Jan Schakowsky: Just because she's out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid.

Jan Schakowsky . . . there's a name you haven't heard for awhile, huh?  If you're not from Illinois, maybe you've never heard of Congresswoman Schakowsky before, but she's politician-famous in Chicagoland. She has a long history of advocating for, as she puts it in this video, "pushing as hard as we can and as far as we can" to ban guns or, failing that, to harass citizens who want to use them.

This is the part where I sarcastically remind you that nobody wants to ban your guns and, by the way, you are clearly paranoid. Also that Jason Mattera is an unfair meanie.

One thing all this high-profile attention on guns and rights has done is to bring in a lot of people who really weren't paying any attention to the issue until a couple of months ago, on both sides.  Nothing wrong with that, but one effect of that influx of n00bs is that we now have an awful lot of people running around who are pretty sure they've got a simple solution and have no idea why the idiots who've been paying attention for the last decade or three haven't simply solved the problem already. In short, they don't know what they don't know. One of the things they're very sure of is that nobody wants to ban anybody's guns, and anyone who talks about gun bans is a stooge for the massive weapon cartels who pull the strings at the NRA. A good friend gave me a hell of a lecture recently; she'd put out the statement on Facebook that "nobody is going to ban your guns.  Get over it." I pointed out several times that this was not the issue; "I knew my attack on you wasn't going to work, so it's OK" is not an acceptable excuse. The point is that there are people who certainly would ban guns and confiscate my property if they had their way, and the only reason they don't have their way is that people like me prevent it by dint of hard work. 

• I don't have to let you crash my car because it's got seatbelts and airbags, and
• I don't have to let you torch my house because I have fire extinguishers, and
• I sure as hell don't have to shut up while knowledge-free debates over whether to infringe my rights and confiscate my property are carried out by my betters.

On Fitness and Complacency, Part II: What's Working for Me

When I left off, I'd described losing about 75 pounds in the last eight months. Clearly I'm bragging a little bit; I'm proud of that change. I'm enjoying my new clothes and some other benefits, which I'll detail in another post a little later on. But I've lost more weight than that in past, and here I am losing it again. I don't want to be on an up-and-down cycle for the rest of my life. But how do you avoid that?  Here's how I'm trying to do it this time:

How do you define "fitness?"

I'm going to use this particular disclaimer five times in this post: everything I'm about to say is true for me as far as I know, but I don't know anything about whether it will work for you.

That said, I've had to give up on defining fitness solely in terms of weight or strength. My approach for the last year has been to define "fitness" as the ability to do what I want to do with my mind and body.  

Using that definition, if I want to go skydiving, but I weigh too much to do it safely, I need to lose weight in order to be more fit. In fact, if you look at the ticker on the left, you'll see a countdown to 275 pounds. The reason for that is not that 275 pounds is an ideal weight; it's the maximum weight for the Grafton Zip Line, and I want to go ride the zip lines high in the air. I weighed 297 pounds this morning, so I'm not fit for that activity . . . yet. Similarly, I want to go skydiving, but the nearest schools allow a maximum weight of 225 pounds, so I'm not fit for that activity yet, either.  

It won't end there, though. If I get a chance to go out west and hunt elk in the mountains, would I go? Only if I'm fit enough to walk those mountains. What if my kids move out and I want a Corvette . . . or a Miata? Gotta be able to fit. What if I find some spare time and decide I should go back into BJJ or Judo? Well, last time I tried that, I was 30 pounds heavier than I am now, and I wasn't fit enough to learn much in the course of a typical BJJ class--I was just proud to survive it. But if I go back, I'll want more than lighter weight--I'll want a strong core, good balance and the ability to move my body gymnastically. That means that those athletic abilities have to go into my definition of fitness, too.

Now, if you want to win a state or national powerlifting title, or you want to run three marathons per year, your fitness needs differ markedly from mine.  But most of us have some fitness ideas in common. We don't want to have open-heart surgery, so we want good cardiovascular fitness, yes?  We don't want diabetes, so we need to maintain reasonable bodyfat levels. We want to be that old man who walks everywhere and tries new things, not the old man who can't lift himself out of a chair, so we all need core strength.

