Day 036: Who am I?

"Can I conceal myself for evermore, pretend I'm not the man I was before?"

Day 031: - 25 lbs, 35 burpees in 7 minutes

When I started this I could do 10 burpees total and not one more for fear of dying right on the spot. I can feel how far I've come.

Day 030: Friends with actual faces

Friends are a good thing, and Facebook is a very bad thing. An actual friend, that you might meet some day, that you want to or even need to stay in contact with one another, is a beautiful thing. Facebook lures you into thinking that several hundred people are your friends, and that they hang on every word of yours, and you on theirs. And then, if you leave, as I have today, for the sixty-ninth time I admit, you realize that Facebook is a delusion of contact that isn't there. If you are lonely and you facebook, you are still lonely. Its just that that loneliness is more colorful and amusing, but you may in fact not have any real friends. Friends that don't need an excuse, or some official role, to care about contacting you.

I'd rather face my condition as it is. As it is, if I am not my own friend, other than my son, I probably don't have any friends. That's a good thing to face, because it really does begin with me. This very challenge I am in can be a tremendous act of compassion and caring for myself, as only the best of real friends would offer, or it can be a performance for  bunch of people that don't really give a shit, because they have their own life and dramas to understand and deal with.

I think I am going to go hang around some twelve-step meetings in the upcoming weeks. Facebook was and is an unmitigated addiction, and one that deluded me into believing I was happier because of it, but probably the exact opposite was true.

I am 30 days into this challenge and I am maintaining 20 lbs of weight lost, and I want to go further next month. I want to accomplish something because it is an actual good thing in my life, and in the life of my son whom I dearly love. Facebook is a distraction, and has nothing of any value to offer me.

Day 025: Russian Roulette

My uncle Ricardo learned today that his son is in a vegetative state after the massive heart attack he suffered a week ago. His family faces the unimaginable reality of having to decide how long to maintain life support and avert the virtually inevitable.

My cousin is my age, and he has Type 1 diabetes. He's has some issue with being slightly overweight, but he seemed to manage that (better than I ever did). But his diabetes required management of what he ate, and the faithful injection of insulin. He was a doctor and a surgeon.

Apparently in what were the last weeks of his life, he spent trying to pretend that he didn't have this disease and could eat like anyone else. His wife said that his blood sugar readings were running more than twice what they were supposed to be. The doctors say that his untreated diabetes made him have a massive heart attack and lapse into a diabetic coma.

I can't help but feel like there is a bullet that I dodged, that my cousin took for me. The bullet we were both putting in the chamber of a revolver, giving it a spin, and pulling the trigger.

I ate an entire pizza by myself. Click. I went to a drive-through junk food on the way from one meal on my way to the next. Click. I had a bagel sandwich for breakfast for the 5th morning in a row. Click.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Bang ! ! ! ! !

I should be dead. This could have been me. No one asked for this more than me.

To die of an untreated disease, to be in the death throws of a massive heart attack, and to know - in my withering heart - that I was finally succeeding in killing myself, and to feel such overwhelming shame and regret about that, was my most diabolically secret and terrifying fear.

Nothing can be the same after this. Today I am treating my illness. I don't need to be like my mother, that when I was a child would drunkenly brag to everyone that she was invincible because she survived shooting herself with a 0.44 caliber Magnum in the stomach, and event buried in the lost memories of being a 5 year old.

I hereby amend the intention of this challenge, which I had dedicated to my son, and I also dedicate it, on behalf of my cousin, to the unknown someone that I will help some day, that is killing themselves slowly, one papercut at a time. To someone that is "loving with nothing more than hope, and crying with everything except tears".

I always had this intention, and it was that intention that I shared with Ani Pema Chödron when I first approached her, craftily coded so that she might recognize my bodhisattva vision, and it worked, and thus began a letter correspondence with her.

But now that becomes more real than I could have ever imagined. And I have narrowly averted being the one with artificial respiration and in an induced coma, and having my son and my parents facing the mortifying reality that I killed myself with a fatal unwillingness to take the medication and the medical advice my Doc prescribed — having only wanted for me to treat my completely treatable disease.

Day 021: Fight Gone Better

On the 21st elapsed day of my Paleo challenge, I weighed in with -20 lbs (12% of my body weight) gone, and on the CrossFit workout "Fight Gone Bad":

3 rounds for rep count,
each exercise - 1 min AMRAP
 - Wall Balls
 - Sumo Deadlift High-pull
 - Box Jumps
 - Push Press
 - Row for Calories
 - 1 min rest

my score improved from 183 to 235, a 28% improvement of performance.

"Paleo Chicken Soup" (It couldn't hurt...)

4 tablespoons of coconut oil, 3 large Vidalia onions, 1 head of garlic, 6 stalks of scallions, 4 stalks of celery, 2 cups of sliced Portabello mushrooms, 1 cup of sliced carrots, 4 chicken thigh pieces (taken out cooked, deboned and stripped and returned), 3 large limes, and 1 cup of sliced cilantro, with sea salt to taste.

Day 19: -20 lb DOWN in nineteen days

Well, there has been a gap in my journaling, corresponding to a couple of days when I just battened down and stuck to my eating goals, because I was feeling ill with a kind of head and stomach flu at the same time, and it was all I could do to go on small walks.

Today I am weighing in at 20 lbs lighter than just 19 days ago. That's outright scary. It's amazing what sticking to a strict eating plan (that isn't even remotely related to starving) together with working out twice a day - can accomplish.

Twenty pounds is a lot. I know it's only 12% of the way from where I started to my goal, but . . . I am on my way, and I have a substantial accomplishment for less than two weeks of sustained effort.

