when, really, we’ve simply been unfair to ourselves.

That’s hard to accept: we did this to ourselves.

I don’t say all this to bring you down, to remind you of your own mortality or your own shortcomings.

I say it because it’s time to shake things up, time to remind ourselves that although we may have a finite number of days in this joint, we have an infinite amount of possibilities, a limitless number of things which we might accomplish if we set our mind and our heart and our will to it.

I don’t know if I’ll achieve everything I want to achieve or accomplish everything I set out to do from here on out. Chances are, I won’t.

But here’s the thing: it won’t be the weight that stops me anymore.

This is a brand new day, my friends. A new day filled with all kinds of promise, all kinds of possibility. There’s not a diet tip or weight loss secret I could share with you here that would be of any more use, any more important than this simple phrase: “time’s a’wastin.”

Get busy and get yourself in check. Take the steps you need to take to reclaim your body, your health, your life. It's the most important thing you'll ever do because it's the foundation for everything else you want to do, everything else you want to be.

Do it today, because tomorrow will be here in less than a blink, and you don't want to be that person who looks back and wonders what they could have had, what they should have done, what they would have been.

It's time to get going.

Tick tock, tick tock.

Confush*t Say...

Confush*t say...

…person who decide to finally lose weight is thick and tired of it all.
… person who get to big for his britches will be exposed in the end.
…person who only check scale once a month has weight-and-see attitude.
…person who forget to work out all the time may be suffering from Allzfatter Syndrome.
…person who fasts for seven days will find that it makes one weak.
…person who can’t can’t lay off the soft drinks will find weigh-in soda pressing.
…person who eat pancakes every morning find weight loss odds stacked against him.
…person who eat too much all the time will have to try bigger pants on for thighs.
…person who eat too much between meals need to learn how to make snackrafice.
…person who understand about dieting has learned his lessening.
…person need to remind self that it’s not the minutes spent at the table eating that put on pounds, but the seconds.
…couple who work out together are sweat hearts.
… person who cooks beans & peas in same pot is very unsanitary.
…person who has fear of bicycling might need to see cycloanalyst.
…person who buy lots of prunes at grocery store get good run for money.
…person who obsesses about counting calories needs to learn to count blessings.

Confush*t believes there are two kinds of people in this world. The first person is the one who diets and exercises religiously. The second person is the one who eats and does what they want and prays they don't gain weight.

Confush*t's motto:
Don't sweat the petty stuff, pet the sweaty stuff
or stuff the cheesy puffs.

I'm Sorry, Johnny Cash

I smell that bread a bakin’.
It’s cooling on the rack.
And I ain’t had carbohydrates since... oh, six months back.
I'm stuck on this low-carb diet, and time keeps draggin' by.
And I’d sell my soul on eBay… for a slice of apple pie.

When I was getting started, my doctor told me, son.
If you eat a hot dog, don't ever eat the bun.
It’ll take some Michelob Ultra, just to wash it down.
When I see others eating, I hang my head and frown.

I bet there's thin folks eating in a fancy restaurant.
They're probably ordering French fries and eatin’ all they want.
Well I know I had this coming; I know I can't eat free.
But these people carbo-loadin’,
Well, that's what tortures me.

Well, if they freed me from this diet,
And I could eat whatever I covet,
I’d order a whole pizza, man. I’m sure I’d really love it.
But I’m sticking to this low-carb diet, that's where I’m gonna stay.
Til’ one day in the future... I weigh what I wanna weigh.

For Oct and my other low-carb eatin’ pals.