Month: April 2009

Got this pointed out to me this morning: The Gladiator Diet.

Compared to the average inhabitant of Ephesus, gladiators ate more plants and very little animal protein. The vegetarian diet had nothing to do with poverty or animal rights. Gladiators, it seems, were fat. Consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley, and legumes, like beans, was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds. “Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat,” Grossschmidt explains. “A fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight.” Not only would a lean gladiator have been dead meat, he would have made for a bad show. Surface wounds “look more spectacular,” says Grossschmidt. “If I get wounded but just in the fatty layer, I can fight on,” he adds. “It doesn’t hurt much, and it looks great for the spectators.”

The time has come when we all must accept that it’s not worth it to sit on the sidelines anymore, and enter the fray of digital ebook readers and join the future of literary passage.

The choice: Amazon’s Kindle vs. Sony Reader Digital Book.

Let’s start out by commenting on the names of the product. They are the dumbest names ever. I think if you want a breakthrough product the people in charge should have done something better with the titling. I’m on a plane yesterday and the guy across the aisle has got the Sony reader and I interrupt what is no doubt the slow process of his eyeballs becoming slowly corroded by the tiny radioactive lights emitting from the gadget because it’s still relatively early mass technology and these things haven’t been fully vetted by consumer safety engineers, not unlike my cell phone which is likely causing testicular cancer from bouncing in my pocket all day long, and I ask him, “Hey, do you like that Sony reader thing with the digital thing face on it?”

Actually, I was a lot slicker than that. I was reading a firm, physical version of the New York Times on paper and the full back page ad just happened to be the announcement of Sony releasing 500,000 free domain books through Google on their specialized reader app. What I did was slide that ad across the aisle as the conversation starter. The guy sees it and goes, “Yeah.” Then he returned to reading. So I had to prompt further to get some answers.

The biggest takeaway I got was that the Sony Reader Digital eBook NextGen Thingy is more plug-and-play because it doesn’t require a subscription and transfer release. Apparently, the battery only pumps on page turn so it can last 3 weeks+ on a full charge. Also, it can hold a lot more info than the Kindle. Meanwhile, the Kindle requires a subscription and you have to email the book to your service so that Amazon can forward it back to you? However, the Kindle has newspaper and magazines, which is cool.

Thoughts? Experiences with either? They ain’t cheap.

There are some things you engage in for a minute. Some for a few minutes. Some for hours. Some for days. Some for months. Some for years. Some for decades.

I am learning that bodybuilding is in that last category. It’s a sport of patience, persistence, and intense, regular dedication.

There are many who have done miraculous “body transformations”: three or four months, and holy crap, look at those before-and-after photos. For most of us, though, who aren’t unemployed or who weren’t in great shape before and set back due to some accident or injury, losing the slow-creep-of-fat is a much slower process.

As most of you know, I’ve lost a lot of fat over the past year. I started September 1 at 251 lbs, added in some weight lifting in October, monitored my stats while putting on around fifteen pounds of muscle through December, then finally decided to take some photos. Here’s December 2008 to April 2009. Avert your eyes if you are offended by the site of pasty white overweight men.

“Before” pic: 233 lbs, around 30+% body fat. “After” pic: 216 lbs, around 23% body fat. “After” ain’t “After” yet, though, I have a long way to go. It’s sort of “in-the-middle-of”.

Terrible, crappy camera phone, I know. But this is a minimally-dedicated, 1-to-5-times-per-week gym physique I’ve built so far. I know that to take it to the next level, I need to ramp up my cardio, tighten down my diet, and increase my intensity and commitment to make it to the gym 6 times a week.

But I’m realizing physiques aren’t shaped in just a few weeks or months. Losing the fat slowly while building muscle preserves muscle, and allows a superb physique lying underneath all that flab to emerge, in time.

So many times, I think I’m losing the game. Sometimes I can’t lift as much as I did last week. I get tired too quickly on a given exercise. I miss hitting the gym one night due to a lack of motivation. But when I look at before-and-after photos of myself, it helps me to remember that I’m winning even when I feel like I’m losing. Just because I fell short of my goal doesn’t mean that I’m falling short in my progress. The scale is moving the right way. The body fat calipers are moving the right way. The photo log is showing progress.

