I'm tabula rasa, or a blank slate. What I'm hoping to gain from this blog is to share my own experiences and thoughts over the the next year; use it to hold myself accountable for my progress via the feedback from friends, family, and other readers; and use the feedback to help guide the direction for the next year. This is not a promise to follow every suggestion from every reader, however I'll do the research for the suggestions I receive and see what I can effectively put into practice.
That being said, I'll ask you right off the bat to keep the tone of the conversations here somewhat light and non-confrontational. I will delete offensive and harassing comments, no one wants to read those, and as long as you're willing to converse rationally and calmly, I will listen.
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So let me give you some backstory...
I've never been particularly athletically-oriented. The best shape of my life was probably the four and a half years active duty I spent in the US Air Force after, I graduated. Generally speaking, I was the guy with his nose buried in book, watching tv, or getting online, and to be frank, that hasn't changed terribly much... though I like to think I'm learning! Following my active service, I spent three years in the Washington Air National Guard, serving one weekend a month, and basically sitting at a computer station, so there wasn't a lot of physical activity demanded of me.
In 2000, my third year of Guard weekend duty, I'd pretty much made the decision to leave, so I could focus on school. Before I left however, in February or March of that year, I managed to fail the Guard fitness evaluation, which was running a mile in 12 minutes or less. I only missed it by a handful of seconds, but I failed it twice in a row (a month apart) and both runs ended with me laying on the ground gasping for air. A quick trip to the doctor essentially confirmed what I'd suspected: I had exercise-induced asthma. My dad had asthma around cats, dogs, and when he wanted to run, so this was not a big surprise to me.
Months passed, and I'd heard nothing from the Guard regarding my failure to qualify the physical fitness evaluation, or about my asthma, but hey, my enlistment was to end in October and I'd been pretty upfront regarding my plans to focus on school. Two days before my final weekend however, I received a phone call from my Guard unit that essentially ran something like this:
Caller: "So we've heard back from the Medical Review board..."
Me: "Pardon me? I wasn't aware I had anything going up in front of the Medical Review Board."
Caller: "Well, you have asthma, so they have to review your case."
Me: "Oh, well that was like seven months ago. I guess I figured..."
Caller: "It takes time for them to cover everything, at any rate, they've made the decision to discharge you medically from the Air National Guard. You won't be allowed to come in this weekend."
Me: "Oh, ummm okay...well you know this was already to be my last weekend anyway, because I'm getting out?"
Caller: "Right, but we're not allowed to pay you for this weekend."
Me: "Let me get this straight. I'm a National Guard combat communications guy, who comes in one weekend a month to sit at a computer terminal. The Guard has known about my asthma for seven months, but suddenly this weekend it is so bad that I can't possibly be allowed to come in this weekend and work. Work that because I'm leaving anyway, would consist entirely of me going through all my outprocessing paperwork, which by the way, still has to be done because now you're medically discharging me, and I still need to outprocess. Does that about cover it?"
Long Awkward Pause
Caller: "Yeah, okay let me talk to admin here and we'll call you back tomorrow."
Me: "Okay"
The end result to that was that I was allowed to come in and outprocess, but what should have taken two days to do, would now be required to be done in one day. Basically they showed me the boot, pointed to the door and asked what was taking me so long.
Since I wasn't particularly active anyway, I didn't let it bother me. Okay, I had exercise-related asthma, so I figured the best bet for, was just not to exercise! Makes sense, doesn't it? And that pretty much summed it up my attitude. How my weight just didn't just skyrocket out-of-control, I don't know.
Over the years, I dabbled intermittently with exercise, but rarely for more then a couple of months. The day before Thanksgiving 2011, I stepped onto a scale, and received quite an unsettling surprise: I was now 196 lbs (88.9kg for you metric types) Okay, that might not initially seem terrible, but for those of you who know me, I'm not a tall guy, I only stand 5'6" (165cm). I knew that if I didn't take steps immediately, I was going pass Thanksgiving and Christmas and pass the 200lb marker. I couldn't let that happen...I just couldn't!
So I started a diet right then and there. Yes, on Thanksgiving.... No, no I don't know what I was thinking. There was no way this was going to work. You can't start dieting on a day revolving around feasting. I would never recommend this to anyone else, and yet I did it anyways. Okay, its not quite as brutal as I make it sound. I didn't forbid myself any foods that first day. I merely didn't allow myself to go back for seconds, and I limited drinking to a single glass of wine and lots of water, and I did the same at Christmas.
I started focusing more on fruits and vegetables at the store and bought fewer and fewer snacks. By late spring to early summer, I hit my initial goal of 170lbs and decided to continue for another 10lbs. I still hadn't gotten back into the exercise routine. I added that to the mix to help me shed those next 10 and by November or so, I'd gotten down to 160.5. I'd almost attained my goal but not quite, I never shed that last half-pound, and of course I eventually fell out of the exercise habit. I was still eating better, but I gained back 5-7 lbs and have more or less hovered at 165 ever since.
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A month or two back it really hit me that this coming year, I'd be 40. This has coincided with a few things which I"ll discuss in future blogs. While I haven't reached panic stage at this time, I've realized just how much of life I've let pass me by. There is much out there I still want to accomplish, and I know that to do much of it, I need to further improve my health and well-being, and that's part of where this blog comes in!
So here's a general outline of what you can expect in this blog:
- I anticipate updating the blog 2-3 times a week. I promise generally speaking they won't be near as long as this one. As a rule of thumb, I'm figuring 3-6 paragraphs for each update though depending on what's going on, it could be more.
- Figure one entry a week primarily for diet progress, one for fitness and health, and perhaps one for "lifestyle". No, nothing weird, just topics regarding what I'm doing this week, at age 40, that don't necessarily fall into the other two categories.
- The diet I'm beginning on Jan. 2 is a modified version of "Eat to Live" by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. He promotes a vegan lifestyle. I fully admit that I will have difficulty quitting meat and dairy, cold turkey (see what I mean?). The current plan right now is to go six weeks or so following "Eat to Live" as closely as possible, then taking a week off. After that, I'm figuring on fish or seafood, twice a week, and a single egg a week. I expect at least for the next year to go in six week cycles on the diet, followed by a week off.
- I'm not a hardcore vegan, perhaps someday I'll get there, but I do enjoy meat and have a hard time imagining going without it on a long term basis. That being said, if I'm a guest at dinner, I will not be demanding vegan dishes. If I go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant (not something I do often) I may allow myself a normal dish, though I may also choose to follow the diet.
- My general exercise plan is to get to running twice a week, cycling twice a week, and swimming twice a week. Right now however it's winter and its pretty cold, so its going to take time to get there. I also need more upper body work, so I expect I'll be joining my brother in law at the gym. If I hold faithful, my goal is to finish this year's Bloomsday Race in under 1hr 40 min. and I'll be participating in the Warrior Dash as well.
- My 40th birthday is less than 4 weeks away and I'm anticipating getting a full proper physical for a male who is 40. I will be discussing my diet and exercise with him, as well as my history of asthma and other things. I also figure on having a prostate exam as I've not had one before, and there is family history of cancer. I will be blogging about much of this, but not all. I promise to be discreet, I don't need to share everything, and you certainly don't want to read everything about it!
I think that about sums up my first post here. Questions? Feedback? Either ask in the comments section, or you can email me at patrick.ashley@gmail.com !
