D.Alan’s BodyBlog

Broke a milestone this past week on bb.com, my photo gallery pix have been viewed over 60,000 times.  Pix of not terribly huge or ripped me.  The one that was the tubby nerd that was picked on in elementary school.  All I can say is: thanks, everyone.  I am still not quite believing all of this, namely that I am no longer the tubby nerd and that folks actually want to look at the pix of my fitness journey so far.

I guess all this lifting and etc. is working.  Fridays at work are like most places, a casual dress sort of day, and yesterday I was wearing a golf shirt that fits me well.  A coworker passed me in the hall and did kind of a double take and asked, "Hey, do you work out a lot?" and I said that I do and his response was, "Man, you are looking great!"  I thanked him and inside my ego went up a few hundred points.  Still not used to getting those comments, either.

Meanwhile the flab around my middle is still hanging on for dear life.  I have been trying very hard to watch what and when I am eating and am slowly getting back to the weight that I was at the beginning of the summer, but it’s been a tough fight.  I need to look at my diet and tweak it, though lately I have been more hungry than I have been in this whole process which tells me I maybe need to be eating more, not less.  They aren’t kidding that the diet part of lifting and fitness is the hardest part.

The fight continues and I will tweak the food and keep liftin’.

The holiday busy-ness is upon me and I haven’t written a blog post, but I have been mostly good about keeping up with the liftin’.  Started out the Christmas break with a lot of old-fashioned cardio… snow shoveling!  We were hit with a series of storms in the days before Christmas which had me outside shoveling the driveway, mostly digging out the big snow plow drifts.  Then it warmed up and melted and then there was the wet, heavy snow to move around.  I admit to skipping an abs workout, but my back wouldn’t have tolerated it after all the shoveling.  My back was getting pretty sore after 4-5 straight days of intense shoveling.

I have been pretty good about not over indulging in all the holiday food too much, though my weight is up a bit.  Just before Christmas I had several days of my all-time low weight of 167 but it is creeping up.  It could be water retention due to too much salt in some of the things I have eaten.  Whatever, I am not stressing about it.  BF% pinch over the weekend was unchanged from the week before.

Had a PM today from another BodySpacer telling me that my progress is an inspiration to him.  I still can’t believe people telling me that.  I see myself as a guy who was fat for far too long and while I have made some progress over the past year, I am still too big around the middle, my gains have been modest at best, and so on.  I see lots of improvement yet to make but some others see it much differently.  As I say in my profile, for a guy who was always the picked-on tubby kid, I can’t quite get used to being told that my BB progress is an inspiration.

Which is why I will keep liftin’ … there’s more progress to be made!

Got through Thanksgiving just fine.  Had a good meal yet haven’t destroyed the weight or BF% stats; everything is as it was before the big day.  The key is to have that metabolism revved up and indulge in moderation.  I had written about that last week in the post that was eaten by the server monsters.  In short, I had said my method for getting through the holidays is to enjoy them, but don’t go crazy.  Have one cookie, not six.  Have a nice plate at the meal, just don’t have several helpings.  Schedule rest days around the social and other events of the season.  That method got me through the holidays last year and I am applying the same plan to this year.  I just looked at my records and see that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s last year I actually lost five pounds.  I don’t think I’ll do that well this year as my weight has been on a pretty good plateau for some time, but I am shooting to not gain any weight over the next month.

Discovered this week that I was given the wrong flavor whey protein at GNC the last time I was there.   They had a buy one, get one half off deal and I selected my usual 5 lb chocolate, but there wasn’t another on the shelf.  I asked the girl about it and she said there was more in the back.  She looked at what I had picked out, "You want the chocolate?"  "Yes, please."  She brings it out, rings everything up and I drag it all home.  Opened the chocolate one and put the other on the shelf and didn’t look at it for the next 4-5 weeks that it takes me to go through a 5 lb protein bottle.  Opened the other one Tuesday night and it looked funny inside, I thought it had gone bad or something.  Then I looked closely at the label… chocolate caramel.  Hmm.  Well, the bottle is now open, I can’t take it back, might as well try it.  Ugh.  Damn stuff doesn’t hardly dissolve no matter how much you stir it and it is so sickeningly sweet.  Great, and it’s a 5 lb bottle.  Hate to just toss it because it costs so much, so for now I will choke it down… I want to choke that clerk at GNC…

I started taking some green tea about two weeks ago.  One of the commenters to my pix put me on to it and after reading up a bit on bb.com about it I decided to give it a try.  We’ll see how it goes over the next little while.  I don’t know how much to have to get any of the benefits of it, but for now I am having one cup about mid-morning at work.  Once in a while I have a second one in the afternoon.  I’ll try just about anything to get this stubborn midsection fat to go away.  Yeah, I know, do more cardio, lardbutt…

But I’ll definitely keep liftin’.

Well, I managed to avoid pigging out on Thanksgiving dinner yesterday!  Weight today was up only a pound from my workout Wednesday evening, so I am quite pleased with that!

Picked up some whey protein today and started taking that; I discovered recently that there’s a GNC store not far from my house, how convenient!  I got looking at my half-arsed diet and see that I am not getting the protein that I should be for trying to lift and gain and from what I read about whey protein, this is almost a must-take.  We’ll see how this month goes with the gains and progress.  If nothing else it tastes pretty good and gives me a chocolate "fix"…