Down With The Clown

Remember this commercial

https://youtu.be/tsjs3boAgok

Evil Punk Rocker Beef Industry Sellout:

“How about a burger baby”

Shimmering late 80’s Barbie Type Lip Singing to a Sexy Subway Growly Voice:

“I don’t want no burger. I said don’t with the Clown today. I fresh delicious sandwich like the submarines that they serve at Subway. I don’t want no grease chicken…”

I have started again with a diet and weight loss plan so I’m saying down with the clown today. As a matter of fact, I’m saying down with the clown for like 30 days because I’m doing a Whole 30 again. Do I think the Whole 30 is the greatest plan? No, but it’s a plan and I need something that will really make me think about what I’m eating. So no processed food, fast food, grains, the submarine’s like they serve at Subway, dairy, legumes, and most importantly no sugar. After 30 days I’ll reevaluate and see how I want to proceed because I need to continue to train and lose weight. I need to continue not only because I would like to see my daughter grow up, but because I signed up for the Tough Mudder in July. Tough Mudder is a 10-mile race with 20 crazy obstacles.  Now some of you might be looking at me like Spiked looked a Hugh Grant’s character William Thatcher’s in Nothing Hill after he turned down Anna Scott. Trust me sometimes I’m looking at myself like that too, but this looming event is proving to be a great motivator. I’m working out almost every day and now starting to change my diet. Hopefully, this story will turn out just as good as the ending of Notting Hill and the “readers of Horse and Hound will be absolutely delighted.”

PS Notting Hill is the GREATEST Rom Com of ALL times. 

Not So Fatso Strikes Again

It's been a while, but that is something I have said a lot during this blog. It’s just like diets or health fads that come and go. We find ourselves saying “I really need to get back to that food plan or gym regime” but they never seem to stick. Last year my plan was to do a Whole30 challenge to explore the grip that food had on me and hopefully lose some weight in the process. I did those things but I allowed my injury to take my focus off the end game and slowly I abandoned all the things I had learned for the sake of ease and comfort. I’m not yet fully recovered from my torn calf muscle and I am now heavier than I was when I started my Whole30 last year, and that makes me sick. I want to feel healthy, be active, and no longer serve food as my master. The return of the return of the Not So Fat So begins...or maybe Not So Fat So Strikes Again is better (I should have just read the title). But it's not just food this time because I want freedom from so much more. I’m not just physically overweight but I’m materially overweight as well. I have so much stuff that I never use or don’t even need and I want to lose that weight as well. So Not SoFatSo is becoming a minimalist...ok maybe that's overstating but I will be trying to incorporate minimalist ideas into my life. Sunday I started my second Whole30...well modified Whole30. I’m not going to run away from peanuts like Kevin McAllister the first time he runs into the South Bend Shovel Slayer outside his house, nor am I going to freak out like Mrs Olsen after she found out Neilly eloped with a poor dumb pig farmer (“Nels, make her a window”) if my package bacon has less than 1% sugar. I will also begin to pare down the clothes that I own and discover what things add value to my life and which ones do not.

So come along for the ride again, it will be fun. It will be like A.J Frost returning home to Arwen, after impregnating an asteroid with a nuclear bomb kind of fun. There will be tears of joy, tears of pain, Bad Santa will be there with a cool mission patch, that guy that kinda looks like Kevin Bacon but isn’t and lots of Aerosmith. “I don’t wanna close my eyes. I don’t want to fall asleep because I’d miss you babe and I don’t wanna miss I thing………………………”. Welcome back.

The Lowest Low

I’m at 23 days of the Whole30 and I’m still alive, although days 11 through 15 were really tough. Days 11-15 felt like the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where Gene Wilder is monolog-ging as they go through the tunnel of the chocolate version of the River Styx. In the background there are twilight zone hypnotic swirls and random images as Gene Wilder gets creepier and creepier. Mix that with full-blown Charlie Brown level of depression and you know what I was feeling.  Overreacting? Don’t judge man; it’s a low place, just ask my wife. 

The issue I was having was multi-leveled. One, I was so low from sugar withdrawal. Two, I was sick with some kind of flu thing which was really messing with my sleep. Three, and this was the weird one, I was depressed because I didn’t want to eat junk food. Yes, that’s right; I had no overwhelming desire for junk food and I was depressed about it. Sure a doughnut smelled good and getting down on some BDubs sounded delicious, but I didn’t really care if had it or not.  Food has always been a comfort thing for me, like Linus’s blanket. I wanted to not feel so low anymore, but food wasn’t going to do it for me, not because I couldn’t have it, but because I didn’t want it.  It’s hard to describe going from NEEDING some Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Ice Cream to just liking Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Ice Cream.  I'm feeling free of food's control over me, but during days 11-15 it scared the heck out of me. 

