Rancid Monke

Last year I hit thirty and realized that unless I wanted to end up having a heart attack before my fortieth birthday I was going to have to shed the massive amount of extra weight I have been carting around since I was old enough to figure out how to budget my allowance well enough to afford chips and pop. On my birthday I vowed that I would never again take my health for granted and decided to work my butt off (figuratively and literally) until I was a body building Adonis like Hollywood kept trying to tell me to be. The day after my birthday I forgot all about my promise and ate two pieces of left over cake. Well over 6 months later I was pounding back a quarter pounder with fries when I realized that the time had come. It was either time to give up and eat myself to death or get my tubby self to a gym.

The story should end with me losing weight, finding my true love and beating my arch rivals at some sort of  athletic competition. Apparently no one bothered to mention that I wasn’t going to get an 80’s montage to healthy. What I did get was a whole lot of suck in fat guy pants.

1) Weight loss is about 90% mental – Most of weight loss is about finding the will power to not eat junk food, prepare proper healthy meals and get your butt out exercising. Considering your starting out overweight your self-esteem has already taken an ass-kicking of major proportions from all corners of main stream media and then public opinion has squatted over the remains and urinated on it. You know those shows where the overweight people go to lose weight and everyone watching goes “How did they let it come to that?!” I know how it came to that. You hit 300lbs and you don’t suddenly stop eating, you just stop looking at the damn scale. When your health starts to deteriorate you get depressed, your depression makes you want comfort, your comfort comes in a bucket from KFC. Breaking the cycle requires drive and energy. The heavier you are the less energy you have to get yourself out of the pit.

2) Fat tastes good – It is a universal truth that fat tastes good. Most of the flavour in our food comes from the fat, oil, sugar or salt it contains. Which means if you are a fat guy with diabetes and potential blood pressure issues your life on the wagon is going to taste like cardboard. So your best bet is to eliminate temptation. Cut the bad eating out of your life, out of sight, out of mind. The problem is that you will still have to go to work, hang out with friends and family, have holiday dinners. Despite the fact that you are working hard on eliminating bad food from your life, no one around you is obligated to. There will always be that box of donuts that someone thoughtfully brought in. There will always be that person offering you a slice of cheesecake 4 times because they want to be a good host. If I could just say no to temptation I WOULDN’T ALREADY BE OVERWEIGHT.  Again, it goes back to a mental thing, you need to accept that other people are more than welcome to pound back a dozen donuts and their metabolism will just accept it. You on the other hand, will be eating a damn salad and hating every minute.

3) Gyms are a huge time sink – In order to lose weight, my personal trainer suggested I work out for an hour about three times a week. I am also supposed to do 20 minutes of cardio at least 5 times a week (including days I am doing the workout). So three times a week I have to give up an hour to a workout, 20 minutes to a treadmill, 5 to stretching and about 10 to changing. Include travel time, dinner and other chores, your life quickly becomes about work, working out and sleep. It is something I accepted, but I don’t have kids or a wife or a girlfriend or even a standing date with a prostitute. Even assuming you can find or make the time you are eventually going to stop going. You will get sick, you will be on vacation or you will plain old give up. During that time you will begin to remember what it was like to have a life. You will miss the days of having no obligation to your beer gut besides filling it. Now good friggin’ luck trying to go back to working out. Now you know what you are sacrificing plus you know how hard the actually working out routine is.

4) Instant gratification is instant – Working towards a healthy body takes time. Ordering and eating a bacon cheeseburger takes minutes. My brain is wired such that the cheeseburger makes it just as happy in the short term. So I could take the long, hard road of life altering change or I could just keep eating cheeseburgers. I don’t think skinny people really get this. While I was working out I was in a fragile state of finally feeling better about myself. I was losing weight and starting to look better. Trainer guy decided the best thing to do was weigh me. Behold my massive 2 lbs weight loss. Suddenly he is scrambling for explanations while I am picking my self-esteem off the floor before someone urinates on it. Now I seem to have stalled in the losing weight department and in the motivation to keep going department. Meanwhile, Cheeseburgers still taste good.

I started up with a dating site thinking that now that I was losing weight it was time I started looking for someone I could be with. This was a BAD IDEA. I jumped in to early, once again hoping for the good old days of instant gratification. Even at the best of times it can be very trying to face utter rejection based on little to no discernible reason. If you or the other person just don’t feel it then it is not going to work, but it is sometimes hard to describe what is not doing it for you. Add your fragile tiny new ego in the picture and watch him get turned into mechanically separated meat patties. After having my self esteem once again savaged and tinkled on I was back at square one. Working up the 90% mental that would get my butt back in the gym. At about 85% when I started writing this. Hovering at 89% right now. Meanwhile, Cheeseburgers still taste good.

5) Everything I like to do involves sitting – I have a list of hobbies as long as this ridiculously long post. I can’t think of one of them that involves leaving a chair. Painting, reading, video games, comics, writing, facebook, napping. I guess cooking does but I can hardly put that in the win column. I was jealous of all the personal trainers for being hard bodied healthy types. Then I realized it wasn’t the job that kept them skinny. Working out was their idea of fun and there is only so many jobs you can get after devoting your life to exercising and eating right. No software company gives a crap how much you can bench. Work the mind or work the body. Now I have to find a way to blend the two, or at least accept the necessary evil of exercising like all the other sad sack overweight people at the gym. It’s 90% mental and I am nothing if not mental.

Rancid Monke