So, you were just going about your business, and lo and behold, you start having the old familiar feelings set in. A sense of dread, your heart racing at a million miles an hour, and you start having some trouble breathing. Congratulations! You're having a panic attack!
Here's what you do:
1. Completely freak the fuck out! Everybody always tells you to calm down during a panic attack. Has that ever worked? Of course not. Fuck those fuckers. They don't know how to deal with this shit. Those stupid breathing exercises never help either, so don't even bother. Just completely lose your fucking shit, because you need to...
2. Understand that they're coming for you. Everyone is coming for you. Every bad thing you think is going to happen is going to happen. The Illuminati is watching you; the government is spying on you; the cops know what you did and they're coming to arrest you. Your boss is firing you because you smell funny. Your spouse is running away to join the circus, and your pets are conspiring to kill you! Russia is aiming nukes at your current location RIGHT NOW! What did you do to piss off Vladimir Putin? Fuck if I know buddy, but the missiles are a flying! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Because fuck you, that's why!
3. When you've realized how stupid all of that is, you'll realize that you're fine. Your life is fine (probably).
Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, and everybody's gonna die. Come watch t.v.
Depression and anxiety can be a real pain in the ass, and I've suffered from both for at least thirteen years. Ever since I got home from my first deployment with the US Army back in 2003, what I refer to as my "default setting" has been anger. When I'm not feeling angry, I'm probably either having a panic attack or had some setback in my life cause me to imagine the worst case scenario. There have been times when I've been happy (like when I ran the half marathon, or when my kids were born), but those moments have been fleeting, and I eventually go back to my default setting. After I got bariatric surgery, I was happy for a little while with all the weight I was losing, and my non-stop exercise was also helping (note to other people suffering from depression: Exercise helps a lot).
I was looking at YouTube videos a few weeks ago when I found a video from a page called Wisecrack. Their videos use pop culture to talk about things like philosophy, literature, history, and psychology. It was there that I found a gem called, "The Philosophy of Rick and Morty".
I had never seen an episode of Rick and Morty in my life, but I liked the video so much that I watched the entire series over the course of three days. Then, I watched the video again.
The video mentions the worldview of three characters on the show. Rick is a nihilist. He understands that life has no meaning. As a result, he's an angry, bitter, and possibly suicidal alcoholic. Another character, Jerry, believes that life has meaning. The show points out that he's wrong, but his ignorance makes him happy despite being wrong.
The third character is Morty. Morty is the grandson of Rick and the son of Jerry. He accompanies Rick on their adventures in time and space. Because of all that he's experienced, he also believes that life doesn't have meaning. Yet, instead of letting it wear him down like Rick, he just rolls with it. His worldview is summed up in a single clip:
"Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch T.V."
I'm told that Morty's philosophy is a variation of absurdism. Absurdism is the idea that life doesn't have meaning, but humans are going to try to find it anyway. According to the philosophy, there's three solutions that humans have when looking for that meaning:
1. Suicide
2. Religion/Spirituality
3. Acceptance of the absurdity of life.
The first two aren't options for me. Despite my numerous thoughts about suicide, I've avoided that because I know my family needs and wants me alive. I waved bye-bye to religion and faith years ago, so finding meaning in a religion isn't going to happen.
That leaves the third option; accept that life is pointless, and enjoy that it is pointless.
For whatever reason, that option made sense to me. Life has no meaning, so I should stop being so stressed out about it. There's no reason to worry. My life is pointless, and that's good. Any mistakes I've made in the past don't matter, and neither do the many problems that I have today. They're all pointless.
As I thought about all of this, my depression lifted away. So what if my life isn't as great as I hoped it would be? Nobody exists on purpose. So what if I'm overqualified for my job? Nobody belongs anywhere. So what if people don't like me? Everybody's gonna die, and that includes those smug assholes.
This doesn't mean that I don't care about anything. I love my family and I still want them to have a good life. I still want to be in the best shape I can be. I want to be good at my job. The point of all this is that I WANT to do these things, and I don't feel compelled to do them. If I fail, it's alright because it was all pointless, anyway. I don't need to constantly be in control of everything anymore.
This also doesn't mean that all of my many mental illnesses are cured. I'm going to have to get some professional help for that, and since my wife took on a new teaching job with awesome health insurance, I'm going to be able to afford the best therapists in the tri-county area. It does mean that I at least have some breathing space to deal with all the bullshit that goes on in my head.
Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch T.V.