Right?

How do you avoid complacency?

If you haven't fought serious obesity, it might sound crazy to think of someone who weighs "less than 300 pounds" checking himself out in the mirror and thinking, "Oh, yeah . . . .close enough for the girls I hang out with." But I've gone as high as a measured 396 pounds, and I assure you, the difference is amazing even now. At that weight, joint pain is constant and normal, moving athletically is nearly impossible unless you're freakishly strong, and your heart is working overtime. By contrast, at my current weight, I feel relatively light and fast, and my joint pain is so much less that I could be tempted to "lighten up" a little and stop working so hard. That's what I've done in the past, and it has always led me to let my weight creep right back up.

The main thing I'm working on is to set tougher goals and set them publicly.  Everyone I know, for instance, knows that I want to go skydiving next fall. I can miss that goal, but I can't abandon it without knowing that everyone, especially me, will know that I fell short. In the past, I've set goals based purely on weight, and I've moderated them with statements like "Well, even if I never get past 290, I've come a long way!"  That's true, but it misses the point. In order to avoid complacency, then, there may be no way around periodically re-calibrating your expectations--or maybe it's more accurate to say that you have to recognize that your old expectations are not going to be useful if you're making progress. If you think 300 would be great, 275 would be wonderful, and 250 would be pushing it because maybe you don't want to work quite that hard, and moderation in all things after all, and . . . well, then, you aren't going to get to jump out of that plane, are you? Ever.

What kind of diet makes sense?

A loaded question with a million answers. But there's a reason I put it before the discussion of exercise; most of us rely on exercise to get into shape, but most of us know that diet is actually doing a lot more to determine our fitness. Exercise can't do the job of diet; it just can't. Diet is what you're made of. So what am I made of these days?

Mostly protein and fats.  I've given up sugar and starch, so that leaves out sweets, breads, fruit and most vegetables. Some will say that it's impossible to get fit on a diet of meat, nuts, roughage, cheese, and only limited vegetables, and speaking for themselves, they could be right. But what I've found for myself is that when I give up most carbohydrates, I stop craving them. When I eat sugar, I crave sugar so strongly that I once sought addiction treatment for compulsive binge-eating. Same thing for starches, especially breads. There's no moderation there for me.

So now my diet is mostly eggs, chicken, beef, venison, fish, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, almonds, pecans, and various salads. That lets me eat to fullness, get plenty of protein and fats, but cut out the carbohydrates.

What kind of exercise makes sense?

Again, I'm speaking only of myself here, but I have a long history of injuries and ineffective exercise, mostly weight lifting, traditional American football drills and practice, attempts at martial arts, cycling, and the standard "gym cardio" on an elliptical trainer. Playing football works--kind of--in that you'll usually get stronger and more agile, but at the price of injuries and taking a general beating. Cycling and the elliptical trainer both had the same basic problem--I was trying to outrun my diet by putting in long bouts of cardiovascular training. Remember the part above where that doesn't work? Right.  

Today, I walk daily. Walking always seemed too tame to be doing much, on a par with bowling for exercise.  But the truth is that walking works.

I also work on my core daily, if only by blowing bubbles in my "belly bucket."  Not sure what that is? That's OK; we'll cover it one of these days.

But the thing that has really made the big difference has been to join HIPE Fitness in Springfield, IL, and work out with Wayne Carrels. Joining Wayne's group fitness classes has given me a coach who pushes me past levels of fatigue that I would have accepted as my limits if I'd been on my own. That can put people off, because it sounds like having a drill sergeant barking at you for three hours per week, but Wayne is a professional trainer who's also looking out for my safety. My body is a map of old injuries (knees, ankles, hips, shoulders, neck, and a hernia) and in fact, I was recovering from my latest nasty knee injury when I joined HIPE.  I have not had another injury. We're constantly told that we have to make diet and exercise a lifestyle, but when you're working on your own and struggling from injury to injury, that's not possible. Wayne has made it possible for me. He's also influenced my idea of safe, effective exercise by teaching me about what trainers call the "Four Pillars of Movement:" 

• Locomotion
• Level change
• Push/Pull
• Rotation

More on those later? Maybe.

