“What’s your secret?” various people want to know. They learn that I just lost 32 pounds in five months.¹ I’m a man and small of stature at 5’3”, so that’s no minor feat. I’m at my goal. I’m fit again for the first time in a score of years. My waist is 4” slimmer. I had been accumulating fat little by little over the whole period. It accretes slowly. It’s easy to not think about it.
¹Author’s note, Christmas 2020: now down 50 pounds in nine months — 26% under my former weight! — and where I want to be.
@MeFitYouFit [click] YouTube channel now up!
I used to be 5’4”, but I’m old. It feels odd to have to admit to 5’3”. It’s as if one is revealing one has gum disease. (I don’t have gum disease.)
I look younger than 64. The hair on my head is still dark, though my beard is peppery and gray and nearly white in places now. But of course, I see my own age. I see it in skin that has lost elasticity. I feel it in tiny and not-so-tiny aches and in slowed healing. I find my haptic — “muscle,” or tactile — memory is sloppier and harder to train. I see it in the distension of my gut, even now after weight loss. I sense my eyesight failing little-by-little. I remember — my mind remains good; I’m training that, too! — I remember when the ophthalmologist told me I could still pass the Air Force pilot’s eye test when I was 38. Ah, youth!
I have heart disease now. I had a fully occluded right coronary artery six years ago. In early June I had a new stent put in directly above the former stenosed area. The doc talked about putting in another on the left side a few months hence. But I’ve put my heart disease in remission in just a few months.
I’ll talk now about three areas: toning, cardio fitness, and diet. Fitness and weight loss are among the hardest things in the world to do – until you do them. But then, they’re suddenly easy! Suddenly you wonder how you could have made so many excuses for years or decades. So, let me give you my approach and my story.
Here’s how the weight loss has looked. The red dot was my goal. I’m below it today! My wife has never seen me this way in 19 years.
The tummy takes a more sculpted form slowest of all. I try not to look. Muscle mass there and elsewhere is coming back slowly but surely, though. There is new definition visible everywhere. I’ve tried to come up with a routine that strengthens my body in all major muscle groups. I don’t want to use weights. I don’t want to go to gyms. Just my body and natural balancing and counterbalancing. It does take some time.
I paid for a gym membership for eleven years. I rarely went. I got fit by quitting that place. I decided I didn’t need to drive anywhere else to do what I wanted and needed to do. And I didn’t want to be anywhere near a gym in the middle of a pandemic!
Most of the old calisthenics we did in school in my generation in the 1960s are still good. I try to be careful about joint impact. I have “loose joints,” to put it in the vernacular. I had to give up skiing over 20 years ago for that reason.
I like to stretch and warm up first thing in the morning. I’ll repeat: it takes some time. It’s not entirely easy to plan if you need to go to work in an hour. Work it into your schedule, and remember: no driving needed.
I try to be creative and think up new exercises or ways to make the old ones more effective. A great inspirational person was a man from my hometown of Oakland, California, named Jack LaLanne. He was a renowned fitness guru and motivational speaker. He opened the first fitness studio ever in the 1930s in Jack London Square in Oakland. He had syndicated TV shows in the 1950s and ’60s teaching housewives how to spice up their home lives with little exercise routines. He’d use the dining room chairs and the kitchen counter. He’d use the doorway to press against. I watched these shows too, when I was a kid. One can still find them on YouTube and on his old website. Take a look!
I use those furnishings as my gym as well. Like Jack, I stretch my jaw and my neck and face muscles sometimes when I’m driving now. Who cares what the driver in the next car thinks? It’s not like I’m picking my nose!
I do lots of the old standbys: push-ups, chin-ups, pull-ups, and so on. I don’t do them all every day. I keep a table. I have about 20 and I do six or eight a day and stagger them. I keep my blood pressure tallies on the table as well. I have a column for notes or diary remarks about how I feel. Here’s what the table looks like:
I am not a lover of exercise by nature. It took about ten weeks for me to have the feeling I even wanted to be doing this stuff. Now, after several months and obvious progress, I have some pride about it, though. And I have the endorphin high now that athletic people talk about. I always hated sweat, but now I enjoy it. That’s a new one for me! And I’ve always hated crunches, but now I’m doing them, and I feel good about them. That, too, is a surprise to me.
