Dean's Blog

Nothing much going on today, other than the fact that my stomach is gnawing upon my backbone. Probably due to trying out the new equipment at Gold’s this morning, and trying to work off my Thanksgiving feast.

I have recently been updating my camera collection. actually, updating is a strange term to use, as the cameras I have recently aquired are older than I am. Yep, the good old Canon FD manual focus series. I have two FTb bodies, a series of prime lenses, and now am awaiting a factory service manual to fix a few quirks that have popped up. Still waiting to actually take any photos with them, but I expect them to be stellar. Going to try some lightning photography with them, as well as some nice portrait and landscape stuff.

Also on my purchases sleeve is a copy of Corel Painter with the Wacom tablet so I can whip up art without burning through Prismacolor markers. Ahh the joys of technology. The only thing that I am really lacking is an updated computer. My P4 2.8ghz is pretty ancient by todays standards, as it has a really slow FSB. Works fine, but I have an urge for more speed on the processing for Photoshop and After Effects. Time is money.. and it takes money to save time. Priced out a dreamish system yesterday that I would still have to build at $3500.00. Not bad, but that doesn’t include new warp-drive Quad Core processors. Something eerily cool about the words Quad Core.. kind of like Quad Damage in Quake.

Sometimes the general oddities of life seem to enthrall me. For example, a few years ago I happened to be grazing the channels on television and came across a rather interesting documentary on the world of competitive eating. That’s right, there is an organization that considers eating a sport, and has coined the term ‘gurgitators’ to describe the athletes of the sport, and unlike the images that likely come to mind at this point, all of the top gurgitators are very skinny.

You see, there is this organization known as the International Federation Of Competitive Eating, IFOCE which organizes and administers comptetitive eating challenges all over the the world, but mostly in the United States. Some of the most famous would be the Nathans Hot Dog eating contest on Coney Island, and the Krystal Burger Square Off in Chattanooga, Tennessee. How many hot dogs you ask? Try 53.5 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes by Takeru Kobayashi, which comes out to 12840 calories and 802 grams of fat.

But it doesn’t end there, as all kinds of food items have been sent to the front lines of competition. Try 11 lbs of cheesecake in 9 minutes, 5.75 pounds of battered asparagus in 10 minutes, 65 hard boiled eggs in just under 7 minutes, and 4 1/4 pounds of fruitcake in 10 minutes. It doesn’t stop there, lobster, oysters, jambalaya, pancakes, pickles, cow brains (17.5 pounds), pasta, sausage, spam and a very long stomach stretching list more.

There is money to be won, records to break, and all the excitement of two handed water dipped gorging you can imagine. You aren’t allowed to purge (barf) during the competition, but there isn’t anything in the rules that state that stuff can’t come out of your nose while competing. 5.5 pounds of buffet food (in 12 minutes) anyone?

I played some indoor soccer last Saturday, which was both cool and foolish at the same time. Foolish because I had a pretty serious leg workout the day before in the gym, and I haven’t played soccer in about 14 years, and we didn’t have enough players to switch off, so it was basically 3 hours of running and missing goals. The cool part is that we had some awesome sandwiches afterwards, oh yeah, and it was fun.

Saturday night I couldn’t move, Sunday I could hardly move, and by Tuesday, which was leg day again at the Gym, I had moved up to 410 lbs for my last set of leg presses (from 360), which is good.

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. It’s the sign of growth, being sore after a good workout, particularly the next day. However, this is not to be confused with being super sore the day after playing a fast game of Hockey after three years of being a couch potato. That’s called paying for your ego.

While I’m on the topic of gym jargon, here’s one for the masses: Gymbecile.

It basically refers to a newbie to the gym, usually indicated by their wearing of matching high fashion activewear, green tea filled water bottles, and an inability to do anything other than annoy everyone else. Gymbeciles may also be people who have no clues about gym etiquette. Case in point; Gymbecile # 1 has decided to look like Arnold, and so starts a rigorous routine of sitting on a machine, doing 8 reps of a ridiculously ego-tripping amount of weight, and then rests for 15 minutes while still sitting on said machine, puffing and spitting all the way, and preventing anyone else from using the machine. Gymbecile # 2 will use some bit of equipment, and then when finished, not wipe down the machine, leaving a sticky film of rash inducing gymbecile sweat all over the seat and cushions. Gymbeciles # 3 and # 4 will occupy a bunch of equipment, while just chatting it up and not actually doing anything for an hour.