On Fitness and Complacency, Part I

I think I've figured out how to measure when I'm back to regular writing: when I stop apologizing for my output at the beginning of each post, it probably means I feel like I'm back.  So . . . . I apologize for my output, or lack thereof. I do have things to write about; what I don't have is the extra time and energy.  I'd like to write about at least ten things in my life right now, but I've let them pile up so much that I'm not sure where to start. Luckily, I know how to proceed when I have a big pile of projects and don't know where to start: just wade in and grab something that looks important or interesting.

So today I want to update both my readers on my fight to get fit and talk a little about what has paid off for me and what hasn't. Obviously nothing I say here is guaranteed to work for you the way it worked for me, but after all, it did work for me.

Got any data?

I'm glad you asked, subheading.  On July 1st, 2012, I weighed 369.5 pounds.  I was wearing size 4XL shirts and pants with 48-and-50-inch waists (the 48s had gotten awful tight, but I could wear them.)  I had a nagging injury to my left knee that was driving me crazy, and my right knee wasn't exactly reliable.  My right hip wasn't great, either, and neither were either of my shoulders. I was a wreck.  Despite my joint injuries and weight, I'd been "working out" at my local 24-hour gym for about two years, mostly by spending 30-60 minutes on elliptical trainers four times per week.  Last February, I decided to see whether I could finish the "Fight for Air Climb," a race up 32 flights of stairs to the top of our tallest local building.  I was able to finish by taking numerous breaks for rest and water; it took me 10 minutes and 53 seconds.  There were people who did it more slowly, but not many.

Today, I weigh 297 pounds.  I wear size 2XL shirts and recently bought a pair of pants in a 44-inch waist, which are big enough that I've just ordered a size 42 in the same pants to see how they fit.  Yesterday, I went shopping for a size 2XL coat, but found that the best fit was an XL.  I can literally button up my old jacket and wear it over my new coat.  My knees still aren't perfect, but I no longer need to wear a knee brace.  My workouts are now balanced between three sessions per week at HIPE Fitness under the watchful eye of Wayne Carrels and calisthenics, yoga, stretching and cardio training at home daily.  This year, I decided to try the Fight for Air Climb again.  I set a personal goal: I would try to make the climb without stopping and try to beat 10 minutes flat.  I did climb without stopping, and I finished in 6:07, which put me just barely in the top 50% of finishers.

Complacency, or:
"No, man, you did it. If you don't lose one more pound, you look perfect. You did it."

I'm glad you asked that, too. See, I've lost weight before.  I've been determined to get fit before, too.  I've never made it last, and I have to wonder why. I think the greatest danger is complacency.  I'm used to thinking of myself as an enormously fat man.  In fact, I'm accustomed to morbid obesity.  In my old body, simply finishing a long stair climb or a long cycling event was a "moral victory."  No, I wasn't competitive nor really even fit enough to enjoy myself, but I could claim bragging rights just by finishing. The last time I was close to this weight was over five years ago, and then as now, I had allowed my weight to balloon up and then made a determined dash to lose it.  I lost about 100 pounds in about a year, but a few years later I'd gained at least 80 of it back.  Why? Well, looking back, I remember thinking it was time to ease up and "enjoy life" a little.  Time to have a couple of Oreos every now and then.  Time to give up that crazy fad low-carb diet and go back to a sensible, balanced diet with fruit and bread and such, especially now that I'd lost so much weight that cycling was easier.  I'd lose the rest by becoming a cycling madman.

