Sugar we're goin' down swingin'

At the start of this year, I accomplished a major goal; I ran a 5K. Three years ago I wrote “Do a 5K” on my list of yearly goals. I did not do it. So I put it on my list of yearly goals two years ago, last year and of course, this year. It finally happened and the feeling of completing it was amazing. The run sucked. It flat out sucked. Why anyone would choose to do their first 5K in the city of San Francisco with all of its stupid hills, is beyond me. I guess, that is who I am. I go big, and then I go home and weep for hours.

A week after my 5K, I weighed myself and I was down 90 pounds from when I started this journey four years ago. Four years ago seems like a lifetime ago at this point. When I started this journey, I was never honest with anyone about just how much I weighed. I think that was always part of the problem for me. I was insecure about my weight loss because I always would think people would see me and think I should be a lot thinner than I really am after losing 90 pounds. Instead of being thrilled about the weight loss, I worried about what other people would think, which is weird for me. It started to bog me down, in a major way.

In the midst of that mental and emotional turmoil, I stopped losing weight. That in and of itself, is not the biggest deal in the world. However, I also felt like I stopped trying because I had hit a plateau. Getting up at 4:15 in the morning to work out was starting to have an adverse affect on my teaching day, and on my personal life, as I would have to be in bed before 8:30 at night. Yet, I was not eating enough to have the energy to work out after I got home from work either. It led to an incredibly awful February. I am pretty sure I was no fun to be around. I needed something to jolt my system.

This led to the best/worst idea ever.

In December of last year Martina embarked on a 21 Day Sugar Detox. Here is the link to the Detox:
Martina had great success with the Detox (which is unsurprising because my fiancée is a BOSS.) I sort of, kind of, in a way, joined her, but not really. I ate all of the delicious food she cooked, and I cooked some of the delicious food, but outside of the house, I was still consuming my regular amount of sugar.

Martina reported that she felt better, slept better lost some weight and learned things about her body. Well, I wanted to feel better, sleep better, lose weight and learn things about my body, so I posed the question to her about me undertaking the detox. Because Martina believes in me for reasons passing understanding, she was totally enthusiastic about it. She was going to join me, and our friend Megan was going to do it for the first time as well. I have to say, I am fairly certain I never would have made it through this if I was doing it alone. Having Megan around to share in my irrational rage, was comforting in every way.

What follows is a recap of the detox:

First off, I made it. I went 21 days without the sugars/sweeteners to which I am so accustomed. I lost 9 pounds in 21 days, and for the most part, felt better, slept better and learned a ton about myself.

The hardest part of the detox was not what I thought it would be. I thought that I would have an unbearable time not eating ice cream, or fruit, or drinking a sweetened iced tea from Starbucks. But that was not the case. The hardest part of the detox was that I had to have a plan for every meal of every day. SUGAR IS IN EVERYTHING! If you want to go out to eat, you need to know the menu ahead of time, and you need to know about food. I did not know about food. Embarking on a 21 Day Sugar Detox requires precise planning of meals. Some days I was in the kitchen for three or four hours cooking two different meals. Then I would have to clean the dishes to get prepared for the next meal. Most meals required way more prep work than I was accustomed to. If I was tired after a long day of teaching, I could not simply order pizza and call it a day.

Over the years I have eliminated soda, energy drinks, and fast food from my diet. There was a time when I was eating 2 or 3 meals a day from fast food, and consuming gallons of soda a week, and downing two energy drinks before 9 am. I have will power. However, I also have a job that requires an insane amount of energy, and I have limited amounts of time to put food in my system during the day, and most snack foods go against the detox, so I could not have an apple, or pretzels to munch on while I taught. I had to have small meal portions during the small breaks of my day. I was microwaving leftovers during the passing period, and eating a few bites while I took roll and my students were doing their bell work. Leftovers are essential. Make enough for two or even three meals.

You find ways to manage. We had a birthday party for Martina during the detox, and I avoided all of the usual snack foods. I cooked chicken wings for the party, and made sweet potato fries. Martina made buffalo chicken egg muffins for on-the-go breakfasts. I ate more things with carrots in them than I ever had in my entire life. The food was good. The detox was hard, but all of the elements of the detox were tasty.

