Walk with me: Learning to Fail

I spent some time reading through Lyle McDonald’s Training the Obese Beginner series. While I’ve got a few months of training under my belt, this guide certainly did a great job reminding me that I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to training. While not a surprise, I had already been considering that I need to understand more to push my strength training to the next level.

In his series of posts, Lyle McDonald explains how the goal for any beginner, but especially obese ones is to train to train. It’s counter-intuitive, but if you’re completely out of shape, you need to rebuild a foundation to truly launch from. I’ve underestimated the difficulty of this alone. A part of me fully expected to be done all that by now. Reading through that guide definitely put how far I truly am from that into perspective.

To really get the most out of it, I need to focus on measuring progression in an objective and consistent way. I also need to plan out my workouts rather than just doing what I feel like doing once I’m there. Another thing I need to get better at is pushing exercises towards failure. I’m starting to recognize that at my phase, the priority is to practice the many movements, rather than necessarily push numbers.

The intricacies of actually learning to use your own body is something I’m only beginning to understand. Understanding theory only goes so far, putting it into practice is the important part. It’s totally mind-boggling to realize how little body awareness I’ve started with and how slowly it develops. There is a lot to look forward to, and I’m excited to learn along the way.

Fitting into old clothes

I’ve hit a pretty emotional milestone. Since I’m down over 120lbs now, I decided to try on some of my old clothes that I grew out of in the last few years. Getting more clothes to fit to only grow out of them is a pretty brutal emotional process, reversing this is very gratifying. I remember tearing up a little bit as something I remember being too tight and uncomfortable actually feeling loose. It sounds weird, but these clothes are stark reminders of all I went through in them. Being able to put things on that didn’t even fit when I bought (and couldn’t return) them was quite the experience.

Almost everything I started this journey with is incredibly loose and oversized. I am absolutely ecstatic to begin the spring with better fitting shorts! I’ll admit, I still struggle to feel the progress I’ve actually made, but wearing some pants that certainly wouldn’t fit before definitely makes it feel more real. I’ve kept a decade’s worth of my old clothes, so I’ll have tons to get through and look forward to on the way down. It’s certainly helpful that I kept my old clothes, because I wouldn’t be able to afford getting new clothes at this rate!

Revenge of the hunger signals

To get control over my intake, I leaned quite a bit on having one-meal-a-day (OMAD) for convenience and simplicity. People regularly recommend intermittent fasting as a weight loss strategy, but I came across some information that changed my mind. It logically follows that your body can only turn so much protein into muscle (or repairing muscle) in a given amount of time. This means that when you fill yourself with your daily protein all in one meal, it’s possible that a non-trivial amount of that protein is ‘wasted’ to be burned for energy.

When I began switching to trying to equally distribute protein throughout the day, I was stunned at how quickly and ferociously hunger appeared. Instead of being perfectly satiated with a single large meal until the next one, I was immediately catching myself counting the minutes until the next meal. This intuitively makes sense. As less protein is available for energy, the body is being forced to lean more on burning fat and bringing in other sources of energy. At least, that’s the situation as I understand it. It could be entirely placebo, but I can say I definitely feel quite differently after making the change.

I’ve been taking this as an opportunity to really face my hunger head-on. I’ve mentioned before that the more I exercise, it’s really the physical pain that is a bigger challenge than hunger at this point. My hope is that if I can continue to push through this, I will be in a better position to tackle the inevitable increase in hunger signals as I leave obesity and become merely overweight. I can say, I’m glad I’m so neurotic about all this, because I’ll have a great deal of trial-and-error to share with anyone who is curious.

Looking forward to making you all proud

What’s really stunned me now that I’m below 450lbs now, is that I’m not that far from being below 400lbs. At my current rate of progress I’ll be below 400 in less than three months. I have so much to look forward as I continue to push through these milestones. It’s quite funny how day-to-day I feel like I’m not loosing enough, but when I think about how I really only began making measurable progress last September, it hasn’t been that long at all. After building a bit of a runway to get started, I feel confident I can soar higher than even I thought possible. It’s actually quite surprising to me how quickly I’ve blasted through the 400s in a relatively short period of time. I definitely expect the 300s to be slower, but also a lot more fun.

I’ll be working hard to reach my ambitious targets and share the challenges and reflection along the way. I greatly appreciate the attention, encouragement, and kindness from those following my journey. One of the things I’ve begun to understand is how applicable much of what I’m doing is to other problems in life. One of the things I’ll never forget is how much a difference a little kindness makes.

New Resources

I’ve started adding various weight loss & fitness resources to my knowledge graph. The hope is to eventually put together a full picture of the process as I understand it, but in the short term it will be where I put links and references as I discover them. I have a weakness for informative information delivered via humorous cartoons. Trainer Winny is a great YouTube channel I’ve recently stumbled on. You’ll hopefully like 5 Things I Wish I Knew When I First Started Lifting.

More motivational memes

I spent some time browsing to see what I could find. I found it fascinating how many of the ‘motivational’ memes out there are just about getting rich and ‘getting it all’. I appreciate the many examples where they show that there is more to this life than just that. Feel free to browse the entire collection