Of course, I didn't.  I left the lifestyle that was working for me, and I let sugar and starch back into my diet.  That led to cravings for more, and I gave in.  Eventually I was bingeing on cookies, cake, pie, ice cream . . . then baking bread at home and eating entire loaves, piece by piece.  But why would anyone do that? I think it was more than a failure of will.  I think I decided at some point that I'd gone as far as I could reasonably be expected to go.  I'd done so well!  When I reached 290 pounds, I'd won another one of those "moral victories."  And, as I had during my entire sprint to lose weight, I gave myself the foods that had ruined my health as rewards when I felt that I'd done enough to save my health.  Hit a weight loss goal?  That calls for a cheat meal at the pizza place!  Finish a metric century ride (100km/43miles)?  CAKE!  

That quote up there in the subheading is real. A coworker said it to me at lunch on Friday with the absolute best of intentions.  He wanted to encourage me and support me, but he made me think. I don't want the feeling that I've done enough, that 297 pounds--just this side of morbid obesity--is "pretty good" or "good enough" for me.  I want to feel like I can do better.  After all, at 297 pounds I still can't go skydiving.  I still can't ride the Grafton Ziplines.  I still can't buy term life insurance--at ANY price--despite my non-smoking, non-drinking, perfect health bona fides. I can finish a competitive stair climb, but I can't be competitive. I do finally come in under the advertised maximum weight limits for my attic ladder and the safety harness for my deer stand, so I've got that going for me, but somehow it's not enough.  And why should it be enough?  Why shouldn't I decide that now I can be a 200-pound athlete who's capable of learning any sport or hobby I choose whenever I choose?

So, today, I'm on guard against complacency. It's all around me, and it's always hungry. My relatives are proud of me and they want to support me, but they want to talk about how great the progress is. To them, it would be rude to talk about how far I still have to go.    Working out with very fit people at HIPE helps me with that. They compliment me on my progress, but I see them enjoying life in ways that I still can't. They have something I want.  My eventual goal is to end up lighter than 220 pounds so that I can make my first skydive; it occurs to me sometimes that many of the people around me in the gym could simply decide today, on a whim, that they'd like to try skydiving, call around, and be in a plane tomorrow working up the nerve.  The real difference in fitness between them and me isn't how they look, it's the fact that their bodies don't hold them back.  If there's something they want to do, but it calls for strength, agility, balance, flexibility and stability . . . they just go out and do it.  That's what I want.  I want to be fit enough to be up for anything and ready to try the next adventure.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

I don't know whether anyone will ever read this, given the way I've abandoned this blog, but today I feel moved to write.  I'm going to try to balance discretion against the kind of vagueness that makes me hate Facebook sometimes. In short, I'll leave out some details, but I'll try to make some sense on the topic I've chosen: the willing suspension of disbelief.

You see, my beloved son, Thing 1, recently had a whirlwind romance with a young lady.  As is apparently the custom in the present day, they did not "go out" or "date"; they simply decided that they would be "boyfriend and girlfriend," exclusively monogamous and suitably jealous. Since his new young lady is a religious sort, Thing 1 decided that it would be best to blend in; he declared his love for Jesus and his devotion to the churchgoing life. I was tenuously supportive until I realized that he'd put out two versions of his newfound devotion:

• Parent Version:  "I've been thinking, and I think I want to try going to church with Young Lady. I think it might be good for me. Plus she says it's a lot of fun."
• Young Lady Version (paraphrased): "Who, me? Oh, hell, yes, I'm washed in the blood!  I've got the Son shining on me, baby! I have a close, personal relationship with Jesus; hell, He built my hot rod! I certainly know all about your particular brand of Christianity and endorse its tenets in full.  What are the odds, huh?"

It didn't take long for that to wear thin; without ever actually visiting a church, he decided about a week later that he would have to come clean. I don't know exactly what he said to the Young Lady, but he told me that he'd made it clear to her that "I'm an atheist so I don't go to church." 

Huh.