This is worth doing. That's really clear.

Oh and I changed gyms. Smaller, closer and with less drama, was a huge upgrade. It's too bad that I will dearly miss some of the friends I made at the previous one, and quite a few of the more laid back coaches (whose ring I didn't have to kiss).

Day 016: Sick

I was able to stay on track with my eating but I started noticing feeling ill mid day and by the time I went to sleep I had the shivers of having a fever. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Day 015: . . .

Of all the days in this challenge, this was one of them. For some reason I went from having one job prospect to 4, as a flurry of prospecting messages arrived all asking me if I had availability. That I do.

Day 14: "finally found" -16.2 lb. in 14 days

More than a "stone" down (14 lb.) in 2 weeks. I wouldn't call this a habit yet, but offered a money-back return on my previous life or keeping this one, I say good riddance to the supposed joys of "eating whatever I want" and inactivity. I do eat what I want, and actually my eating has not even remotely looked like starving. I just don't eat what I understand as poison as if it were (using the most appropriate metaphor possible: ) pizza and ice cream. You have it. Everyone that wants it, have it, and enjoy it if it does your body good.

This week with my mother's stroke, I faced a couple of unplanned deviations, and it was fortunate that I didn't beat myself up over it, and just went right back to the eating plan.

The exercise is still running twice a day, once at the gym if I can, and once either walking or cycling from my house (I live in the hills, so I always get a good workout at home as well).

Windhorse.

Day 013: Dancing machine

I went out to some clubs in Red Bank directly from River View hospital, after visiting my mom.

The "Downtown" bar was quite the scene. I asked the bartenders if they worked out at the same gym, because if they did, perhaps I was going to the wrong gym. The one girl I noticing dancing with herself (at this bar that didn't have a dance floor) inspired me to ask her - so where do you go dancing, which she obviously must be doing. She was really nice and clued me in to the club I was right next too, which had dancing. Initially I walked in there and there was no dancing happening yet, lots of people swaying at the bar. Finally as the time approached midnight, the place let its hair down, and the dancing started breaking out left and right.

Dancing is awesome, and actually represents a decent amount of cardiovascular (to this old guy)! I was the fifth black chick. The other four weren't aware that I'd be joining them just because I happened to be dancing against the same wall. I could get used to going out dancing, but I really wishing drinking was minimally involved since it breaks my Paleo diet. I haven't made it to the twerk zone yet, but it feels immanent.

Day 012: Husband

      

Today, I still spent most of it in a hospital being of some support to my mother, being this admirable son that everyone seems to want me to be sure I know.

I managed to blow off breakfast this morning, and waited until lunch time to eat. Not good. Predictably, I made, by decree of the universal monarch, an exception for ordering an order of onion rings with my Caesar salad. And I sat there hypocritically enjoying the little rush of being bad especially on the sly, except that the whole thing was performed in front of the goddamn guy trying to write this blog. True to form, after a nearly orgasmic satisfaction (I know, that's hyperbole), it was so not worth doing that. The writing was on the wall, not making the time in the morning for the egg whites and getting the day started correctly. And before that I was obsessed about some back-and-forthness of the scale, which last week plummeted consistently like a rock. I need to not touch the scale except once a week.

So I jogged the same trip I did yesterday, without swinging weights, but attempting a faster rate (on a track that has a 150' elevation change down and up). 

I'm curious about measuring effort. Naively it seems it should be the calories measure, and interestingly enough by jogging rather than walking, I competed the same mile in less time, and with less calories burned. Perhaps a more interesting measure would be

calories / minutes today = 178cal / 17:15min = 10.3 calories / minute

calories / minutes yesterday = 223cal / 22:17min = 10 calories / minute

Oh, and the title. My mother identified me to the questioning occupational therapists as "her husband". Twice. All right, having a stroke is an awfully good reason to be confused about that. It's just a little scary to hear after you have suspected that there is a really unrealistic and unhealthy perspective taking place in that now ravaged brain of hers.

Day 011: Stroke

    

Today my mother suddenly had a stroke that took out quite a bit of her ability to verbally communicate. It was painful watching her not be able to be herself. In the hospital, she wanted so desperately to make contact with and become the intimate stranger friend of everyone she met, that I felt I had to do it for her. It made it okay that I was "only" doing it on behalf of her. In a way its nice to crazily expect everyone to want to know you, and you to want to know them. That's her thing.

Heart rate monitoring is cool. I do this loop around the house that ends with an uphill, and I really leaned in to that uphill, as my heart rate in "Zone 4" (within 20% of a 'theoretical' max) shows.

I think calories will be an interesting measure, not from the mindfuck of thinking I have more calories to consume or banking negative calories, but just from the seeing how many watts of energy I generate, if I were a "generator". Clearly when that number goes up on the same walk, my fitness is probably improving. Also that bar chart of how much time during the exercise I spent at different profiles, will be interesting to see as I progressively work on certain standard sets of exercises.

Day 010: Drunken Elephant

Drunken Elephant —
Catching mirage by net;
In the mirror of my mind I comb my hair
With the brush of samsaric absurdity 

— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Yes, my Paleo eating and CrossFit training goals are accomplished, and not a hell of a lot else.

Day 009: Carrying that weight

Tonight on my walk around the block (which since I live on a hill, is a third of a mile, but down and up around 150 feet of elevation) I carried a couple of 20 lb dumbbells with me.

If occurred to me that when these 40 lbs of unnecessary weight could be set down, what an amazing relief that was, and how much better I felt. Conversely, the walk which I could do pretty painlessly now was excruciating to pull of, so the impact of those 40 lbs was truly palpable