Trying to Lose Weight
I hate to harp on the “getting old” theme but I am currently struggling with the inability to lose weight. Like no matter how little I eat, and please don’t start with the “your body is in starvation mode” bullshit as I am clearly not talking about living on meals of kale thrown back with a big frothing bowl of steam. I am eating plenty but simply trying to control the portion sizes I ingest and still, I lose no weight. I can pretty much eat as much as I want and stand par so common sense should dictate that if I cut back on the junk and portion sizes, I logically, should get thinner. Sadly, this is apparently not so. My body has found a way to defy physics. Pretty awesome right?
So I fire up this MyFitnessPal app thing which keeps track of my daily calorie intake. I plug in my height, 5 foot 10, and weight, 213, and also shamelessly tell it that I am virtually sedentary and that this lifestyle will continue for the foreseeable future. I tell my friend Ryan all the time as he hurts himself continually hiking and just generally dicking around outside, that no one ever got hurt laying on the couch. No truer words have ever been spoken. Anywho, MFP decided to allow me a daily allotment of 1500 calories which I found to be bountiful and quite easy to adhere to.
I decided to give this iPhone fitness machine thing a month to produce results and actually committed to where I would like to be when done. A goal weight, if you will. I figured a month would be more than enough time to take care of 40 years of caloric abuse. Now, Lord knows, I would like to be back at my playing weight of 175 but let’s be realistic here. Truth be told, if I could get under 200 pounds I would probably break down and start weeping from sheer joy.
I must say, in my defense, that I am pretty good at telling myself no, almost achieving a sort of sexual gratification in denying myself pleasure. Pretty sure it’s based in some sort of self-loathing issues I’ve picked up over the years. I also decided that I would only check my weight once a week not wanting to get caught up in the day to day worry of whether I was dropping any pounds. In my mind, I would just know that it was working because of the new blousy way my clothes were fitting. Sadly, this did not happen.
After one week, I mounted the scales. I weighed 213, which, if you will remember, is exactly what I weighed when this suffering began. Great! Shit! I could focus on nothing but the foods I missed out on all GD week just to find out that I’ve done nothing but spin my wheels on this stupid diet. Damn me for trying to be healthy.
After entering my pathetic statistics into the app, I discovered that MyFitnessPal also gives you inspiring messages when you make good decisions and also predicts how much you will weigh in two weeks if you keep on track, “If you keep this up, you will weigh 205 on June 17th and will have lost 8 pounds!! How inspiring! I blamed my stagnating weight on drinking too much water and decided to carry on with my one month commitment. I knew I was lying to myself but the alternative of quitting seemed like I was signing my own death warrant for some reason.
However, after a month of meticulously following my calorie counter I got on the scale and discovered that had gained 3 pounds. Gained! Is somebody fucking with me here? Immediately I demanded to know if my wife had monkeyed with the scale. I feel compelled to remind you here that I was not exercising and will not but I don’t exercise when I am eating whatever I want so shouldn’t there be some progress? I mean, shit, I could have eaten pizzas and burgers and stayed at 213 but I had to eat a bunch of crappy salads and garbage like that so that I could gain 3 pounds? Eat shit MFP!
MFP was now giving me irreverent messages like, “If you keep this up, you will weigh 240 by July 1st” and delivered with a large dose of sarcasm. Like, “Nice job fatass, please delete our app.” I felt like I was getting the same attitude that I received from the salespeople at Express when I thought about buying clothes there. Like they were begging me to please not wear their clothes and sully their fine name. FYI Express, your clothes look like a costume for a gaudy European pimp and I wouldn’t wear them anyway. MyFitnessPal was now ashamed to have me as a user. Apparently, they only want winners, or losers as the case may be here.
I quit. I give up. I am convinced, at this point, that I have done serious damage to my metabolism with all of the fad dieting I have dabbled in. I once lost 40 pounds on the Atkin’s Diet but gave that up after Dr. Atkins dropped dead on a treadmill while eating a block of cheese and one of those giant Slim Jims. Not that I would ever catch me on a treadmill but still, this was distressing news.
I also noticed the other day, in addition to having lost the ability to lose weight that my hair has become remarkably grey on the sides leaving me looking like an Irish version of Paulie Walnuts from Sopranos. The hair on top is still pretty black but it’s thinning and when I use too much gel I feel like I look like a doll that had its hair chopped off like that thing from Toy Story or a pin cushion.
I know a guy who dyes his grey hair fire red. He’s old and wrinkled too which makes him look like one of those Peruvian mummies where the skin is all rotten and shriveled but the wig is still perfect. Mostly, he looks ridiculous and sad because he’s a douche and really his hair is the least of his problems.
I read that taking B vitamins might help bring back some of the original color of your hair. I don’t want to become vitamin guy though. I really don’t think they do anything but make you waste your money and they make me queasy. I’ve been to GNC and they push really hard to get you to join their “insiders club” and that gives me the willies. Anybody pushing that hard is up to no good. “Look pal, I don’t want to give you my email address and I don’t want to spend a hundred buck to be a gold member. I just came in here to buy that latest fad diet pill, so let me buy it and, yes, I know it isn’t going to work but please leave me alone and shut the fuck up.” What is this some kind of a supplement time share? Sheesh!
Plus people that take vitamins are like the Krishnas that used to hang out at the airport shoving their lifestyles and pamphlets on everybody. “Oh, you should really think about taking a multi-vitamin.” I hear that a lot and it’s always coming from the least healthy person I know. Like didn’t you almost die from a nose bleed last year? Where were you previous vitamins then? Back to the Krishnas, whoever decided that the airport was the place to hang out and get converts anyway? Like they expect that I’m going to wake up one morning and go, “What I need is a new religion, let’s hit the airport and see what they have to offer.”
I just guess that I would rather be a tad overweight, keep my greying hair and crush the occasional extra-large pizza all by myself than to be an app using, hair dying, vitamin taking d-bag. Evidently, I don’t really have any choice anyway.
JP Shaver Says.... 