Now, I'm a fairly outspoken atheist myself, but that was news to me. He used to make noise about going to church whenever he wanted to rile me, and I'd simply suggest that he keep an open mind during the services and tell us all about it when he got home.  Somehow, it never reached the point of action, but I figured there were some vague notions of a vaguely Christian God and Heaven and Hell bouncing around in there. We talked about it a bit on a long drive, though, and he does seem to have come to the conclusion that he doesn't buy the Christian narrative.  Whether he sees the difference between that and atheism, an actual lack of any belief in anything that could be described as a god, I don't know yet.

And then . . . . well, last night he showed me that he's still capable of the willing suspension of disbelief.

He was explaining to me that an unidentified (to you, anyway) woman of our mutual acquaintance is actually, despite her decades of lies, abuse and neglect of children, quite trustworthy. I had just finished explaining that he should not take her words at face value because she had, and I think I'm quoting myself accurately here, "been lying both to and about everyone involved in this question since before you were born."  

This wounded him right in his most deeply compassionate feels, and he explained my error.  I had failed to take into account, you see, that she has now changed.  She's told him the truth about everything and made it clear how I, his mother, his grandparents and everyone else who loves him has deceived him.  Actually, when you think about it, she is clearly the victim, here. Unfortunately for him, he tried to prove it with a handy example of her honesty.  See if you can spot the flaw:

"She's been telling me the absolute truth about everything, dad. You don't know. She tells me everything, even when it makes her look really bad. She even told me about her DUI! She told me all about how it really happened, how she was riding in a car with someone else driving and she'd been drinking, and they crashed, and she passed out, and when they found her, she was in the driver's seat and the other guy was gone and she never found out who it was! Why would she tell me about all that unless she's trying to tell me the truth now?"

That's right; although he doesn't believe in God, and he doesn't believe in Jesus, the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, he has clung to belief in one more supernatural force personified:  Sumdood, Punisher of the Innocent.  

Ahem. (Annual Blog Post, 2012)

So, it's been more than a year since I last posted anything here, and . . . . uh . . . how ya been?

See, I was just talking to a colleague about what we planned to do this weekend, and I don't really have big plans other than watching my son, Thing One, play football tonight.*   Then I saw that there's a TamBerta X Blogmeet in the mighty city-state of Indianapolis (literally: city-state stolen from Indians) on Sunday.  That's a long way for me, but then again, Illinois gun bloggers don't meet up in Illinois, so maybe I ought to go check it out.  But Blogmeets always make me itch to write something, so here I am.

But what to write about?  Thing One's football career?

Well, I played football when I was younger (it was mandatory in small coal-mine towns on the prairie, as was the fashion at the time.)  I liked it a lot, as a sport to be played, but I never really built the kind of passion that most people in my small town can work up over it. I'm not a "Sports Booster," and I don't really remember the highlights well enough to sit around and do the Al Bundy thing.

Still, last year, as their junior year of high school began, both Thing One and Thing Two were determined to join the football team.  To be honest, I never cared whether they played football; it was a lot of fun when I did it, and I did get some benefit, but it's not the molding of young gentlemen that so many people seem to think.  On the other hand, I'd like them to be able to make their own decisions about things like that, so I wasn't opposed to their football aspirations per se.  My objection was to shelling out time and money for yet another team or activity that would end when they either quit or were told not to come back.  Their record so far had been dismal:

• Flag football-- Played an entire season because mom and dad did not allow them to quit.
• Pee Wee football-- Quit
• Golf-- (Thing Two) removed after a brawl in a country club dining room.
• Scholastic Bowl-- (Thing Two) quit.  (Thing One) quit because he'd only joined the team to torment Thing Two.
• Basketball-- (Thing One) quit.
• Basketball-- (Thing One) went back, but was thrown off the team for fighting at halftime.
• Track and Field-- Both quit.

Perhaps you can imagine my confidence.  

We made a new plan for high school football.  Both boys were allowed to join the team, but each was entirely responsible for himself.  Each had to pay his own expenses up front; if he couldn't afford that, he could either earn more money or quit.  Each was responsible for getting himself to practices and games; we didn't say we would never drive them to the field or remind them not to be late, but it would never be our responsibility.  And each was absolutely responsible for his own behavior.  If his time, money, blood, sweat and tears went to waste because he just had to fight or quit or whatever, that would be his problem, not ours.  In return, I promised that on the last day of football season, given an itemized list of their expenses, I would reimburse them--IF they were still members of the team.