The good news is I have come out the other side of Mr. Wonka’s candy-coated acid trip and I’m feeling great. I’m not supposed to weigh myself until the end but I know I’ve lost weight, which has been good since my calf and foot are not 100% yet, so exercise is hard. I have no overwhelming need for sugar, although I have to admit a nice rich piece of New York cheesecake sounds pretty good. I have tons of energy and feel great. As my Whole 30 winds down I’ll need to figure out my next step, because I’m not doing this forever, but I also don’t want to  live the way I was before either. Leave a comment and follow my blog here on BlogSpot. Until next time.

Things get drastic

So if you have been dying to know what rules I basically broke off, it was the fast-food/ gas station food ones. I feel so criminal as I write it, like I was sitting in the dark, eating a big mac and suddenly there is a spotlight on me and I’m dressed in old-timey, black and white prison stripes. Somewhere beyond the light a man calls “We've got you surrounded, Schwartz. Put down the burger and come out quietly; No one needs to get hurt.” (When you read that, read it like Peter Brady saying “Porkchops and Applesause”.) “You’ll never take me alive, Copper! I ain’t going back to the joint!“ I shout, as I stuff my face, trying to eat it all before they cuff me.

The truth is, it wasn’t a matter of craving or needing junk food; it was simply convenience and inappropriate use of preparation time… AKA laziness. If you don’t spend the time to make and plan out your food for home as well as work, you will fail as I have. Just the basic principle that what you eat from home is better than eating out will probably save you calories and money. So, to break my old mindsets and challenge my twisted, unknown philosophies about food in my life, I’ve done something rather drastic. I have started the Whole 30 food challenge. If you have never heard of it, look it up on the Googles and check out the details. No sugar, no bread, no dairy, no legumes (which is beans), no processed junk. That means yum, I can have bacon, except if it is made with sugar, which pretty much all bacon is. You have to read labels all the time because, guess what, sugar is in everything. I read that 80% of all the things you will find in a supermarket will have sugar in them.  What the Whole 30 does is force you to explore whole food, try new things, get creative, and really make you think about what you’re eating. But more than a diet, it’s a philosophy changer. There are ways to make pancakes with bananas and eggs, or baked goods with fruit and almond flour, which are all Whole 30 approved ingredients, but the rules say "No!". Actually their phrase for that eating that stuff is “sex with you pants on”. I like to say people want to NOT have their cake and eat it too. The reason they say this is that your brain doesn’t know the difference between the “good for you” sweet, yummy muffin and the sugared up one, and the idea is to detox your mind as well as your body. It’s not that a little sugar is bad or a delicious biscuit is bad, but it's all we eat.

That’s a really simple and hopefully not grossly in error way to describe it, but hey, I’m still learning.  I’m on day 9 and I don’t really miss the sugar, at least not yet, but I do miss the dairy and mostly cheese.  I didn’t realize how much dairy my diet consisted of until not having it for nine days. I have had to get creative and try out new recipes, but I’ll save all that for another post. Check out the Whole 30 Challenge and tell me what you think. Comment below, email me at thenotsofatso@gmail.com, and follow me on twitter @thenotsofatso.

Change of plans

“If I was coaching third I would have made you crawl to home plate.” said my friend Dan Cupersmith, as I sat in a folding camp chair with my foot up, watching my teammates continue on without me. Dan is the coach of the church league softball team I’m on, and part of me wishes he would have gotten me to crawl home; it would have been a great story. But alas, I did not crawl home because a sniper shot me in the leg as I was rounding third….I mean someone was trying to throw me out at third and hit me in the leg…I mean I tore my calf muscle and fell down. This is when Dan wanted me to crawl home; he was kidding of course…well at least I think he was. Although I wasn’t shot or hit by a ball, it did feel like that’s what happened; a shot right to my calf. I went down “limp like a bonefish”, lying on the ground ready for Shelob to eat me, hoping and praying I didn’t tear my Achilles or an ACL or MCL or BLT….mmmmm, BLT. Lucky for me the other team from my church was playing right after us and they have a doctor on their team. Dr. B. checked out my leg and it looked like everything was still there, it was just a really bad pull. Later I would come to realize that what I did was tear my calf muscle. Then I looked to the sky and proclaimed “I’M OLD.” Now, was it twisting my leg earlier mowing the lawn, or lack of hydration and stretching before the game, or was my 18 old mind telling my 38 year old body to “RUN Forest RUN”, I guess I’ll never know except that it was probably all those, so I guess we do know. I cannot expect to play sports or do activities like I could when I was younger, especially with being out of shape. I don’t want stop playing sports, games, and activities, but I need to adjust how I approach them.  I call this the Three W’s:

