Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
I find it interesting that we all consider ourselves experts of some sort; we know exactly what others need to do, but we hardly follow our own advice. I’ve often said that if we did follow our own advice, we would have the bodies of gods and the minds of a genius. And we would all be super-rich. We’ve got these great ideas but our thoughts are things that only apply to lesser men. We praise those above us in the food chain and we look down on those subservients as being mindless and incapable. We will give them great advice, but we hardly expect that they will listen; after all, even we don’t listen to our own advice, especially when it comes to health.
So, what is this incredible array of wise understandings that we need to keep under our belts as we approach this season of over-indulging? Well, quite simply: We eat and we move and that combination determines our appearance and most of our health, along with stress and whatever we do as far as chemical toxins, aberrant behavior, and neglect. What do we need to eat then?
Well, the statistics are slightly different for every individual but for sure we do not need not some of what we eat, and we know it. Let’s take the array of things we face: (again) Halloween, football season, tailgating, the elections, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of the visiting, the office parties, the family gatherings, and the occasions that are created to introduce, persuade, and announce all these magnificent occasions. It is redundant to party so much! We celebrate celebrating. Adding one pound of fat is a net gain of 3,500 calories. Period. To stand at a party is already not moving. To stand next to the food is already a net gain if you eat one thing. The major reason that people give for eating is that they do not want to be rude. That is amazing to me.
We will likely have about 40 occasions by my estimations to eat an extra 1000 calories. If while we are standing we are not doing anything and end up not burning that usual 200 calories per hour that we burn being slightly active, then we might have in the area of 40 X 1000 + 40 X 200, that is a total of 40,000 + 8,000 = 48,000 calories, or 48,000/3,500 = 13.7 pounds. Now, shopping is going to knock off 3.7 of those and that is how we get to the national average of 10 pounds of weight gain per year during the “holiday season.” And between the vices, the extra celebrations, the amount of tailgating we do and our sense of loss or victory in each of these venues, we might gain 20 pounds in the next three months. If we skipped the entire season and instead lost by lowering our consumption and working on moving more a total of 350 calories per day, we would in fact lose 10 pounds. So, the choice in front of us is to either gain or lose 10 pounds, depending on our plan of attack during the next 100 days.
I’m going with the latter. Here is what I am telling myself, and you can do whatever you want, which you are going to anyways. I’ve been working up the entire idea of hitting the zone for some time….I have a tumblr page (http://runningturtle87.tumblr.com/) where I have been following the FITSPO pages of the Internet, the sites that propose health, good eating habits, and fitness. These people usually got ready for bikini season last year, so if seeing fit human beings is not in your repertoire of activities to do, then you might want to skip this activity. I find them engaging and emotionally supportive, not to mention need I say mentoring by example. I don’t mind being told potential advice by someone who at least looks like he or she knows what is being said from a practical point of view.
One of the very first things that had to seep into my head is that I know I am not 25 years old, because my driver’s license says I am nearly 59. I’m retired, and I have every reason in the world to sit down and just take it easy. But I have not been doing that. I’m playing monster racquetball, I bought a bike, I got new camping gear, and I have gotten ahold of some simple work out gear. I am losing the battle to get more calories into my body. I have found that I don’t deserve, in spite of what advertisers will try to tell me, that extra 10 pounds.
I park way out in the parking lot. I take the stairs. I play and goof off outside. And I work out in front of the TV. I know, that is crazy. I used to just sit in my big papa chair and veg out for hours at a stretch, and now I stretch out and do 100 pushups every time there is a commercial. I have those stretch bands hanging off the stair case and I can stand and do tricep-press downs and military presses while I watch Hawaii 5-O.
I took a few things out of my diet. I will not name them, since I am not a nutritional expert, but you can guess them. I decided that most of what we eat is a modified donut: sugar, flour, oil, and a topping of sugar and oil. A hamburger is a meat donut. So is a hotdog. So is a burrito, really. Taco, yep. We eat stuff that while we are eating we will say about it, “I should not be eating this.” I am sure that is good parenting, right?
Husbands will take a sweet, tender, slender waif and turn her into a self-conscious overweight shy person who does not feel much like doing anything just so he can have the chance to eat what he knows is going to kill him with a heart attack at 45. We hide, we avoid, we evade, we stew, we ponder, and we obsess. And while we do this, we sit and we eat. And what does that do to fix the problem?
Eat another 10,000 calories for the elections. That will help your candidate win, right? Regardless, at the end of the season, I hope to be 10 pounds lighter. And I am going to do it one bite at a time.
runningturtle87