I learned that foods I figured would be safe, were not. I learned to read labels on everything, and I learned that there are roughly 5,000 words that mean sugar. I learned to pay better attention to what I was putting in my body. It is so unbelievably simple. Really it is. The entire detox was simple. Except, it was also hard because of what my body is used to me putting in it. Before the detox I was eating healthier than I ever had in my lifetime. Still, I put tons of crap in my body because I like the ease of it, and I crave the sweetness. I crave sweetness after every single meal. Though, I am in month four of not eating candy, and only miss it when I think about Jelly Belly jelly beans. So, I know that I can best my cravings. The ultimate goal of the sugar detox was to tweak my taste buds and maybe, just maybe curb some of those cravings.

This left me with conflict. I wanted it to work. Seriously, I did. Except, I totally did not want it to work. I want to crave ice cream because I have an emotional reaction to ice cream (read ALL FOOD). I am an emotional eater, and have been for as long as I can remember. When something great happens, I want to eat the foods of my people (my people= fat people). When I have a stressful day, my immediate reaction is to eat nachos, or pizza, or ice cream to calm those emotions down. All of the food of my people is excluded in the detox. I had to learn how to deal with emotional situations without the crutch of food.

This was, by far, the most revealing aspect of the detox. It is not like I did not know that I am an emotional eater, but it revealed to me, how often I went to those foods. It was not even only in times of extreme emotions. If I had a bad part of a day, I thought about ice cream. I associate any emotional up or down with food. I talk about food tons. I think about food all of the time. These issues were always there. The detox flushed them to the forefront of my mind. I was forced to confront why I am an emotional eater. I am still wrestling with the why. Who knows if I will ever figure it out, but the fact that I am able to have that look inside myself is helpful. By the way, emotional toxins are even worse than actual toxins. My sugar detox was also a nice emotional toxin cleanse.

Yesterday I went to Starbucks for my usual sweetened black iced tea, and opted to have half the pumps of sweetener that I usually get. It was enough. Yesterday my baker student brought me a cupcake to eat after lunch. I had to eat half of it later because it was slightly too sweet. Last night I got frozen yogurt and I got the tiniest bit I have ever had, and got the least amount of toppings I have ever put on it, and it was enough. My desire for sweet things has not deteriorated at all, but I need less of it to have that craving quenched.

I am not sure this is going to jump start my system back to losing weight, but it definitely has got me thinking about trying to eat even cleaner than I was before. It also reminded me how much I enjoy cooking. I get tired of cooking the same things over and over, and the detox got me out of that rut. Martina has two books of recipes full of healthier foods and it time I stop talking about it and start being about it.

I have no idea if I will ever meet my goal weight. I have no idea what that goal weight will look like, so who know if that is even the right goal weight for me. I do know that the journey has been monumental in helping me figure out who the hell I am. This journey, while far from over, is already the most important thing I have done in my life. I wish I did not need it. Seriously, I wish that this was not something I had to undertake, but I got myself into this, and it is up to me to get myself out of it.

Over the last 4 years I have accomplished so many things I never would have thought possible. I can add this 21 Day Sugar Detox to that list. I am proud that I did it. I am proud that I found a way through 21 days without the things I have grown to love, and feel like I needed. Of course, I never loved those things, I thought I did. The ultimate goal to remember that I do not love ice cream, I feel like I need it. It is something from which I need to break free. I am getting there. It would be much easier if Phish Food did not exist.

What is my motivation?

Not sure how many regular followers I have ever had with this blog, but for those of you who are/were regular readers, you have assuredly realized I have been absent for quite some time. I wish I could say that I have been so incredibly busy shedding pounds and getting ripped, but that is simply not true. This actually does not have anything to do with being too busy. The opposite is true, in fact. In my second year of teaching, I have gotten a stranglehold on my time management like crazy. I am ahead in my planning, I am grading at a solid pace without getting too backed up, and I rarely have to stay late at school this year.

What it amounts to is a lack of motivation. I stopped caring about my three year endeavor. Other things mattered more. Other things matter more. I decided to write a novel this summer. That was more important. Once the school year started, and my free time was more limited, I did not want to fill it with workouts from which I stopped seeing results. I had not lost weight in some time. Actually, I had gained weight back. Even with my workouts, and not eating fast food, and not drinking soda, or too much other sugary garbage, I started to put weight back on. This did not inspire me. This did not throw me back into hardcore workouts. All it did was extinguish the flame that had burned so well for so long.