WATER:

I need to be drinking more water. I think that's already a part of my new rules. It’s not like I didn’t have liquid with me at the game, because I had delicious ice coffee. (I can feel your judging from the other side of your electronic device, and you aren't the only ones - My wife was judging from the moment I came out of the store with coffee instead of the water she thought I was getting.) Anyway, I found in one of my apps a place to record how much water you drink a day, and it's set for 64oz a day as a goal. I guess I’ll try that unless I hear different.

WARM UP:

I have been playing in the church softball league since I was 17 years old and I have only missed two seasons. That means I have been playing for 21 years (gee whiz, why aren’t I any better?). Sometimes before a game there would be these older guys jogging up and down the fence line, stretching out their leg muscles and laying on the ground stretching all over the place.  I would think “Ha! Look at the guy running around trying to touch his toes, what a goof!”. So that’s going to be me now.

WOAH - Settle Down Now (Settle. Da. Na.):

I need to ease into things and not hit the ground running anymore, especially now that I’m trying to rehabilitate my calf.

Have any advice for me when it comes to keeping fit or great ways for me to keep a workout routine while I’m injured? Leave a message in the comments! Also, take a guess at which of my new rules I already broken in half and I will reveal the answer in my next post.

Is that what I look like?

If you have ever seen the movie “The Emperor’s New Groove” you’ll remember the evil Yzma; you know the one who looks “scary beyond all reason”. Well when she is turned into a white, fluffy cat and tries to do an evil, maniacal monologue she finds that her voice has been changed as well her appearance, and she now has a cute un-maniacal kitten voice. This causes Yzma to stop monologue-ing mid-sentence and say “is that…is that my voice”. I had a similar experience the other day while looking at pictures I had been tagged in on Facebook. “Is that…Is that what I look like.” I have never cared about having my picture taken, or even seeing embarrassing photos of myself, but I get it now. I saw that picture and my heart sank. And it wasn’t in a "Poor me", self-loathing way, (well, maybe a little bit), but in a "How serious am I about getting healthy?" way. The guy in that picture doesn’t look very serious. I know that guy; He talks a lot, but how badly does he want this? I need to step this up.

Here are some of the basic things I will be doing to start my change -

No Eating after 9pm

Seems easy until you’re out late helping with the church Youth Group and you haven‘t had supper yet and your heading home at 9:30pm and Taco Bell Starts calling like the bells of Notre Dome for Sunday Mass. The Hunchback is up in the bell tower ringing the bell, but instead of yelling “SANCTUARY” he’s yelling “NACHOS BELL GRANDE”.  No healthy eating happens after 9pm.

No Fast Food\ Especially at Work

I think this goes without saying. Anything I bring from home is going to beat anything I can go get during a half-hour lunch break; calorie wise, health wise, and money wise.  I work very close to a Hardees and I can “taste its stink, if there is such a thing” from my workstation, so I must be vigilant.

No Gas Station Food.

Have you ever heard someone say “This is pretty good for gas station food”?  Why do we compare gas station food to other gas station food when deciding if it’s edible or not? We compare things like this when discussing necessities like work; “As far as factory jobs go this is a pretty good one", but gas station food is far from necessity. Comparing Gas station food to itself is more like which poison is easier on the palate or which Star War Prequel is the worst. It’s all bad so why bother right? We bother because it's right there ready to eat, and you can get 9 of them for a quarter, but NO MORE. Avoiding gas station delicacies is an easy way to cut calories and garbage out of the diet.

Lots of Water\ No Soda

This one I have gotten good at, well at least half of it. I have cut soda out of my diet, Its very, very rare that I drink soda anymore and life is better because of it, but making sure I drink enough water for the day has not been on my radar. Not even just for hydration, drinking water will, in theory, help me to stay more full during the day and eat less. Drinking enough water appears on almost every "Ten ways to start living healthier right now" list and so it's going on mine.