Thing Two is much the bigger and stronger of the two, but also the most reluctant athlete, and he was further hampered by a deeply personal hatred of the school's head football coach.  He hemmed and hawed, skipping meetings and a few early workouts, before deciding to cut his losses last spring.  I think that was the right decision for him; he was really on the team only because he thought he would prove that he "could do it" to the inevitable small-town teenagers who thought they were better than he was.  None of them are editing their third novels, as far as I know, so it seemed to me that Thing Two's real interests were elsewhere.  The best fatherly advice I could figure out was this:

"Look, if you really enjoy playing the game of football so much that you want to do mostly that for the next few months, that's fine.  But if you don't love playing the game, you're going to hate this.  Don't give up your time and punish your body unless you have your own reason.  There's no proving anything to haters."

Thing One, on the other hand, has never wanted anything as badly as he wanted to be a football player.   Unfortunately, starting to play football as a high school junior around here is a little like being chosen as Tribute from District 12; everybody hopes for the best, but the careers have been training for this their whole lives.  He was and is the smallest person on the varsity team, but what he sees is that he's on the varsity team. I haven't always been impressed with his coaches, but he loves them and they do show that they care about how his life turns out, even though he's not in a position to help them win football games right now.  He's had to moderate himself and bring himself under control, and he's had to suffer the consequences of his own decisions.  He's quit and rejoined twice, and at the beginning of this week, he decided to settle his feud with another player by inviting him to an unfair fight in the parking lot in front of a scattering of parents waiting to pick up their young men.  How he avoided being cut from the team for that, I don't know, but he made amends and he's still there.  I'm proud of him.

Tonight, there's not much chance that he'll play.  But he wore his jersey to school today, and one of the girls will wear his other one, and he's proud of himself.  Tonight he'll stand on the sidelines and vibrate as he waits for a coach to call his name.  Four generations of my family will sit in the bleachers and cheer for his team, and Thing Two will stay home, writing and savoring the silence.  Will we all be where we belong?  I don't know, but we'll be where our choices put us.  That's pretty good for a small-town Friday night.

*What, the game itself?  Well, everybody loves an underdog, and the good news is that they're definitely underdogs.  They squeaked into the playoffs with a 5-4 record by running the table in their last four games of the season.  Their opponents got into the playoffs by going 9-0 and winning the conference championship while allowing only two touchdowns all year.  They shut out their first six opponents completely, not even allowing a field goal, and wrecked our team 50-0 in the second game of the season. And of course, the game will be played on the opponents' home field.  

Imma post something today: Zombie-killing music.

Don't look so shocked; I still know the password to this place.

Anyway, Tam wants to know what song would come up on my iPod when I loose lead into zombie heads. In case anyone else is wondering, this is what an atheist listens to when he fantasizes about splattering zed-brains across chain-link:



Well, one atheist anyway . . . what can I say? Somebody's gonna cut you down, you filthy undead shamblers, and it might just be me. As my dad used to say, one of us is going to get hurt, and it might not be me.

Tam actually got it from Random Nuclear Strikes, who chose Ministry's Assimilate. And I really only decided to contribute mine after I listened to Breda's quirky, Icelandic death-pop selection.

Bad Idea, Ebert

I don't want to give the impression that I'm some kind of violent redneck, unless you want to talk about your fantasy of putting me into a "green re-education camp."

We are not going to be re-enacting the Cultural Revolution, here, goober. Nobody is going to try to load me on to a train or put my kids in a glorious farming collective camp. Even if the whole world turned upside down and anybody did try it, I'd kill them really, really, really dead.

I don't do a lot of internet chest-thumping, but something in this guy's plaintive wail touched me deep inside where my trigger-puller lives.