Of course, I have noticed the difference in my life without even small workouts. Every day is a bit of a drag, and my body ached every night, but not that good ache of progress. It was that bad ache of sadness, or lethargy. That old friend, Shortness of Breath, had come back to visit. Nights have been restless to say the least. Yet, I continued to stay unmotivated. All I wanted to do was sit on the couch and eat ice cream. My 5:15 in the morning workouts were completely fruitless. I was getting up, and going down to the gym and walking for 15-20 minutes, but the reality was, I was not committed to the idea, and thus, my track record for getting up at that time was spotty. What was the point?

What is the point? I have a great life. I have a job that inspires and stimulates me, and that fulfills so many of my own personal needs. I have a fiancée who loves me, and I have great friends. So what if I spent my life a bit lethargic and out of shape? This is the exact mind with which I spent so much time my entire life and it had served me well enough, right?

WRONG!!! Every single day of this school year I have felt disgusted. Every single day of this school year I have felt useless once the school day was over. Every single day. Even though I had put a few pounds back on, the daily workouts had served a purpose. They got me up and moving and thinking about life in a positive way. As I found myself falling deeper and deeper into isolation, I kept thinking I would just snap out of it, that it would pass as so many other things had. It was only this last weekend that I realized how wrong I was. Certain feelings do not just pass through, they fester. They hang out until you DO SOMETHING. It was time to do something.

This week I began fresh with what will hopefully be a new routine. Tuesday morning and this morning I got up at 4:15 and went outside for a walk/job that measured out to around 2 miles worth of cardio. It felt amazing. Last night I solved my sleeping issue. I was exhausted, but in a completely different way. It was exhaustion from having completed a full day. It was the most satisfying kind of exhaustion. I hit my mattress last night, and instead of the anxiety of the day washing over me, I was met with a quiet mind, and a quiet body. Instead of tossing and turning for hours hoping for sleep to catch up to me, I turned Pandora on (Regina Spektor station), cuddled with Gatsby for a few moments, and then, without giving it another thought, I was carried away to dreamland. On top of that, I did not have anxiety filled violent dreams. It was a peaceful sleep.

Now, I am not deluded into thinking every night is going to be like that, but just being active from 4:30-5:10 in the morning, and then giving myself time to have a proper breakfast, and allow myself time to stretch and make sure my body was fresh for the day has made a ton of difference. This morning’s workout was interrupted by rain, but it felt awesome, and getting home and having time to get myself together was great. Not being in a rush is spectacular. My entire mindset has changed in these last two days. Maybe I will never lose the kind of weight I hope to lose. Maybe I will never be as healthy as I would hope to be, because my priorities do not allow for that. It is more important for me to be a great teacher, than to be in great shape. However, that does not mean I should stop trying to find a way to be more active, and to keep trying to be in shape, and keep trying to lose weight.

Year three of this life change has been tough in terms of my own physical and mental fitness. Any weight loss blog you read will eventually come around to the dreaded plateau section. I have hit plateau after plateau over the last few years, but this current one hit me like a hammer. For months it weighed me down. I have not overcome this plateau, but I changed my perspective. I reminded myself that this was never about the weight I lost, but about the progress I made to positively change my life. This was meant to be about feeling better, and being better, not about a specific loss weight target. That is what I need to focus on. Everything else will come as it comes.

Every so often I find that I am hitting my head against a wall repeatedly, in a metaphorical sense. Eventually I realize that the wall is not the problem, my head is. The wall is not going to change, so I have to change my perception of the wall. It does not always work, but more often than not, a change in perspective can do wonders for the disquiet mind, body, and soul.

Clash of the summer goals

This summer I laid out a series of goals that I thought were reasonable, but would also require a tremendous amount of effort on my part. These goals were spread across a few different goal making categories, but the common thread was that they would help me rediscover who I am. I wanted to read tons, write tons, spend plenty of time with those close to me, and I wanted to work out twice a day and lose a pound a week, which would have put me at roughly 13 pounds lost for the summer.

Quite early on in summer, I realized how difficult this truly was. Getting up at 8 in the morning and walking by 9, gave me plenty of time to write a little bit or read a little bit before Martina came home from work, but doing all three of those things in the same day turned out to be quite difficult. I tried a variety of combinations, but ultimately, the clashing goals left something out, and that something became my workout routine. It turned out that this summer, I felt it was more important to take care of who I was inside. Instead of working out twice a day and losing 13 pounds, I worked out once a day for the first half of summer, and ended up losing 7 pounds this summer. It was 8, but I put a pound back on in the last few weeks, which is totally fine.

