.:: Run Fat Boy .net ::.

Ever since Jr. High I looked forward to the winter time. I loved the way the cool breezes hit against my face. I loved the fact that I could wear a long sleeve shirt and not worry about breaking into a sweat or develop pit stains. Winter was the fat man’s paradise where the lower temperatures gave me a sense of freedom that no other season provided. I was in a seasonal wonderland where my above average body heat didn’t control me and I could finally wear and act how I wanted without the embarrassment of my overly-sweating body showing itself.

But winter was no friend and he was only acting as a mask to further deep rooted problems. Most people who chronically sweat are probably over weight and I was no exception. Furthermore, I had high blood pressure as a result. And the high body temps were probably a result of this. Who wouldn’t be hot when your heart is working twice as hard as the average individual?

In May of 2006 I was hospitalized for my high blood pressure and as a result, I have been taking three different blood pressure medications. Atentolol, a beta blocker, Avalid, a diuretic, and Norvasc, a vasodilator.

My entire perception has changed. With a normal blood pressure, I now enjoy the sun and the heat and have even worn a long sleeve shirt when it’s 80 degrees out. I actually have days where I want to feel the warmth of the sun against my neck and feel the summer’s breeze blow against my shirt.

It’s such a strange perception shift. This has to be the feeling that one would feel when observing an indigenous tribe for the first time or experiencing weightlessness in space. While before others would tell me that they “feel cold”, I didn’t understand. But now I feel their cold and I feel their discomfort, and for once my perception of temperature seems right in line with those around me. And I am finally figuring out that I was living in a whole different world these past few years.

We made the front page of Digg!  It’s been amazingly hard to keep pace with all of the emails and suggestions that I have received since first being listed.  RunFatBoy received over 10,000 visitors in the first hour of being listed.

Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity has just launched a blog ( http://www.ruddsoundbites.typepad.com/ ). Great info thus far.

I’ve received email both loving and hating the name "RunFatBoy.net".  Some despise it for personal reasons, others for it’s lack of politically correctness, while others identify with it, recognizing that the site is an exercise site designed for the average Joe.

The name was selected in the same spirit as the "For Dummies" book series. My site is a sincerse attempt at helpng the average user get up to speed with a simplistic workout system.

I’ve often read that in the fitness game, you can think of training, nutrition, and rest as legs of a tripod — if any of those are subpar, you’re not going to be balanced.

Well, I’m proud to say that over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten the training side of the equation down.  Not perfect, of course — I could always stand to train harder — but I use a lot of compound moves with a lot of weight (for me), know my body well enough to back off to prevent injury (a problem I used to have in my earlier days of lifting), and most importantly, I’m pretty consistent; I’ve probably only had a week break a couple of times over the past two years.

The nutrition/resting side — those have been my weaknesses.  It’s too easy to get caught up in what I’m doing some late night and end up staying up way too late (oops, hopefully this posting doesn’t have a timestamp).  And on the nutrition side — while I always eat a very healthy breakfast and average a reasonable amount of protein for my needs, the consistency hasn’t always been there.  Too many days where I’d suddenly want a pizza and go eat it (which would make it hard to get 200 grams of protein that day).  Too many days when I just wouldn’t feel hungry, so I wouldn’t eat (doesn’t sound like a big problem, but if you’re trying to gain mass, this just won’t cut it).

So in order to level out my tripod, I’ve rededicated myself to fixing the rest/nutrition side of things.  My main goals every day — 250 grams of protein and 10 servings combined of fruits/vegetables.  Generally if I accomplish that, I accomplish the other things that go along with a healthy eating plan (it’s hard to eat 250 grams of protein and 10 fruits/vegetables all in 1 sitting, so you better believe I split that into 5 or 6 meals every day — which requires a fair amount of planning/preparation).  I’m not strictly counting calories, but eating this much generally gets me somewhere between 2800-3300 calories per day.  I do make sure there’s some variety in my diet (there’s a pretty wide variety of healthy choices I can make my selections from).  And I’ve managed to accomplish these goals and eat "perfectly" (no junk, no sugar, etc.) for the last 16 straight days.  All in all, I’m very excited; I "feel" healthier — now it’s a matter of consistency and keeping it up.  The funny thing is that while it was a little tough the first couple of days, now I seem to be on autopilot; I think it’d be harder to eat unhealthily and not meet those goals than to just do it now, just because I want to keep on stretching those days into weeks and those weeks into months.  That’s how you win at this game.

I’ll make a separate posting in the next couple of days to talk about my homegym and my workouts.  I bought a couple of thickhandled dumbbells which definitely deserve their own article… 

Let’s get things off to a semi-geeky start.  All superheroes start with an origin story.  We learn of how the hero’s parents were killed, or how the hero found a ring with gnarly powers, or even how the hero discovered that after touching hands with his sister, he could turn into a bucket of goo.  This is the moment where the hero *becomes* the hero that we know and love. 

So what exactly is my, ahem, "bucket of goo" moment?  The truth is, I don’t really have one, and I think that those who’re successful working out don’t have those either.  This is going to be one of the running themes of my blog posting; as Dave Draper says, the secret is "there is no secret"; it all comes down to hard work, done day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade.  To do anything great, you just have to be in it for the longhaul.

I’m going to talk a lot about working out, a lot about writing, a lot about learning.  And I’ll mention my first misguided attempts at all of those.  But there’s never going to be a "this is it" moment, because all the things that I mention above are things I love doing precisely because there’s never going to be an end, and there’s always going to be a potentially higher PR.