My point of view here is hard won, btw. From age 12-to-21 I was a competitive swimmer and weight lifter. My body fat was such that with a full lung of air I would hard-sink to the bottom of the pool. I was always cold. I don't know what the % was but it was about as low as it goes. My resting heart rate was 49; a college party trick with girls was to tell them I was dead and have them take my pulse. After that time I continued to lift to about age 25. I couldn't buy suits. With a 45 chest and 29 waist, the haberdashers would say go custom or buy two suits. One guy said "sure but the pants will have the pockets cross over in alteration...so no, I can't help you."
Fast forward to, say, 2016-2017. I had been idle and sedentary for decades. I ate too much, wallowed too much, drank too much, and was at least 20 lb over weight with visceral fat in a family where the men have fatal or near fatal "heart events" in their late 40s and early 50s. My suits and pants didn't fit. My shirts were loose and blousey. I'd had a crappy series of relationships with women that didn't really care about me and for whom I did not care either. I had no real goals as such. I hadn't touched a weight or a pool for years. It's a miracle that I did not start smoking, too. I was a walking pre-heart-attack case study and a retirement blogger with no energy or enthusiasm for anything except maybe excel and R-script (though those have been quite helpful, thank you very much).
Time for a change! A breakup with someone that had browbeat and harangued me for four and a half straight years without the hint of a letup liberated me to look closely at the future. I'm 60 now. I mean, really, how much time do I have left? That future had better be well-spent time: good health, good healthy and meaningful relationships (or none, I'm cool with that), and a sense of purpose meaning and identity. You know the drill. And so I press-ganged myself into a hard shift down that path. And I mean Hard. Somewhere around Q3 2017, when I finally liberated myself, was the inception. From now on, I said, a full focus on self and health and identity and purpose.
The following year and a half, since Oct 2017, has been almost nothing but 6x per week in the gym in splits, 6 months of no alcohol, a hyper focus on healthy but not obsessive nutrition, an intense focus on what I want from my future, a close inspection of past behaviors and experiences in relationships, an serious engagement with what I want to do with my remaining, what? 25 years?!? This is a big big deal! It took me, with that degree of commitment, about 6 weeks to lose 20 lbs of visceral fat. That's pretty fast but that is also what can happen with a hard commitment. The rest of the year has been kind of a slog but just yesterday I ran into a 51 yo woman, someone that I've known for years, who looked at me and said "omg, what happened to you? You got really big." Ok, yeah, that sounds like a brag, and I guess it is, but it is also a tool: affirmation = reinforcement loop = acceleration = radical change. Those kind of comments are fuel for change not just big heads. The mission and purpose stuff is there too, btw, but grist for another post.
So, when someone in their 20s contacted me recently about a health related issue, after I had just inventoried my own gratitude, I had to jump in and offer the only thing I had which was my own narrative. Solipsistic, yes of course, but I have to assume I am doing the right thing here. This is what I said:
--------------------------------------------
To [...]
Part of my rationale over the last year and a half to get as ripped as I can, lose weight, and get my heart checked twice, one of which was a
state-of-the-art procedure, was "that nagging voice" I heard in the
back of my head from [...the person...] about taking care of myself. And it
worked! ex-cardio conditioning, I am probably in better physical shape
than I was at 25. If you can swing it, do me the reverse courtesy, in
addition to the concept of self-respect, of taking care of yourself. [having ….]
at [age…] should really catch one's attention.
Here are several tweets that I've sent out to twitter-sphere
this month. I do this kind of thing as a form of reinforcement therapy. I
am not messaging *anything* here to you. I am just trying to demonstrate what I
do for myself to consolidate and accelerate what I am trying to do, in case
it's useful.
My response to a thread where a woman that dropped something like 120...
"Cold cuts are prob good idea. Twice in 10 years I've had to burn off ~20lb of visceral fat. Method: high commitment, intense training, IF (fasting) 18:6, lean protein + veg + sol fiber, and, importantly, low or no alcohol for a while. First time took 6 months, second ~6-8 weeks."
My response to some guy's tweet; he's a physical trainer and
IF coach
"I’ve done IF twice. Works really well when paired with a hard commitment, rigorous resistance work, low/no alcohol, and a lean meat & veg diet. I won’t do it thrice because it will now be permanent. Except for the alcohol abstinence, perhaps"
A tweet from me to the universe:
18 months ago, my only goal was to be able to walk thru the front door of the gym. Now the only constraint is the nausea of working out too hard and even that, which I used to consider failure, now seems more like victory. Literally in the best shape since 1980.
Here is one more self-congratulatory tweet in response to something
from someone somewhere. This is not vanity, it is a form of gratitude and
self-reinforcement. This is not typically something I'd share […] but it does
show a "path" that I'm on personally that I consider to be uniquely
positive for the first time ever, so whatever... Plus I said it in
public now so it’s out there:
Me, since 2017:
1) High intensity lifting in splits 6x/wk; well-cut for 60, first time in 30 years
2) Testosterone up, body fat almost down to my competitive swimmer 20-something self
3) High intensity intellectual self-development plus now something to show for it
4) Hyper (full time) commitment to three teen-20s daughters (that’s not new)
5) Radical commitment to self-accountability
6) Irrevocably anchored frame of reference vis-à-vis relationships
7) Applied awareness of evidence-based intersexual dynamics
2019 is the best year yet…
So, please use the [...health scare...] thing as a "spur." You know, I
used to have a boss that would sometimes fire people if he had to say something
three times. That meant that if he ever happened to say something to me twice,
I totally tuned-in and I suddenly became hyper-hyper-aware of what I was doing.
Consider your body your boss and that it has said something to you at least once
now.
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