Atheist on the Blog - Nick Gisburne

2 January 2008

Exercise! Fit, yes please. Fat, no thanks.

2 January 2008

I am a fat, lazy bastard.

I'm not saying that all fat people are lazy, far from it. I'm just talking about me. I am lazy, and do no exercise, and I do mean ZERO exercise, and this is making me fat. I'm tall - 6'9" is tall - so when you see my weight you should take that into account, but still, I now weigh 294 pounds, which is 21 stone if you're British or 133 kg for metric fans. That gives me a BMI (body mass index) of 31.5 which is not just overweight, it has now strayed into the obese zone. Bad, bad, bad. To simply become overweight, rather than obese, I have to lose 15 pounds. To get down to a 'normal' weight, it's a horrifying 62 pounds. Gulp.

So I've decided to do something about it, something I've been meaning to do for a while and probably shouldn't put off any longer. Exercise.

Ignoring the excesses of Christmas, I do eat healthy food. I stopped buying ready-prepared 'boxed' meals about a year ago, and I cook all my own meals from fresh ingredients. I eat a lot of fruit. I do mean a LOT of fruit. I shop maybe once every two weeks and the trolley/cart is maybe 1/2 fresh fruit and vegetables, with the rest fresh meat and fish, plus lots of dog food which is obviously not for me! Porridge for breakfast stops me getting hungry for a good 4-5 hours, so I don't snack, and if I do there's all that fruit. Yum.

But still, I have put on a lot of weight lately, and it's down to two things: eating too much, and not exercising. It doesn't matter how healthy the food is, if you eat too much of it it is going to stick around as fat, and my giant-sized plates (see this video) don't help one little bit. However, even then if I exercised I probably wouldn't pile on the pounds, so along with smaller plates I am going to try to get fit.

At my age I need to start doing something about this before my sad sack of a body gets too old for me to get it into shape. While I'm unfit I'm probably increasing my chances of damaging by joints and muscles to the point where they simply won't last long enough. At 6'9" I am almost certainly going to be having problems in later life anyway, so I'd rather push back that 'later' part as far as I can. I also obviously want to lessen the chances of heart disease and all the other things related to lack of exercise. Now's the time to start doing something about it.

It's the end of New Year's Day as I write this, but I was resolved to make this change before now, and what I've done is bought some exercise equipment and I'm going to clear out my spare room and make a little mini gym for myself. I'm not interested in muscle building, and I don't just want 'perfect abs'. I want to feel healthy, lose the weight, and carry on exercising for the rest of my life to make sure I don't get so far out of shape ever again. So there are two reasons I've chosen the equipment below.

First, I wanted things which would be effective. If I'm going to have to spend 30 minutes to burn only 100 calories, forget it. So I used a calorie burn calculator to see what activities seemed to be most effective, and from that chose the ones which I felt would keep me motivated. And motivation is my number two reason. Something like jogging, no way - if it's too cold, too hot, too wet, too (insert any excuse) I will not go out of the house. I know me, and it needs to be indoors, and it needs to be easy to set up and, importantly, contain a certain amount of fun.

So what did I decide on? Well, maybe my later choices will seem unusual but let's start with one which probably isn't:

Exercise bike
The calculator says that 'Bicycling, Stationary: moderate' uses up 494 calories in 30 minutes for a 294-pounder like me, and 'Bicycling, Stationary: vigorous' uses 741. That compares really well with, say, playing a game of basketball (564) or running at 6 mph (706), both of which are more than likely to hurt my joints (I already have bad knees, something which runs in the family).

I've also had an exercise bike before, and I enjoyed using it, which is important because of the motivation thing. However, with that bike I made the mistake of buying some cheap crap, which quickly disintegrated, after only a few months of use. A lot of exercise bikes aren't designed to be used by people over a certain weight (duh, who do they think needs them most?), so I made sure I bought one which would take me on. These days whenever I buy something, whatever it is, I always find one with great reviews - if other people recommend it, I take that into account, so this is what I've bought:

York Fitness C750 Platinum Exercise Bike

Update: this model has apparently been discontinued so maybe that's why I managed to get it for such a good price (I paid £200). There are lots of programmable exercises, again so that I don't get bored, and what I like is that the computer controller in it can vary the resistance itself, whereas with my old cheapo one I had a really difficult to adjust friction tape (it does seem pretty prehistoric now I think about it), and adjusting that involved stopping the exercise. What was I thinking?!

I like exercise bikes, and this is one thing I can do while watching TV! I'm actually planning to put my spare TV in the room and attach a DVD to it, rather than an actual TV signal, just to stop myself watching crappy daytime TV shows. I have plenty of documentaries I can watch, so I can exercise my mind as well as the rest of me!

Boxing - Punch Bag
You won't find it on the calculator above, but I looked elsewhere and it's around 400 calories for each 30 minute session. This one has more to do with the motivation side than calories, however. I have a lot of frustrations, many of them caused by dealing with crazy God-botherers of course, and I figured that a good way to get them out of my system would be to punch the living crap out of a body-sized object!

I figured that I'd better buy the heaviest one I could find, given that I'm always going to be a heavy person anyway, and if I get stronger I don't want a lighter bag swinging all over the place. Having said that, what do I know? I've never even seen a punch bag close up, let alone used one, so this is all new to me. I also have some mad thoughts about using the bag as a target for kick boxing, but until I get my lard-laden legs in shape that part of the plan will have to wait!