Avoid Grains and Sugar

How can one live without delicious, flaky biscuits, and if they could is that really any life at all? I say NAH, and that is why the rules say avoid instead of cut out. The American diet is packed with carbs, it's every where like gremlins, or tribbles, or bearded hipsters. (Quick tangent, What's up with the lumberjack hipster look? It's like 90's grunge decided to untie the flannel from around their waist, and put it on properly, trade messy hair for messy beards and geeky glasses with no lenses, and ditch the skate boards and guitars for jugs of maple syrup and a steady diet of quiona and organic Emu eggs, but I digress.) By avoiding grains I will keep my carb intake low and it will make me watchful of what I eat. Having to avoid them causes me to be more creative with what I eat, and causes me to be more purposeful in my diet, but not entirely means I can feel like a normal person some of the time and not a crazy Paleo diet-pusher trying to force feed me $23.00 an oz. avocado mayo. For the sugar part, anyone one who has seen a toddler on a Snickers bender, or sat next to an elderly gentleman who wants to talk about "The daibetis" knows the dangers of sugar. Besides, once carbs hit your body they changes to sugar. Look it up - It's all sugar.

Count my Calories and Use My Fitness Apps

I want my calorie counting app to talk to me with the voice of Sesame Street's The Count. "ONE! One bowl of Ice Cream! ZERO! Zero calories left for the day! AH! AH! AH! AH!" But I've got the next best thing, I think. I'm using the MYFittnessPal app to count my calories, and my Fitbit pushes my steps to the app and it recalculates how many calories I can eat based on how many steps I've taken for the day. It's easy to use and it makes me think about everything I eat during the day. I have started with a goal of under 2400 calories a day, but I shoot for 2000. The 2400 is a number that the MyFitnessPal app came up with when I put in all my info and how much weight I wanted to lose. "ONE one more rule! AH! AH! AH! AH!" 

Go to the Gym\Chart my progress

Go to the gym literally means go to the gym. Getting there is half the battle "GI JOE", or better yet "YMCA". I need to have regular days at the gym and a plan of what I'm doing while I'm there. I want to chart what I'm doing so I can see my progress. As a 'now thinker' compared to a 'future thinker', the idea of "I will lose weight in the future" is hard for me to grasp, and makes me want to quit, hide under the covers, and binge-watch Doctor Who, but hopefully charting will help me to see the small, immediate changes and help me to keep going. 

The Return of Not-So-Fatso

Due to overwhelming popular demand (mostly my beautiful wife) it’s the return of Not-So-Fasto. Now, this isn’t like “Return to Oz” kind of return, a movie that terrified children everywhere. Small children expecting to see singing munchkins and dancing scarecrows received Dorothy locked up in a mental institution, Wheelers, which are dark creatures with wheels for hands and feet, and a headless queen with a display case hallway full of screaming, detachable heads. Did I mention this is a kid’s movie? So, no, it won’t be like a terrifyingly dark kid’s movie from the 80’s (or more commonly known as, kid’s movies from the 80’s). My hope is to bring my light-hearted, fun-loving, psychotic mind ramblings to my adoring fans (mostly my beautiful wife), as I journal about trying to get healthy.

Nor will this return be a return like Batman Returns. Movie-goers expecting a continuation of the entertaining-yet-realistic Batman movie they fell in love with a few years prior, got a creepily-deformed, fish-eating, carnie version of Penguin, more monster than master mind, and a origin of Cat-Woman in which she falls from a skyscraper and has dirty, inbred alley cats run all over her as she comes back to life with cat powers. If you fall like 30 or more stories you die; even in a comic book, unless they take your brain and put in in a robot, or you fall in a vat of toxic fluid, but if you hit the ground, let me tell you, milk-drinking flea bags won’t save you. "Hey Tim Burton, creepy circus people and screwy origins does not a Batman movie make (by the way stop ruining the beloved children’s classic 'Alice in Wonderland' too…just sayin')". Why on earth am I mentioning this? Because my return, although filtered through my strange comparisons and rabbit trails, will still be grounded in reality. Although I like to entertain, I’m taking my health very seriously and I will do my best to achieve my goals and live a healthier lifestyle, while expressing it in a fun, entertaining way.

So I guess my return is more like Return of the King or Return of the Jedi, but more like a pudgy, hobbit version of Aragorn, or Luke from the Force Awakens. But I don’t have a Sauron or a Darth Vader to defeat because my Sauron, my Vader, is my weight, my high blood pressure, and my unhealthy habits and mindsets. Sometimes I will feel like l’ll want to jump in the Sarlacc pit, and I’ll chronicle it, and other times the food I eat might taste like the slop Eowynn gave to Aragorn on the road to Helm's Deep, the stuff that's only good quality was that it was hot, and you’ll hear about it. With this blog I will reforge the sword of Elendil; it will be my lightsaber, and you will be my fellowship (mostly my beautiful wife) helping me along the way. Are you ready to follow my adventure? Because here I go. “FOR FRODO” (but mostly for my beautiful wife).