D.Alan’s BodyBlog

Random musings this week.   

It is monthly measurement night and it’s been another month of no changes… arrgh.  Everything is the same as it was last month.  This after upping the protein intake, and concentrating on form with the various arm routines, adding a rep on each pullup set, and on it goes.  At least the BF% pinch total was down a bit over last week’s total.  I think last week I had some water bloat going on, for whatever reason.

Twisted my ankle this afternoon.  I was doing some work behind my garage and the ground is so soft right now that the ladder sank into the mud unevenly and threw me off it and I landed on my left foot rather hard and rolled my ankle.  It hurt.  It doesn’t appear to be broken, it’s just sprained/strained.  I am OK walking on the level, but stairs are interesting at the moment.  There’s a little bit of swelling.  Such fun… not.  Glad I do legs on Thursdays, I might be able to do them again this coming Thursday.

Before I twisted my ankle I headed over to the local Penney’s store as they are having a sale and I wanted to pick up a couple of shirts for work.  Only problem is they don’t carry the athletic cut shirts in the store for the line of shirts I like.  "Oh yeah," saith the clerk, "you have to order those online."  It’s interesting that they have the fat guy clothes on the shelves, but not the ones for the fit guy.  Oh yes, the shirts online aren’t on sale, they’re $3 more than the ones in the store.  "Plus shipping and handling."  Way to cater to a society that everyone says is too fat and should be fitter, guys.  I get to pay a penalty for getting in shape by having to order my clothes online from an operation that has a local store but chooses not to carry athletic cut versions of its dress shirts locally.

As always, I read various blog entries of other BodySpacers this week.  I feel so insignificant and whiny compared to some others.  Some are insightful and reflective like Ryan__K, and then there’s the outright hilarity of family life documented by tclary.  Me, I grumble and whine about my fitness progress.  I suppose it’s because this is the only place I have to talk about it.  My parents, who are 70+, live with me and look upon working out and fitness as a lot of rubbish.  My mom is convinced I am dying of some dread disease because of my weight loss, depite my telling her I have been working out.  My dad makes fun of every fitness machine ad that turns up on the TV.  So I obviously don’t talk about my fitness progress with them.

My coworkers for the most part are supportive of me when they notice I am down in the weight, and I even had a custodian at work this week ask me, "Hey, have you been working out?"  But no one is into fitness themselves, other than trying the latest fad diet, eating wrong, etc. and wondering why they aren’t losing any weight, so I don’t engage them in conversation about it.  None of my friends are into fitness seriously.  I hang out with techno-geeks and they for the most part live up to the stereotype of that group being greatly out of shape, shall we say kindly.

So, I am on this island alone, except for the BodySpace folks who take the time to rate a photo or drop a profile comment, and maybe even read one of these blog entries… though I wouldn’t know that since the visitor counter to the blogs has been broken since last August!  This is my vehicle to celebrate the little bits of progress or complain about the setbacks.  Sorry that I don’t make you laugh or think like some of the other bloggers, but thanks for listening.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep liftin’…

The euphoria of the lower BF% pinch total was killed a bit tonight… damn pinches are up about 2 mm from last week!  Up, down, the battle continues.  The weight has been up a bit through the later part of the week and here I was hoping that there was some muscle mass adding on, but probably it’s the fat adding on.

It’s not a lot and I shouldn’t freak out over it, but it’s sure a let down after last week’s totals.  Just gotta watch the eating this week.  I think I know what happened this week, had a couple of extra cheat foods here & there over the course of the week and that is likely what made the difference.  I guess it also shows how close to the edge I am running on the diet between losing and gaining fat.  But, that kind of thing isn’t new to anyone likely to be reading this!

Had a really good bicep workout tonight; had the best pump I have had in a long time and they even looked the best so far afterward.  I should have tried to get some pix of them.  That helped make up for the disappointment in the BF% pinch news.

Gotta keep that BF% on the downward trend so I’ll keep liftin’.

Down some more in the BF% pinches!  It’s not much each week, but over time the little changes add up to a big change.  According to my calipers since the middle of January, I am down 4 mm according to cheap plastic one, and by the digital caliper I am down 6 mm in the same time frame.  For a while now my pinch total is less than my stomach alone was when I first did a BF% pinch over a year ago.  That’s rather cool.  As to what my actual BF% is, it’s open to interpretation.  The chart I have says it is now 8.8% according to the total from the plastic caliper… no way I am at 8.8%… and 9.8% according to the total from the digital caliper.  Um, I don’t think so.  Something around 11%-13% is probably more like it.  I put myself at 11.5%, just for the sake of discussion!

I was moving data around the other day, transferring stuff from some Zip disks to an external hard drive and came across a number of digital pix from several years ago.  One that caught my attention was one of myself taken at work in June of 2001… yikes, what a chunker!!  I was thinking that around that time I had been a little more svelte, but apparently not!  Nothing like some photos to encourage some progress.

I’d rather not look like that 2001 photo again, so I’ll keep liftin’.

Dropped a bit in the BF% pinches this week, rah.  Pinches are down a total of almost 5 mm for the week (4.6 to be exact), which has me really psyched, esp. after last week’s monthly measurements coming up with no changes in the previous month.

I had thought that the pinches should be down this week as I hit my new all-time low weight of 166 late in the week for a couple of days, and my obs seem to becoming more visible all the time.  I still have a lot of ab flubber so no visible abs yet, but they’re coming.

Restocked on the whey protein this week and was able to get back to my favorite chocolate flavor, and one diet tweak this week was hitting the protein an extra time each day.  I just couldn’t face it with that awful chocolate caramel whey protein I was given by mistake and couldn’t return because I discovered it was wrong after I had opened it.  So, with an extra hit of the whey protein each day and I am looking at other diet tweaks, hopefully I can get a few muscle gains going in the next few weeks or so.

Oh yeah, and gotta keep liftin’, too.