Since I wrote a 10 page fantasy story for a Fantasy literature class my junior year in high school, I have wanted to write a novel. My senior year I wrote a 2 page slasher story for my Mystery and Terror Lit elective class. Once I got out of high school, I wrote dozens of half finished, half baked stories of varying genres. Eventually I stopped write prose all together. I wrote a ROM-COM screenplay that is roughly 50 pages long during college, and eventually a zombie screenplay for a Horror film class in college. After college I pretty much turned to verse. I wrote poetry nonstop for a few years. I have notebooks full of poetry. In that time I tried to go back to prose. I tried to write a novel about how David's death changed me as a person. I tried to write a novella about a guy who had not slept in a month. I tried. I tried. I tried. Nothing ever stuck. I kept going back to verse. Poetry was my creative saving grace, but I knew deep down there was more that I needed to say, not to anyone else, mind you, but to myself.

I have toyed with screenplays, play writing (I still love my idea for a play), and I even tried to write an old timey radio show once. My entire life in filled with half finished ideas. Then the worst thing happened. I stopped writing. I was blogging at the time, between this blog and my movie review blog, but for over a year, I just stopped writing. I was not making time for it because the entire enterprise just frustrated me. What was the point when I knew I was not going to finish it anyway?

When 2013 began I was at the lowest I had been in a few years. I did not have a teaching job, and I was working the exact same job I had in high school and college. I was barely able to contribute to my life financially. Instead of wallowing, I had an idea for a title of a poem. It was called "Curbside Redemption." I tried to write this poem about two people confessing things to each other while sitting at a curb in 2 in the morning. It was not working because verse was just not the right avenue for it. That title turned into the ending of a short story, where a guy, utterly destroyed by his own infidelity, confessed to his girl on a curb at 2 in the morning, and while she walked away from him, it allowed him to begin to feel like he could work on his issue, therefore finding his redemption. The story was a disaster. Everything about it was forced. I was 5 pages in, and I deleted everything I had, except that title. That title just kept haunting me, begging me to find the write story befitting of such a great title.

Around this time a friend asked me if I could watch her youngest kid a few days a week, which would include dropping the kid off at swimming and then picking her up an hour later. I started to think about this title more, and because I was now given this new place to write, and time to write, I thought about what would have happened if I had made a few different decisions in my life. What would have happened if I had given into certain things, or people. Once I stopped thinking about the Curbside Redemption being one of romance, the entire story just hit me. It was a teacher feeling redemptive after a conversation with a student. From there it just clicked. When it was all said and done, I had a legitimate novella on my hands. I felt reignited. It would not have mattered if everyone who read it just hated it. It was something I accomplished!

Finishing that novella reminded me of how badly I have always wanted to write a novel. I put it on the bucket list I shared with my students last year, and I got it in my head that 2014 was going to be the year of the novel. My students had just finished reading Into the Wild and I was becoming incredibly interested in cross country road trips. The idea for my novel was that a man would meet a woman, and after a whirlwind few days, they would get in a car and drive across the country together. Each chapter would switch points of view. The guy was going to be a sheltered guy who thought this woman was going to save him from a life of loneliness, and the woman was going to be a woman running away from all sorts of messy choices, who half way through the trip was going to realize the guy was expecting her to be a savior of some sort.

I started it over and over again, but ultimately it was a waste. It never felt honest, so I sat down one day and thought about what spoke to me. In Curbside Redemption I had tackled the life of someone allowing his addictions to control his life, and through this blog I have spent years thinking about how I have used food like a drug my whole life, but never thought of it in that way because we usually only see addiction as something that makes someone out of control. I decided to tackle addictions in my novel. I decided that the novel would be about 5 people whose lives connected through one character. I would tackle food addiction through two different lenses, gambling addiction, and a character whose constant searching for an escape to emptiness led her into a series of bad decisions. I also wanted to tackle a variety of issues. In fact, I might be tackling too many, but who cares?

This summer I have completed what I think is 75% of my very first novel. Yes, my physical goals fell by the wayside, but this novel has been insanely cathartic. It has allowed me to write about how it feels to be obese in an every day setting. How uncomfortable public transportation is, how sitting at a bar with stationary stools can be painful and embarrassing, and a whole host of other things that I didn't even know I was dealing with until I started writing. My goal is to finish my first draft before 2014 is over.

I have to do it because I already have my project for 2015 thought of: a collection of short stories revolving around the theme of TIME. I want to explore different genres, different styles, and different narrative structures, but be loosely connected by time. I have two stories already thought up.