Another thing I hate: doing sets. So, I don’t! I just do one rep count, as much as I can until, after a few weeks or months with my staggered schedule for that exercise, I hit a hundred. I’m not there yet on everything, of course. One hundred isn’t magic, but it seemed to me like an impressive enough number to ensure I am working hard and will see results soon enough to be gratifying. It takes a few minutes per exercise, but for me that number is a good compromise. I practice my multiplication tables while I do these! Sometimes I count by threes; sometimes by fours or sixes; sometimes by twelves. Fours and eights are probably my favorites. They seem to make the count to 100 happen fast enough, yet to remain easily attainable while one is trying not to feel overwhelmed by all the numbers that are left.
If I’m doing the count by eights and I get to, say, 66, I can tell that way that I lost count. It must be 56! I correct my count. Some multiples are better for self-checking the count than others. I try to exercise my mind with such math tricks while I’m counting. I don’t listen to music or to TV or radio. I don’t listen to audiobooks. But that’s me.
Anybody trying to emulate this should find his or her own target number. It doesn’t need to be 100. If you like doing sets, well, do sets. Note that my high-rep, single-set method isn’t the preferred way to bulk up fast and build gleaming muscle. Any bodybuilder types reading this are either shaking their heads or have already clicked on. But that isn’t my goal.
Sitting at my desk, these days I sometimes take a break to lean back and rotate my ankles – yes, 100 times – or move my arms or tense and release some muscles in some vaguely exercisy manner the way Jack LaLanne used to do. Isometrics (tightening and releasing muscle groups for exercise) are also a fine thing.
One further note: I don’t do weights, with a small exception: I happen to have some 3-kilogram hand barbells that I occasionally use with caution to avoid stress injuries. As alluded to above, I use the furnishings around my house in creative ways. I do “bar dips” in the 90-degree corner of the kitchen counter. I hold a pair of Oxford shoes in my hands to add some light heft when I do some overhead stretching routines.
The inspiration for all this, besides the new bout of heart disease, has been the coronavirus. I’m not interested in being the next obvious victim. I’ve still got things to do! Thus, the pandemic and my heart disease together became my wake-up call.
The strengthening exercises are for toning, but they don’t do much for cardio fitness. I use a road bike for that. I’m riding about 250 or 280 miles a month now! I’m lucky, in that we have lots of bicycling or multi-use paved paths in our area. I can do most of the ride on these paths or farm roads and avoid traffic. I know mountain bikes are the in thing these decades, and I’m not implying you should scrap your mountain bike for a road bike! But I personally love the road bike more.
I’m riding six days a week now on average. My typical ride takes about 45 or 50 minutes. Soon the weather will turn, and I won’t be able to do that. But I’m at a good place with my weight and fitness now, so I’ll make it through the winter with a less intensive maintenance regimen that will include a home trainer. I don’t enjoy the home trainer! When I must use that, I do listen to music or audiobooks or podcasts.
When I can’t ride, or when I occasionally want to do something different, I walk at a fast clip. I try out new routes. Typically, I’ll walk for half-an-hour if I am pressed for time or if I want to take it easy. Otherwise, I’ll do three-quarters of an hour or a full hour. I can persuade my wife to walk with me about once a week, and that’s a nice activity together. I bought her some comfortable walking shoes! (Next I need to buy myself some better ones.)
I saw my cardiologist last week. He says I now avoided the stent he wanted to place in the left coronary artery. By the way, do pay attention to your cholesterol levels. I can’t stress enough how important that is. Diet, exercise, and weight loss are the big factors under your control there. Work with your physician on containing it beyond those things.
Some people don’t tolerate statins. I’m one such person. Thankfully, today there are new therapies. The cholesterol-lowering alternative medication I take now is working out well. Contact me if you want to know more about that part of my program.
For completeness’s sake, let me state that if you still smoke, stop at once!
Much of your dietary habit is not about sating your hunger. It’s about sating your psyche. It’s about routine. It’s even about boredom.
I’m not here to tell you to starve yourself thin. I am here, though, to tell you to take the reins and get sensible about what you are doing. It’s your body, after all! Learn how to treat it right so it can treat you right in return.