My shoulder got fucked up again back in January. I don't know what caused it, only that I can't lift any weights.
At first, this was a mild annoyance. I already knew I could run to stay fit, and planned on running and doing strength-training routines on my lower body, but that plan went to shit when I hopped on a treadmill and couldn't finish because the shock from my feet hitting the treadmill went up into my shoulder and felt like my arm was being torn off. So I stopped working out altogether.
Not exercising naturally led to weight gain. I'd check the scale each week to find I had packed on another couple of pounds. My pants were getting harder to fit into. I got to 279 before I decided to start dieting again. I'm off carbs until further notice.
I kept getting annoyed at not being able to work out, too. The gym is supposed to be my happy place, and not being able to go to my happy place makes me very unhappy.
After reading some of my old blog posts, I found this one that helped put things into perspective:
If you're not bedridden, you can work out. If your legs are broken, you
can train your upper body. If you have a broken arm, you can do squats.
So long as you aren't a quadriplegic there's something you can do.
After seeing that, I asked myself, "Well, what can you do?"
For cardio, running was definitely out. So was the elliptical, as I wouldn't be able to constantly push and pull the arms for more than a minute before giving into the pain. That left the stationary bike.
For strength training, I couldn't use any free weights, so I settled on using machines. My main leg exercise is the leg press. I'm also working my core. Anything related to muscles at or above the torso are off limits, though.
These aren't my favorite exercises. I've grown to hate exercise machines, and I've always hated the stationary bike, but at least I'm doing something.
I see the same sports medicine doctor that fixed my shoulder the first time in a few weeks. Hopefully he'll have an answer as to why my shoulder is all jacked up and be able to fix it again. I hope he can, because not being able to strengthen my upper body sucks.
This is the diary I had wanted to write before I wrote my long rant about being an exhausted father (for the record, I do love my kids; being a parent is stressful, though).
That diary was also the second most viewed one I've ever posted. The one with the highest views is my before/after pictures. So if I want to drive traffic up, I should either post a clickbaity title, or put up half-naked pics of myself. :D
I'll avoid doing both this time around. I've been wanting to write this for a while now because it'll show the direction I'm going to start going with this blog.
I love to watch the show "Extreme Weight Loss". It's one of the few weight loss shows that I enjoy because it seems to take the idea of weight loss seriously (as opposed to some other shows that make it into a game). After I binge-watched half of last season, I started noticing a pattern with all of the people they work with.
Every person they brought onto the show had some sort of mental or emotional disorder.
There was a woman that was a hoarder. There were sexual assault victims. There was a woman whose dad killed himself. Another was a gambling addict. The list goes on.
Now, I know that all of these people have been hand selected by a very meticulous crew that wants to make sure that the people they bring on are as watchable as possible, and that includes having a good back story. Even still, I started thinking, "How many people do I know that are overweight, and how many of them have had a traumatic experience or a mental illness?"
Turns out, pretty much all of them. I gained a massive amount of weight due to a state of depression I fell into after my first tour in the US Army. Having PTSD and General Anxiety Disorder after Iraq didn't help things, either. I gained weight after both tours, until I blew up to 367 pounds. I know people that have been molested, that went through shitty divorces, have mental disorders, and have a whole slew of issues related to trauma and mental illness that are overweight.
I started looking into whether or not there were any studies done to back up my theory, and it turns out that it's been known about in the medical community for years. High levels of stress, anxiety, and depression can lead to overeating. And if you're like me, without medication there is no "moderate" amount of stress. You're either okay, or you're preparing to survive an ambush. There is no in-between.
The boss called! Get to the foxhole! Prepare to lose your job in 3...2...1...
It's not just the mere act of shoveling food into your mouth and not working it off that makes you fat. Mental illness makes you fat. PTSD can make you fat. Even being poor can make you fat.
Not only that, but being obese increases those problems, or causes them on their own, creating a vicious circle that keeps leading to more obesity and more mental health problems.
Diabetes creates its own issues. I can tell you from personal experience that when your blood sugar levels are too high or too low, you're stressed and you lash out at everyone.
Yeah, it's kinda like that.
So, while I planned on keeping this blog restricted to articles about diet and exercise, I'm going to be writing about other things in my life. The things that cause stress (which is just about everything), mental health, raising kids, and money problems.
So buckle up bitches. The ride is going to get bumpy!
Okay, so I don't really hate my kids (I don't think). I'm just burned out.
When I last posted about my kids, I heaped lavish praise on my youngest daughter, who was at the time the most low-maintenance baby in the history of infants. She just slept all day and rarely cried.