Who knows if I will ever let anyone read any of these new finished products, and who knows if I ever plan to do anything with them (probably not) but it is the sense of accomplishing long standing goals that keeps me moving.

This post was meant to be more about the challenges of having so many goals, but I guess I really needed to write about the writing process.


As the school year gets going, I am planning to rededicate myself to my journey to health, so I am hoping to keep blogging semi regularly.

I pretend they don't, but words hurt

Before I begin, mother I apologize for any swearing in this post. I am not sure there will be any, but it is definitely possible.

Some days just suck. Today did not start out as one of those days. In fact, considering how sick I have been feeling for the last 36+ hours, I was in pretty great spirits when I woke up. I packed 6 boxes of books for our upcoming move, I cleaned the kitchen and this afternoon I topped 20,000 words for my novel. It was quite an excellent day all things considered. Then I went to Safeway to pick up Nyquil, throat drops, and a few other things. As I was leaving the store, I started to cross in the crosswalk, when this truck looked like it was not going to stop, so I stopped. I waited. The guy stopped. I waved him through. He waved me through. I waved him through, he waved me through so finally, I went. After maybe 6 steps the guy shouts out of his window "Hey move it along fatty."

Now this is not the first, second, third, fifth, twentieth, fiftieth or even hundredth time someone has shouted derogatory shit about my weight at me. It, in fact, happened just a week or so again. It started happening when I was 10 years old, happened on a daily basis through my teens, and then on a weekly basis in adulthood. I hear comments from random people in stores, I hear comments from students, and I obviously hear them when they are hurled at me loudly like today. There was a time in my life when every single one of these comments got to me. I missed school pretty much every day of 7th and 8th grade because I was tired of being mocked for being fat. I was tired of girls wondering aloud what bra size I wore. This comment today was nothing compare to some of the shit I have endured in my life. It is just a part of my life I have learned to accept because otherwise, most days would just be a nightmare. I just do not have the energy to fight every single person who shouts "Fat Ass" outside of their car.

I am not sure why, but today it hit me like the words were actually rocks being tossed at me. They stung. It hurt. A lot. I hate admitting it, because I have been in such a positive place lately, but frankly, I got to my car and nearly started crying. I know I am not unique and that there are people in this world who endure far worse than I do, which is partly why normally I can let those ugly words run off me like a warm breeze.

I want to say that I am writing this in better space, with some positive affirmation, but I am not. I am quite down. I know that people who shout things like that are probably insecure and I know that I am better than to let that get to me. I know all of the nice things my friends will say to pick me up, but frankly, right now, they do not matter. I feel awful. Some random person decided I needed to be reminded that I am fat. Once a week some random person feels the need to remind me that I am fat. As if, I am not aware of that when I wake up every morning and look in the mirror. I also wish I could say that I have accepted that I am fat, and that I am comfortable with that fact, but I have not and I am not. I have accepted that I need to appreciate my body more. I am comfortable knowing that I am fat and that I am working on myself, and that I am less fat than I was two years ago, but words hurt.

I see it all of the time. I hear students call each other names. I make snide comments about a weird looking stranger on occasion, thinking that person does not hear me, but what if that person does. I see people taking pictures of odd looking people and posting them on social media to mock them. Girls called each other bitch and slut like they are terms of endearment, but I wonder if the girls being called slut think of it as endearing? I know people get flung much worse hate than I get. I have no idea how people deal with it on a regular basis. This shit sucks. There is so much ugliness in the world, and I think, sometimes we do not think about how it hurts someone on an individual basis. My entire day was ruined by this one guy.

There is no denying that words hurt, but words can also heal. I do my best to tell the people I love, why I love them. I try to fill the world with hope, but maybe I need to extend that to strangers. Maybe I need to roll down my windows and say "Hey you look great today." Though we live in such a cynical world, that person would probably not believe me.

This is probably scatter brained and I am not sure I am arriving at any point, but I deal with thoughts through writing about them. I am not looking for pity, and I am not fishing for compliments. I am not sure what I am looking for. I do know that the next time I see someone who looks odd, or different or unique, I am not going to say anything mean. I do not want to be the reason someone gets to his/her car and nearly breaks down like I nearly did today.

I am sure next week when I hear someone call me a fat ass, I will let it roll off of me because, hey, that is the life of a fat person. But today, it has defeated me. Today it has me questioning whether I am ever going to lose enough weight to stop getting those comments from people. Today it has me wanting to turn on the TV, pop some popcorn and retreat from the world. I hate that some random guy has that much power over me in this moment.