So here's what I bought:

TKO - All Purpose Canvas Heavy Bag (the 100lb version)
TKO - Duratek Mesh Bag Gloves
TKO - Space Saver Heavy Bag Wall Mount

Another reason for this choice is that it is so totally different from cycling that if I ever have a day when I am bored with one, I can go with the other. Punching a bag is not something I will need to change into gym shoes/shorts to do if I don't want to (yes I really am that lazy!), and mindful of the amount of space I have, it's only going to take up a small amount of the room. I do need someone to tell me how to attach pictures of people I hate to the bag, but if I can't figure it out I'll just stick something to the wall and imagine I am trying to punch through the bag to get to that person! Er, do I have unresolved issues?! Well if I do, I can take them out on the punch bag can't I?

Bodylastics
The first two were all about cardio exercising, which is what is going to get my heart and lungs working, and get the fat off my body. However, I don't just want to be a thinner version of me. Despite what I said about not wanting to build up muscle, well, I lied! I'm realistic and know that I'm not going to be a muscle-bound Arnie-type dude, but if there's a chance that I could at least have some kind of decent physical definition I will go for it! Once again, that is another motivator for me.

So weights are the obvious choice here. But I have a set of weights. I've used my set of weights. I hate using my weights. They are just too damned heavy for one thing! And I could never really get into the mindset of it, not at all. For weights you really need other equipment, such as a bench and a stand, and I didn't want to spend that kind of money for something I'd already tried and disliked. I didn't like spending time swapping weights on and off the bar, didn't like having something in my hands which could potentially injure me if I dropped it... you name the reason, I didn't like weights!

But I know what weights do. You are giving resistance to your muscles as you use them - the more weight, the more resistance. I just need something which gives me resistance, but in a more enjoyable way. So I found this:

Bodylastics - Max Tension With Manual & DVD

That's right, it's a set of elastic bands with handles! But I've read just about the whole site, watched a lot of the videos, and (a) it looks like a lot of fun, (b) it seems to be a very flexible system, with lots of different exercises (removing the boredom factor) and (c) it is very, very cheap!

So cheap, in fact, that the postage from the US to the UK (it's not available over here) was almost as much as the equipment itself. So if I don't like it, I've not spent a fortune. The alternative would be one of those huge, expensive multi-gyms and with those you get what you pay for - expensive for me would be a cheap multi-gym, and a high-quality multi-gym would be ridiculously pricey, and I just don't have the space to set one up, let alone the money. Not to mention that I might hate that too, and have wasted upwards of a thousand pounds!

This page is good for explaining how it works, and check Dan the man's video - that could be me in, er, 5 years! I like the fact that the videos all show switching between exercises is instant - you just move your arms and legs in a different way to exercise different muscles. No weights to drop on your feet when you're tired, and extra resistance bands just clip on/off as needed.

Okay, I'm sounding like an infomercial now, but they do seem like a fantastic idea, which is why I bought them. I just want to make sure I'm doing exercises which don't seem like they are a chore, to keep my motivation going.

I've also bought a full-length exercise mat, just in case there are Bodylastics exercises which involve lying down or kneeling, and when I do start to get fit I can also mix in other types of exercise too - push-ups, crunches, and so on. It's all good.

So that's my plan. Nothing has arrived as yet, because I ordered things over the Christmas and New Year period, but hopefully next week I will have things set up and will be getting started. I'm going to look into my eating habits too, but I don't want to get too concerned by the type of food, just the quantity - I want to live a normal life, not a body builder's life, and as I've said the food I eat is already pretty good, it's just way too much.

One last thing I did to motivate myself was take a few photographs of myself sans T-shirt, to check my progress over the coming months. However there is absolutely no way anyone else is seeing those until I have a 'that was then, this is now' blog to write about, and that is going to be a long time coming!

I'm not going to be turning this blog into an exercise diary, so don't worry, but I'll give the odd update now and again. And I wanted to talk about it at least once to serves as yet another motivational exercise. Now I know that you know that I am trying to get fit. I need to keep that in mind whenever I am thinking about giving up, which will probably be around 6 or 8 weeks after I begin... and I can't let you know I'm a quitter can I?!

I'm really serious about wanting to do this, and I didn't want to go at it in a half-hearted way, which is why I've bought three totally different sets of exercise equipment, which will give me a lot of variety and really give me something to look forward to. If I hate doing a full 30 or 45 minutes on one thing, I can do 10 or 15 minutes with each of the three. That just make more sense to me than doing one type of exercise day in and day out.

Wish me luck, but please don't pray for me because your name/picture may well be going on the punch bag if you do!

Footnote:
I should also mention another quite important motivation for doing this: I am single and I'd like that to change. Do I need to say more? If there are any female atheists out there (bearing in mind that I live in the UK) who want the benefits of my efforts, just let me know!

Another thing to note is that the calorie chart says that I only burn 106 calories during sex. And WTF? Housecleaning uses 247? Over twice as much as sex! Then I re-read it and it said 'moderate effort'... so I can probably double or triple the calorie count then :o) but of course see my previous note - I don't think it counts if you do it solo!