I’ve been a big fat loser for too long. It’s nice to start winning for once.

This is a political post, but it’s going to take me a while to wind around to the final point. Bear with me; I hope it’s worth the ride.

When I was a kid, we went on a lot of road trips. I mean, long, tedious, hours-spent-winding-through-wilderness road trips. We drove from Maryland to Jersey, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Alabama, Georgia, Florida… basically, if it was near the East Coast and somewhere south of New York State, my family would occasionally get a wild hare to pack all the boys in the car, load the trunk with luggage, and set off to visit family.

On this trip, there were milestones, turnpikes, landmarks, and a whole host of things we passed. There were hills, valleys, mountains, obstacles we had to cross, obstacles we had to dodge, dirt roads, and even an occasional wrong turn with a subsequent U-turn, a little back-tracking, and final arrival at the destination.

You might think this would be kind of a fun trip, right? I mean, you pass all these historical places, sometimes eat out at unique cafes, and you can have fun on a road trip. But that, unfortunately, was not the way our family managed it. My dad was a bit of a cheapskate, and didn’t pay for air conditioning on most of these rides. In fact, in the few vehicles we eventually owned that had air conditioning, he thought that leaving the windows down for a little “4 and 60” natural air conditioning was the way to go to save gas money.

This wasn’t a totally horrible idea, really. I could stick my hand out of the window, catch a few breezes, feel how the air shifted when a big semi rode past, celebrate when that one semi eventually responded to our “honk, honk” hand-signs with a loud air-horn blast, etc. Except the biggest problem was that we usually ended up driving in the muggy, oppressive summer heat, and our cars inevitably had vinyl seats.

The vinyl seats were sticky and uncomfortable, and, being a kid, I of course was in shorts for summer. Which means that my skin stuck to the vinyl. I’d get a rash, or just get really uncomfortable. Some of these ramifications were my own fault for not preparing adequately. I mean, looking back, I think “why didn’t my dad tell me not to wear shorts?” Well, sometimes he did. But more likely, he just assumed I would remember from the mistakes of my past that shorts + vinyl seats + summer heat == bad. I eventually started remembering, and the voyages got a little better.

The last thing, of course, that everybody remembers kids saying, is “Dad, are we there yet?” Now, we kids knew at least on an instinctive level that, until the car was stopped and we saw relatives running out toward the car, that we weren’t there yet. In fact, in most cases, we knew we weren’t anywhere close. Faceless miles of interstate still faced us. Discomfort plagued the trip, and that brother sitting next to me would just not stop touching me and getting his shorts-clothed leg sweat on my legs. The potty and food breaks were way too short, and way too infrequent.

“Are we there yet?” is, in truth, not a legitimate question at all. We weren’t really wondering whether we had arrived at the destination or not; we were actually expressing a general complaint that we were uncomfortable and unhappy that we weren’t already having fun at our final destination.

Despite the outbursts, Dad would keep on driving. Yeah, it was a long freakin’ way. It seemed like an eternity. But even though we could all look on the map and figure out when we were getting close, it still felt like it took forever. I’d second-guess my dad in the driver’s seat, then spend time counting mile markers to see how close we were. I’d question every detour, repeatedly ask “Are we there yet?”, and generally make a nuisance of myself because I didn’t like where we were, was bored, and just wanted the trip to end so that I could have some fun.

Back in November, I voted for Barack Obama. He’s since had to make some really tough decisions. Controversial decisions. Painful decisions. In some cases, wildly unpopular decisions. But these problems were inherited from the previous administrations, and complete recovery is just a long freakin’ way away. The trip back to fun-land is going to take a while. We put who we thought was the best man in charge of directing this huge Winnebago down the road to recovery, and it’s possible he’s going to make mistakes. Sure, we’re welcome to criticize, but for the next few months if I hear more whining and complaining about how long it’s taking, or whether we should have changed lanes back there or not, I’ve got one thing to say to these “Are We There Yet, Dad?” complaints:

Sit down. Buckle up. Stick your hand out of the window and try your best to enjoy the ride. We aren’t there yet.