Working for the Weak-end

Offering an underrated disco classic for tonight’s musical number: 

Jackie’s a great girl, I enjoy working and chatting with her at the old Rustic Café, she’s pretty and petite and hard-working and motivated, it’s just great hanging out with her.  Monday morning, however, she brought me to my knees, not once, but twice.  See, I’m getting just a little cocky about having lost 110 pounds.  There’s Jackie over there, playing on her iPhone, so I asked her to jump on my back; seeing as how I’ve lost almost exactly as much as she weighs, I thought it would be fun to feel what it was like to have that weight on me again, you know, sort of remind me what it was like to weigh 337 again (my 227 plus her 110).  Anyway, I braced myself for her to jump on me, or so I thought I was braced, because the second she got on, I instantly got pulled down and fell on my butt.  Thinking it was an aberration, we tried it again, me getting much lower so she could climb on more easily, but for the life of me, I just could not lift her even a little.  I felt the strain in my back and hips and thighs, and I realized it wasn’t because she was heavy or because I didn’t have the leverage to lift her. 

I’ve gone weak, and I’m trying to wrap my head around it.  I’ve come up with two reasons why this has happened: 

1. I’ve drastically cut my eating in all facets, including carbs (for energy) and protein (for muscle development).
2. I’ve foregone classic weight training for the sake of faster weight loss, focusing almost exclusively on cardio and sit-ups and little else. 

For the first point, it’s to be expected.  I’m a lot more active, and I eat a whole lot less.  Debby tells me this is normal for someone who is cutting out processed carbohydrates (one of the side effects of the Atkins Diet), to have a drop in energy.  The flipside of that is, compared to six months ago, I’m a lot more active, I walk to work every day, I work out five times a week, I play with my grandson (including walks and swimming a couple of times a week), so what carbs I do consume (at this point, it’s almost all fruit), I burn them off much more thoroughly than before, not leaving much in the way for surplus, hence not leaving much to turn into fat. 

As for the second point, this was a decision I made when I started at 24 Hour Fitness, to get the fat off of me as fast as possible, setting the weight training aside at first.  Since muscle weighs more than fat, and since my primary goal for now is to get rid of the sheer tonnage I’ve been carrying, it just seemed to make sense to do a lot of cardio, work on shedding my bloated gut, and that’s about it.  As long as you can keep your heart rate up and can work up a good sweat, the pounds will melt off.  So far, that much has worked much better than I had anticipated.  However, in devoting virtually all my workout time on fat burning and none on body building, I’ve gained little lean muscle mass (maybe in my thighs from all the bike work, but that may be it), not wanting it to count against me when I step on the scale. 

As a result, the petite Jackie is now too heavy for me to lift.  On one hand, it’s funny as anything, me being too weak to lift someone so small, someone I could have easily picked up and tossed around in the past; but it’s also a red flag, a sign that what I’m doing to lose weight isn’t flawless. 

Of course, at some point, I’ll resume a semi-normal diet, and I’ll hit the weights.  The thinking all along has been the boot camp mentality, to break myself down and then build myself back up.  Keeping that in mind, I’ve done a spectacular job.  I’m broken down.  I have just enough energy these days for walking and work and exercise and occasionally playing with my grandson, but that’s about it.  That’s not enough if I follow through with getting a second job part-time, or take a class or two to push me along for teacher certification, or start playing basketball a couple of nights a week.  This isn’t about losing weight just for its own sake, and it’s only in part about looking and feeling healthier.  It’s about living a full life, the sort of life many other people live and take for granted, one where I can juggle a job and a family and exercise and all the other things I want to do.  I certainly could not do it weighing almost 340 pounds, I definitely could not do it dead from a heart attack, but I’m finding it’s not a whole lot easier weighing 227 and having no energy or strength to spare. 

I’ve long put off the weights, having originally planned to start them a while back.  I’d say, I’ll start at the start of the month, or I’ll start when I weigh in at this given amount.  I’ve put it off, largely because the weight is indeed still coming off, and there’s no reason to fix something that isn’t broken, partly assuming that, when I do plateau, if I’m still doing just a simple diet and exercise regimen, I’ll have plenty more elements to add as needed.  Were I busting my ass as hard as humanly possible right now, were I pulling out every trick in the book, I’d be out of ideas when I finally plateau, and I’d be dead in the water.  I know I can diet more efficiently, I know I can work out more thoroughly, and there’s plenty of ideas in the bag I haven’t yet put to use.  If I can save them until they’re truly needed, or better, until I’ve hit my goal weight and start stabilizing, so much the better. 

While I have a plethora of good reasons for losing weight, one of the minor reasons is ego, and yes, it feels great to tell people I’ve lost so much weight, it wows them.  My ego had been inflated a bit over my recent successes, but it lost some air the other day.  It’s okay, it’s just a wake-up call for me to shift gears and do what I probably should have been doing all along, eating a little more efficiently and hitting the weights.  I probably should be doing it soon, I plan on doing the same thing when I’ve lost over 150 pounds.  It’s pretty wimpy for me to crumple to the floor when someone as small as Jackie jumps on my back, can you imagine what will happen when I try it, I’m smaller than I am now, and someone forty pounds heavier than her jumps on me?  Absolutely no offense to anyone who dares to jump on me on that day, but you’re going to squash me like a bug if I don’t take strength conditioning as serious as I’ve taken weight loss. 

Tip #7:  Know the heart rate needed for fat burning, and keep it there.  There’s usually a small chart on every cardio bike or treadmill of StairMaster that tells you what your heart rate should be when you work out.  By knowing what that rate is, and by keeping your heart beating that many times a minute for an extended period of time, you can burn your fat efficiently and consistently.  In my case, being 42, the chart says to maintain a rate of 115 beats per minute.  By all means, don’t work out so long or so hard that you drop from exhaustion, a workout is no good if it kills you, but if you start with, say, twenty minutes every time, keeping your heart rate up for almost the entire time, you’ll get that good hard sweat, and you’ll burn a bit of fat.  Once you get comfortable with twenty minutes, move up to thirty, then forty.  Once you can get yourself up to forty-five minutes to an hour, with your heart rate staying up the whole time, the pounds will REALLY start melting off.  What’s better, because you’re doing cardio instead of weights, you’ll be losing the fat from all over your body, as opposed to burning it just in a concentrated area.  On top of everything else, you’ll be strengthening your heart, pushing your blood through you faster, pumping the cholesterol out of your arteries, making your breathing more efficient, and cutting your risk for heart disease and stroke.  These days, I try to do an hour of cardio, keeping my heart rate around 125 beats per minute, and while I’ll cut back to a more humane level soon enough, I have to admit, it’s working pretty well as it is. 

Alive once again!