I'm Fat

 

Not Jabba the Hut level, Peter Griffin, or Homer Simpson, or Mr. Creosote (vomiting guy from Monty Python “The Meaning of Life”), but chubbier than I’d like - somewhat around the "before" picture for Bradley Cooper.  I earn the dubious distinction of having a Dad bod without being a dad.  D’oh!

 I’ve never been skinny – that’s my brother’s department. I have had broad shoulders and decent muscles, so I am of the athletic build.  Rugby was the only sport I played, and mostly in high school.   My brother’s reward for playing in business school was to injure his knee to the point of requiring surgery.  Probably not worth it.

 My weight has gone up to around 240, from around 200 a few years ago.  This was not a sudden gain but a gradual one over the years.  I actually sat down and plotted the progress on Excel, cross referencing it with my notes for contemporaneous exercise.  What I found was that despite exercising consistently and regularly, which included weight lifting and cardio (treadmill), my weight still steadily increased. 

 A few years past I tried a diet supplement called Chroma Slim (or Lean), which I bought from GNC.  The active ingredients are L-carnitine and chromium picolinate.  That initially worked wonders:  it stimulated my metabolism and I lost 30 pounds.  However, at some point the supplement stopped working and I gained the weight back.  Periodically I’d purchase L-carnitine and chromium picolinate from GNC, but they no longer work.

 Another supplement I tried was capaiscin, called “BURN”.  Well, it burned my wallet but not my fat, notwithstanding a slick 30 minute infomercial talking about how capsaicin, the ingredient of cayenne peppers that makes them hot and spicy, can act as a powerful thermogenic if concentrated with other (proprietary) ingredients in a special supplement.  Well, I tried it and it did exactly nothing.  I do eat hot salsa (habanero or ghost pepper) with chips.  

 Incidentally, the FDA doesn’t seem to do much.  Product liability suits may take care of anything actually harmful – in theory – but they fall short if the producer is overseas.  In any case the FDA's role is simply to make sure these aren't actually harmful.

Even if a supplement is not harmful, it may well be ineffective:  sugar pills, snake oil, and glorified placebos.  It seems the supplement industry managed to get around this by slapping a disclaimer on the label: “The FDA has not evaluated these claims”.  If Consumer Reports has done an evaluation of weight loss products, I’d love to hear about it – especially if they managed to find one that actually works.  The agencies responsible for battling fraudulent claims, i.e. supplements which aren't harmless but don't work as promised, are the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice.  But in terms of effectively policing the weight loss supplement market, these agencies are ineffective.  Whether this is due to simple incompetence, overworked (they don't have the budget to effectively do their jobs) or actual collusion with the industry they're supposed to be monitoring, I couldn't tell you.  

 I’m already drinking green tea and a caffeine pill, the latter to get caffeine without drinking soda, which is how we’d normally get it.  I must be the only adult who can’t stand coffee (disgusted Kirsten Wiig face here).  Fortunately green tea has some caffeine in it.  I actually switched from soda to green tea back in 2008, but still no major results.  Doctors have advised me that metabolism slows down as we age, and as noted, I’ve yet to find any supplement successful at beefing it back up again.  

 Three Buff Dudes. 

Bradley Cooper buffed up for “The A-Team” (2010).  Born in 1975, he was 35 at that time.  As he described it, doing so required intense exercise and strict diet – and finally he decided that doing so was not worth it beyond the role itself. 

Hugh Jackman buffed up for his Wolverine roles.  Born in 1968, he’s about my age.  Those roles, in eight movies from 2000 to 2017, cover his age from 32 to 49.  By the later time this meant exercising full-time, but he was being well paid to do exactly that.  I'm guessing the adamantium skeleton and retractable claws were CGI...

Rob McIlhenney, aka “Mac” from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, recently joined the buff crowd.  Born in 1977, he’s now 44 years old.  Sharing his secrets, so to speak, he indicated that it requires 40 hours a week of exercise (“forget having a normal, full-time job”) and bizarre diet of eating nothing enjoyable at all.  He also complained that compliments came mostly from other guys, and his own wife wasn’t nearly as thrilled as he’d hoped, as it now put pressure on her to maintain her own weight.  I suppose she may have been concerned that it also attracted competition for her; but although "Mac" may have "come out", Rob has not, and as noted most of the attention was from other guys.  Oops!   

 Current routine.   Three days a week at Gold’s Gym.  Oddly, the gym shut down from March to June 2020 during COVID.  During that time I’d walk up the stairs in my high rise, and do pushups and situps at home.  Yet I weighed about the same in June 2020 when Gold’s reopened as I did in March when it closed.

 Anyhow.  Weight lifting, fly, press, and other stuff to make arms big and chest nice.   Plank, situps and leg lifts for the abs – I’ve probably got a six pack under 30 lbs. of fat.  And then cardio.  That was 30 minutes on the treadmill, until the weight gain meant nasty pain in the knees and ankles.  So I switched to the elliptical.  Still not a whole lot of results.

 Current diet.  I pulled out almost all sugar.  I substitute chicken for beef most of the time.   I allow myself one pizza a month.  For fast food I limit myself to Chipotle and those grilled chicken nuggets from Chick-Fil-A.  Lunch is often a kale salad with spinach and cucumbers.  I make vegetable smoothies (avocado, berries, green apple, banana, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, celery, kale, and spinach) which I drink every morning, plus hard boiled eggs.  As noted, green tea replaced soda long ago.  I keep beer down to 1-2 during the weekdays and no more than 4 a night during the weekends.  I try for low sodium variants of anything that has one, but it appears that everything, even sodium itself, seems to have sodium in it.  For bread I’ve been falling in love with sourdough, which falls between white and wheat bread for healthiness.  Lately I’ve been trying protein shakes and Greek yogurt.  I’ll keep trying until I find something that works.

 I certainly don’t’ expect to be able to eat whatever I want, or avoid exercising, and lose weight, least of all at my age (52).  If I couldn’t do that when I was younger, I certainly can’t do it now. 

 LENT.  By the way…   I’m Catholic, which means from Ash Wednesday (late February) to Easter Sunday (early April) I give up something.  My dad said that Sundays don’t count during Lent, but I keep it up for the full six weeks.  And some years I gave up fast food AND beer for Lent.  And guess what?  I weighed the same on Easter Sunday as I did on Ash Wednesday.  So much for that.

 Beyond that, I’ll keep up the diet and exercise and hope to find some combination that works.