Today, she's 11 months old and mobile. She went from being a quiet, sleepy baby to someone that you have to watch constantly because she will go to anything and everything and try to eat it. This includes my wife's cell phone, which she broke because she chewed it until it died. Having to constantly monitor her is exhausting as shit.
My oldest used to be easy to take care of too, but only because she hated me. For the first year and a half of her life, if I came near her, she'd start crying. So watching her was easy; I just played whatever movie she felt like watching that day and not much else needed to be done.
At the time, I hated that she hated me. People told me that it's common that babies hate their dads at first, that it's just a phase, and she'll grow out of it. She did.
Now, my oldest kid loves me. She loves me so much that whenever I'm home, she wants to be near me. All day, every day. Every minute of every waking moment of both our lives. Ron Swanson summed this up well:
I've watched so much Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood that I'm enraged by the idea of Fred Rogers leaving a legacy. I keep hoping that Prince Wednesday will go all Joffrey, kill his dad so he can claim the throne, and execute the entire cast just so this damn show will be over. But it wouldn't be over, because of the damn DVR that holds all the episodes.
Share my toys? I AM YOUR KING!
My wife is just as burned out as I am. She used to love being a mom, but like me, she's grown tired of the lack of free time, constantly having to monitor one kid to keep her from eating glass, and another one that is attached to her hip. She keeps talking about wanting to get away from the kids for a weekend, but the truth is that we'd need more than a weekend. Probably a month.
Then, there's the guilt. The guilt from not wanting to be around your kids anymore. Hating yourself for being resentful of two loving kids that just want you to be with them and play with them. I have to constantly control my temper because I have to resist the urge to scream at my kids when they're not being bad, but just annoying or too young to understand what I'm telling them.
They're too young to understand that you just want to be left alone sometimes. I can't tell my kid, "Look, I don't want to play with you right now. I just want to lay on the couch and binge-watch Jessica Jones! Go play by yourself!" Even if you could get them to understand what you're saying, they wouldn't understand that it's not personal. You just want some free time.
Eventually, they'll get older and will go to school. They'll play with friends after school, and have enough autonomy to be able to be left alone without adult supervision. That's a long way off though, and my wife and I are just exhausted.
At the time of the last blog entry, my runs were averaging around ten minutes per mile. Part of this was because of the training that I was putting myself through. While my shoulder was injured and I was looking to lose weight, I decided to do the maximum that I could do decrease calories as opposed to being able to run faster. So twice a week I would run five miles, and twice a week I would do sprint days while doing lower body weight lifting. My running did improve, but very slowly.
Now that I'm happy with my weight (more on that later), I decided to knock the dust off an old Higdon training plan. I'm only doing the first two weeks of the program, which are the same except for the sprint day and the long run (which I'm keeping at five miles for now). The first run of the week is three miles, and when I did it last Monday, I found out that I can run much faster when I'm not saving fuel for the last two miles. So I averaged about 9:30 per mile. The next time I ran three miles I averaged about 9:15 per mile. On Saturday, I ran five miles with a finishing time of 46:03. That's just a millisecond over 9:12 per mile. I should have no problem going below nine minutes on my next three mile run (tomorrow). Knock on wood.
One of the reasons why my five mile run was so good was that I have made Saturday my designated "cheat day" on my diet. I used it as an excuse to carbo-load. I ate pancakes for breakfast and had a small pizza for lunch. It was more starch than I had eaten in a month. I'm back to eating low carbs for the rest of the week.
My goal is to eventually run five miles in under forty minutes (less than eight minutes per mile).
As far as my strength training goes, I started doing drop sets to increase my upper body strength quickly. Drop sets methods vary, but for me it was taking the most weight I could do with one rep and doing that; then, reducing the weight and doing as many reps as I could. I continued doing that until I was either bench-pressing ten pounds, or I had reached a weight so low that I could lift it more than 20 times. It's worked very well for me.
I found out that I hadn't lost a lot of strength in my back. Apparently carrying a three year old and an infant around is a pretty good back workout. :) So this week I'm going to start training to do my first chin-up. I've never been able to do a chin-up or a pull-up in my life, not even when I was a skinny kid. It's always been something I want to be able to do. I like the way this plan is looking, so I'll give it a chance.
I've also decided that I'm not going to run a full marathon next year. I'll still do the Crim race with my wife, but there's a lot of stuff I want to be doing aside from running a very long race. I might change my mind down the line about that eventually, but for now I want to increase my strength, and if I can find the money for it (not happening right now-my ass is broke), go back into martial arts.