What I have found is that there are twelve hours a day that I don’t need to be eating or thinking about food. Clearly, you’ve caught on that about eight of those are when I’m sleeping. That leaves another four. I decided I could stop a bad habit I’d had for a couple of decades: I could stop noshing late at night not long before bedtime. So, I did!
I’ll confess it took well over two months to get over wanting to eat late at night. Sometimes I gave in at first. But I modified one aspect early, and that turned out to be a huge aid to my plan and results: I cut back my portions dramatically.
Watch your portions. Chew more slowly and more deliberately. Americans are the fastest eaters in the world, I read somewhere recently. We do know they’re about the fattest group around. If you eat too fast, you don’t give your body time to signal that it’s full. You’ll overeat.
Change your choices. The most important part here, in my view, is to cut out sugar. Cut out highly refined carbohydrates. Cut out all soft drinks. Don’t drink “diet” soft drinks! They switch on a physiological response that leads you to crave unhealthy foods. Restrict alcohol to a bit of wine occasionally.
Drink plenty of water. Don’t try to fool the scale by dehydrating yourself. We’re not interested in fitting into a smart outfit next week for the high-school reunion. We’re interested in your new life’s choice! It’s not an act; it’s the new you.
Ask yourself, when the urge to snack hits, whether eating that will leave you feeling both satisfied and healthy afterward. If the pleasure will likely be overshadowed by a guilty conscience later, then choose something else.
Before a training ride, if I think I’m going to need a boost, I eat a half-a-banana. When I get back home, if I need it, I eat the other half.
Whereas I used to eat a carbohydrate snack, some pretzels, and so on, often, I now do something different: I pop a few cherry tomatoes in my mouth, or a fistful of mixed nuts.
I don’t use energy bars. I don’t drink protein shakes. I stay light on fruit juices, but I don’t limit fruit if I want that. I am an occasional meat-eater. I recognize that I want more protein when I’m working my body this hard. The weight still comes off! At first it came off more slowly. It’s gotten steadier now, as you can see from the chart; but there are still plateaus and regressions that can last up to a week or more. That’s okay! Don’t lose sight of the longer-term trend or goal.
Do you see that big blip back up in my chart in early June? That was when I was hospitalized for the cardiac stent.
Let your family and friends into your emotional life (if they aren’t already in that spot) and allow them to give you support and validation for your efforts and achievements.
I do feel great these days in ways I had forgotten about. I had gotten rid of most of my arthritis already starting eight years ago by taking up piano again and practicing zealously. The mental work with music theory also challenged my mind and has improved my memory and focus. But I had begun having new pain in my lower limbs, various digestive issues, and angina pectoris (unspecified chest pain). Those are now all gone!
I don’t suffer from diabetes myself, but if you do, you can probably look forward to a dramatic improvement in condition from the adult-onset variety of that disease.
On the other hand, I had seen my blood pressure climb over time with age-related degeneration, and I had an acute dangerous BP event only months ago; but now I’ve been able to drop my blood-pressure medication back to the lowest dose. Soon I may be able to ditch it entirely.
Talk to your primary-care physician. Get the go-ahead. And hop on the exercise bus as soon as you possibly can.⮘
Mid-July 2021 addendum: I’m fifteen-plus months in. The weight stabilized by Christmas 2020. It now fluctuates a pound or two week-to-week in a normal variance. I’m 50 pounds lighter than my early-2020 lifetime peak weight. New pants are waist 30 and not tight: better than high school going on fifty years ago!
For the main upper-body calisthenics — pull-ups, push-ups, and chin-ups — I switched to sets. The rest of my program has stayed similar to my write-up above of ten months ago.
I now take no blood-pressure meds — I could quit the last of those last winter. Blood pressure at rest usually stays near or a bit under 120-over-high-60s for diastolic. Resting pulse hugs the low 50s most of the time. My medication is limited to prostate stuff now, which is pretty much unavoidable for many or most older men. I have one new major complaint: hernias. I had the right side handled in early April 2021. The left side became a problem soon thereafter. I will have to have that handled as well, probably in the fall.
I just shaved off my beard! My wife is recovering from the shock. 😄