This is usually the moment in my dark posts where I start to feel good again, but I don't. I am just going to end this with, next time you see someone and you want to ridicule them, even just to your friend, don't. It sucks to be on the receiving end of those comments for 20+ years.

My morning Pro and Con list

On a typical morning I wake up anywhere between 7:30 and 8:30, today was no different. I was stirred from my sleep around 7:45 by the sound of my poor sick and pained kitten receiving eye drops courtesy of Martina before Martina headed to work. I went on my walk/jog at 9:15. What follows is everything that happened in my brain between 7:45 and 9:15, and is not atypical for any given morning these days.

8:00 am: I should get out of bed, make some breakfast, let my food settle and go for a walk.
8:01 am: Why?? I am tired. I should stay in bed. My body aches from the stress of dealing with the cat this weekend. I have earned some extra sleep. Plus, I did not exactly get a ton of sleep last night because I was constantly worried about Daisy. Plus, if I go out for a walk, my body is just going to get sore, and my knee has been feeling sore for the last few days. Just Stay in bed for a little while then get up and make a huge filling and time consuming breakfast.

There it is, isn't it? When I look at the pros and cons of working out, the cons always outweigh the pros. There are a dozen or more things I enjoy doing more than working out. I would prefer to sleep, read, watch a movie, write, play video games, watch Orange is the New Black, eat, play with kittens and a host of other things. I am too tired. I am too achy. I am too stressed. I am too busy. I am not seeing results fast enough. WHAT IS THE DAMN POINT? The cons not only out number the pros, they are louder. That pesky pain in my right knee screams like it is being stabbed with a knife. The stress pounds repeatedly on my shoulders. My sleepy eyes heavy with exhaustion. It is so hard to hear over that. Sadly, this summer, I have listened to all of the cons way too much. My work outs have been spotty at best, full of the frustrating starts and stops that someone first driving a manual car feels. I cannot get any strong momentum going.

See, I can list 10-20 cons to getting up in the morning and working out and only 1 pro: To feel better. That is it. That is the only reason to exercise. It is simple and shockingly profound, but it is the only reason. If I want to feel better, I have to exercise. If I exercise regularly, suddenly so many of those cons dissipate. The pain in my knee lessens because my knee is getting stronger. That stress lessens because I am out working it out. I am thinking through the problems. I am getting my blood flowing. That sleepiness goes away because I sleep better at night after I work out. I just feel better. In fact, every facet of my day gets better. I do not feel lazy for playing video games after a work out. I get excited to try and cook new healthy dinners. I can even focus better on a book when I exercise in the morning because all of my senses are fired!

There may be 20 loud cons, and there maybe only 1 pro, but in terms of sheer weighted volume, the pro vastly outweighs the cons. The problem is remembering that. The problem is remembering how I felt this morning after walking/jogging over 3 miles. Yes, I was beat, and sweaty, and totally unequivocally gross, but I was also refreshed and felt like I had accomplished something. I was not lazy this morning, and in turn I played video games for much less time than I would have other wise. On days where I listen to that steady pro, I am not as accepting of a lifestyle of utter laziness.

Maybe other people have other reasons for exercising but I feel like they all come back to that one truth: We want to feel better about ourselves. Sure, for some it may be more of an image thing, but that still falls under the same umbrella. For me, I just want to feel like today I am better than the man I was yesterday. And I want to make it a challenge to be a better man tomorrow than I am today.

Today's soundtrack: Tech N9ne: Something Else. It is an album that pushed me to move faster and to think harder about my fitness goals because of how wonderfully honest the lyrics are. I would not recommend the album to anyone who is not a strict lover of rap music, though.

The goal now is to listen for the pro in the sea of noise that is the con list. It feels good to be back....today.

The myth of the "friend zone."

Before I dive in: I know this is not what this blog is typically about. I have been wrestling with this for a few weeks and decided the only way to stop wrestling with it was to just write it. I will go back to my usual posts next week. Also, this is purely anecdotal. I am adding my voice to the dialogue only for those who know me. I am no trying to incite anything major, there are no studies cited, there is not social justice theoretical framework that is framing this post. It is a purely subjective blog post. Take it or leave it. Oh also, this is my personal experience, so it is going to be about male/female friendships, not those of someone attracted to the same sex having same sex friendships. Okay here goes.