As far as the money issue goes on martial arts, I'm not going to let myself make any excuses on that, either. I used to be a black belt in Tang Soo Do. I still know how to do most of the moves in my head. There's no reason that I can't practice on my own until I can get the money to go to classes. I'm going to have to start making time for training. When I get the money I'll expand into MMA so I can increase my grappling abilities, but for now I'm more than capable of doing what I learned fifteen years ago.
Now for some really good news!
Last week my wife and I left our kids with her mom for the weekend. We used this as an excuse to have some alone time. We even checked into a hotel like we used to do before we got married. The room had a full body mirror, and I kept staring at myself in the mirror, completely naked. I was completely stunned with how good I look! I just kept looking at my front, then turning to my side. I struggled to walk away from the mirror every time I saw myself in it.
There's many things that give you good feelings, but none of them are nearly as effective as looking at yourself in the mirror naked, and loving how you look.
I guess this means my weight loss journey is at an end. I'm not dieting anymore to lose weight. I'm eating healthy to maintain the body I already have. This is a new experience for me. I either binge-ate whatever I felt like eating at any given time and didn't care if I gained weight, or I was on a diet and trying to meet a weight-loss goal. As of now, the number on the scale doesn't mean anything. I will still workout and eat right, and for that I will lose body fat and gain muscle, but as far as the number on the scale goes, I really don't give a shit.
This isn't to say I'll never weigh myself again. I'll still do that from time to time to make sure I'm not slipping up too badly. I just don't have a goal to move the numbers on the scale in any particular direction. If I gain ten pounds and it's all muscle, that's great. If I notice that my stomach is bulging a little, the scale will show that too, and it'll mean I have to be more careful. But my goal isn't to be thin. That's accomplished. My goal is to get stronger, faster, and better than I was before. The scale doesn't show any of that.
Well, that's no surprise. Between May and September, I didn't work out at all. I also ate a lot of junk food. It's why my last entry talked about my kids but not about fitness. I wasn't even trying to get fit.
I wrote a long time ago that even if you're injured, you can still do something to get in better physical condition. So if you're injured, you should avoid giving up and find something that you can do.
I didn't do that. I gave up. I had a jacked up shoulder, but I didn't run. I did nothing, and I ate a bunch of unhealthy shit. I knew I was gaining weight. I could see it, and so did my family.
So, one day in September, I stepped on the scale. It said 292. I gained 42 fucking pounds, and I was almost back in the 300 club, a place I promised myself I'd never go back to. So I went to a place called the Medical Weight Loss Clinic to lose weight, and I started running again. I worked my legs on weight training days even though I couldn't lift with my arms.
I wanted to blog about going back on the diet and working out again, but at 292 pounds I was too ashamed. I was angry at myself for letting my body nearly revert back to where I was pre-surgery.
I'm now down to 256 pounds. Just six pounds away from where I peaked.
Medical Weight Loss Clinic gave some good pointers, but I still had to cheat on my diet because no matter how many times they swear differently (and they did), they have no idea how to deal with athletic people. They didn't know how to deal with a guy that burns anywhere from 1,100 to 1,500 calories in an exercise session. So I ate extra meat, protein shakes, and occasionally had to carbo-load to keep my blood sugar from hitting rock bottom. .So I'll be quitting this diet next week and start working on carb cycling. A lot of athletes swear by it, so I'll give it a shot, because...
My shoulder is finally healed up! Yay!
After waiting for months for my shoulder to heal on its own, I decided to get an MRI and saw a sports medicine specialist. The reason for my injury was a calcium deposit that had formed on the tip of my humurus, right where the bone meets the shoulder. So the doctor used an ultrasound to find the deposit, stabbed it with a large needle until it was no longer attached to my shoulder, and used another needle to suck it out. After a few days of recovery, I had full range of motion and no pain in my arm.
Now that my arm is healed up, I'm going to be working out even more than before.
My fixed arm also changed my priorities. When all I could do was work on my lower body, I decided I wanted to do a full marathon next year. Now I'm questioning that. My wife wants to do the Crim next year and I'll run that with her, but I don't know if I want to run a marathon when there's a lot of other stuff I want to do. I want to try powerlifting, martial arts, and work on being able to do my first chin up. If I can do all that and train for a full marathon, great. But I don't want running 26.2 miles being the end-all-be-all of my physical fitness.