In 9th grade I had a friend who had a bit of a reputation. Getting over the fact that these reputations existed in 9th grade, people assumed I was friends with her because I was hoping the stories of her sexual aggressiveness were true. When someone asked me about it, I said that we were not hooking up that person said "Well then, what's the point" as if the only reason to be friends with a sexually active female was to have sex with her. This person assumed that I wanted sex, but that she was unwilling to give it to me. This is when I became familiar with the "Friend Zone" term. This girl would go on to be a great to me through high school. In fact, that same year, my 9th grade class went to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival, and after someone who shoved me to the ground in the pouring rain, and I was unable to go change my clothes because we were running late for a show, this girl was the only person who would sit with me at the show. She was the only friend of mine who helped me clean up at the theater, and she was the only one who hung out with me during the rest of the trip after my other friends joined the chorus of people who were laughing at me. If friendship is measured by what I got out of it, well she was a great friend because she salvaged my first trip to Ashland.

All of my life I have had incredible female friends. I have also always had way more female friends than male friends. It is something that my ex-girlfriend could never get over. It started with that girl in 9th grade and has continued to this day. Over the years I have had people always mention how often I have been put in the Friend Zone, and I always reacted the way I was culturally told to act: disappointed. I would act like the victim I thought I was supposed to act like. I was acting upset that these girls did not want to have sex with me, but the reality is, I was not upset. I understand attraction. I get that friendship does not equal sex. I also understand that my life does not revolve around sex. When I look back on my life time of great female friendships, all I think about are the incredibly rich relationships I have with them. I think about all of the great life lessons I have learned through the friendships. You know the same things I learn in my male friendships, because FRIENDSHIP IS NOT ABOUT GETTING TO SEX.

I like to think that my girlfriend would confirm that I am a good boyfriend. She might even say I am a great boyfriend. I strive be the best boyfriend I can be on a daily basis, but I strongly believe I am, on my worst day,a good boyfriend. I have always attempted to treat my girlfriend in a way that her friends who have not met me would love me because of how she talks about me. I believe I accomplish this because of 2 things. First, I was raised by a wonderful man who treated my mom with incredible respect. Growing up my parents had regular date nights, and while my dad is not super affectionate, I took notice of how he treated my mother. The second reason I think I am able to accomplish this is because of all of my female friends. Over the years I took notice of what girls want. Yes, it gets frustrating when girls you like date jerks, but that was not because I thought they should be with me, but because I wanted them to be happy, and over the last 20 years of my life, I listened to what girls generally want. I got so much out of those friendships because each one made me a better person, and prepared me for the time when I met a girl who not only wanted to be my friend, but wanted to my partner in life, love, and friendship.

If you are looking at sex with women as the end game, you are not a nice guy, and you did not get put in the Friend Zone by a girl, you got put in the Asshole Zone, because that is what you are. I have no idea what would have happened if some of my female friends had had sex with me. Were there female friends I wanted to have sex with? Yes, absolutely, but who knows how different my life would have been. Would that relationship have been irrevocably damaged beyond repair? Would it have turned me in the kind of guy who was looking at sex as the end game? I have no idea, but I do know that I am thankful for every single female friend in my past. Friendship is not a consolation prize. Sex is not "first place" because sex is not a prize to be won. If you think a girl has put you in the Friend Zone, you are not actually friends with this girl. Friends do not turn their backs if sex is off the table. Yes, it can be difficult to have feelings for a girl and listen to her complain about her current boyfriend, and if it gets to be too much, just walk away because you are not doing yourself or her any favors, but please stop complaining about being in the Friend Zone. If you are actually a friend, you will listen to her, and be there for her even if the boyfriend is a jerk. Then, when the time comes that you find a girl who wants to be with you, remember all of those lessons you learned from your female friends and be the best boyfriend you can be, and continue to be the best friend you can be to your female friends.

I am the man I am today because of countless female friends, some of which I want to mention here in no particular order: Martina, Wendy, Marina, Jessica, Jessica, Taylor, Karly, Megan, Christina, Emylee, Lyndi, Cindy, Sarah, Erin, Joelle, Shirley, Malia, Megan, Andrea, Carolyn, Caitland, Lauren, Liz, Amanda, Tayler, Brandi, Brittany, China. Thank you ladies for helping me be a better friend. Thank you for helping me be a better human. Thank you for helping me be just better.

SO to answer the age old question about men and women being friends, yes they can be, and it is awesome.

Appreciating the only body I get

I am currently sitting in a Barnes and Noble, where I have been holed up for a few hours to escape the heat in the world, because, as I documented on Facebook yesterday, our air conditioning is broken. A broken A/C is the perfect cap to this current heat wave we are experiencing, right? Martina and I have been lucky to have great people around us to help when things go wrong, so we are doing just fine. Besides, in the grand scheme of life, a broken A/C unit seems relatively small. It makes summer days unpleasant, but there are enough places like B&N that exist to make it manageable. The heat, of course, is not the point of this post, but it relevant to my health.

Summer is currently a week old, and I am proud of my first week. I reached my steps goal 5 of my 6 days, and the day I did not get there, I got close (1 mile away). I ate all of the vegetables, including making stir fry for the first time, roasting broccoli for the first time, and spinach in my breakfast every day and spinach in my sandwiches on sandwich days. Outside of Wednesday night when Martina and I were celebrating, I cut out super salty snacks, and more importantly to my long term financial sanity, we only ate out 1 night. The start of this week has had complications because of the heat. Yesterday I did manage to go over my steps goal by 4,000 steps, but we have not been able to cook at home so far. So far, things are going well. However, I have not been able to truly find a solid rhythm in these things. I went out for walks a few days, but other days I have just relied on my every day browsing of shelves at B&N or Safeway for my steps. I have not yet begun my second daily work out, and I spent too much time during my first week playing video games and not enough reading or writing.

This is my 8th or 9th "Day One" since I began my journey 3 years ago. I have written extensively about Day One, and if I were more tech savvy, I would link to that post, so I am not going to rehash the Day One idea. I want to focus on my positives, in hopes of providing myself with a reminder that baby steps are important. Last summer is when I was at the height of my jogging and biking. I was straight up killing it because I had built a routine. I am slowly building that routine now. My alarm goes off at 8 every morning. Now, I have to actually GET UP when it goes off, instead of laying in bed for another hour. If I can actually get up at 8, I can get out on my morning walk/jog before 9, which is manageable with the heat levels these days. I also need to utilize the pool more. The big issue there is my appearance. I am still incredibly self conscious about all of the fat I am carrying all over my body. It is never an issue when I have Martina with me, but when I go down to a pool by myself, I am suddenly incredibly aware of how fat I am and how gross I feel/look. It is an issue I am continuing to work through, but my self conscious mind always believes everyone else is staring at me and being super grossed out by the pasty white flab swimming through the water. I know, with time, I will conquer this. The fact that I can be shirtless in my apartment is already huge progress for me.

Instead of agonizing over that self consciousness, I am going to focus on the positive. Buying shorts and buying swim trunks this week, was actually a painless process. I have been wearing the same pair of shorts for a few years because shopping for them is always a hassle. Not only was I able to find swim trunks that fit (I usually purchase swim trunks that are too small because it is what they have available), I found regular shorts that fit perfectly and are 5 sizes smaller than when I was at my heaviest. Beyond that, I finally felt comfortable buying a relatively thin t-shirt. Typically Big and Tall size shirts are thick, and do not breathe AT ALL, but this weekend I tried on a thinner shirt and felt comfortable in it. I am not as worried about how it lays against my rolls of fat, or worried about how OTHER people might feel about how I look in a shirt. When you are in 100 plus degree heat, the last thing I want is to be in a t shirt that does not breathe, and just collects sweat.

In keeping with the theme for summer, reconnecting, I am reconnecting with loving myself. It can be a trying thing, to look at yourself and just love what you see. I am not sure I have had long periods of time where I truly loved myself, but I am working hard to replicate those moments, and have them last longer. My body is the only body I get, so I need to appreciate it more. I have started by treating it better, but I have to realize that even if I lose all of this weight, it will still be the same body. I think sometimes I get lost in that. I keep thinking if I lose the weight, I will somehow get a "better" body. It will still be this body. It may look different, but it will still be the body that has been 1 fight. It will still be the same body that has been behind the wheel, for 10 fender benders, none of which were my fault. It will be the same body I had when I fell in love, got my heart broken and fell in love again. It is the same body that played sports as a kid, and danced in theater starting at age 15.

For some reason, just typing that last paragraph out feels freeing. It a lesson I am still learning, but there it is typed in the ink of the internet. I will love my body because it is the only body I get. I will love myself because this is the only *myself* I get. It starts with appreciating myself and my body. It starts with understanding how to treat myself and my body. It starts with treating myself and body well. it starts with understanding this is my body and this is the only body I get.