I think the hoilday season at the end of the year is one of the most difficult times for trying to lose the flab. I mean, standard days of the year are bad enough. At our weekly family dinners I have to fend off the copious amounts of bread, cream cheese, sour cream, potatoes, and pasta. Following the diner there is always the call of “bring on the dessert!” and “where’s the ice cream!” along with, “3 scoops or 5?”

So, Christmas comes along and the artillery bombardment becomes even more intense. It’s not just the stuff from the store, it’s the Christmas baking and homemade treats and chocolates at 10lbs of butter per square inch. It’s ok though, I am quite used to my wife baking up dozens of cookies “to give to other people” that I am ok with seeing treats go out the door instead of into my gullet.

At any rate, progress in my personal jihad against my waistline has been progressing. I actually had to take out a knife and cut a new hole into my belt, as it was just sort of hanging from my belt loops on the smallest setting. I’ll need to get new pants, but I don’t really want to buy a bunch if I’ll have the same process repeated in a few more months. Maybe they have Business casual sweatpants.

I can always tell when I’ve had a good lower body workout, being as when I go to walk down the two flights of stairs to the C-Train, it feels like I am standing on jello. My Friday Leg and Core lower body routine is pretty brutal, lots of Squats, Lunges and Deadlifts. Lunges are probably the worst for me. I do 30 Lunges with 70 lbs and I’m about dead. Then I see a video of Ronnie Coleman at Metroflex gym with 200lbs doing lunging laps around the parking lot. Of course the guy has legs like a warhorse, but I mean, it sure makes a guy feel like a girly-man.

Interestingly enough, last weekend after consuming a large Thanksgiving feast (Sundy is my normal cheat day for food) I stepped on the scale and realized that I am 20 lbs lighter than I was when I started my exercise and diet program this summer, and 10 lbs lighter that my last check-in on my weblog. This is encouraging.

I’m starting to see results in the mirror, which is nice. The initial losses usually come from visceral fat around your organs, and the stuff that’s built up in your muscles, kind of like marbelling in a nice juicy steak, dripping with peppercorn sauce, nice and medium rare..mmm. I digress.

I think the most difficult thing has to be morning nutrition. I mean I get up, and an hour later I’m at the Gym. Food has to be consumed with enough time to digest before hitting the gym, which is about an hour, so that you don’t hurl your whey ‘n oatmeal all over the nice clean mirrored walls. The thing is, Oatmeal, the real kind, not that instant crap, with all it’s super great awesome benefits, is really hard to eat quickly. I mean it’s a big gooey lump. I can’t add anything to it, because simple sugars at this stage are bad, and fructose from fruit and jellies is a retarder to metabolic processes. I can add skim milk, but still, it’s a big lump going down, and it takes patience to consume.

Well, ok, so this post is about supplements in regards to strength training and all that jazz. So, one might be lead to ask the question, what is it with all the horse pills and sludge that athletes gobble down all the time? Well, I’m no expert, but I’ll toss in my two cents.

When you exercise, you break down muscle tissue. This tissue breakdown, along with the chemical reactions that take place during energy depletion causes a few things to occur. One, your body needs protein to repair (and build new) muscle fibres. So, you can eat 2 pounds of chicken and fish a day, or you can be like most people, myself included, and take your protein from protein shakes, at, on average, 24g of protein per serving. The recommended rate of consumption is 1g of protein per one pound of bodyweight. So, you can see how it adds up real fast. Plus, you can’t do it all at once, cause you’ll just pee out all the stuff you don’t use up within three hours.

Next, BCAA, or branch chain amino acids, glutamine, and all those other muscle preserving and building bits are destroyed or used up during exercise, and have the side effect of retarding your immune system a bit if not replenished, so hence the need for various L-Glutamine and BCAA powders. I won’t get into Creatine, it’s too complex to type about in a blog entry. Well, at least today

Finally, all that breakdown has released deadly oxidizing chemicals into your system, and so topping off the recovery nutrition is the simple anti-oxidants. You’ve heard about these. Some kinds of fruits, teas, etc, have anti-oxidant properties. So, you can gobble down a handfull or two of blueberries, or take a Vitamin C tablet and Calcium.

That’s it really. There are other things, like simple carbs at a 2:1 ratio to your protien after you workout to replenish blood glucose and cause an insulin spike that speeds up Active Transport to the cells. The bottom line though, is that things can get expensive, so here is my endorsement of the day. Optimum Nutrition’s 100% Whey, Chocolate. It’s the best tasting whey powder I’ve ever had, more like Nestle Quik than a protein shake.. It mixes great, and it’s cheap. 5 lbs for $45.00 vs $40.00 for 2 lbs of GNC pro performance whey isolate that tastes pretty poor and mixes horribly.

I remember 10 years ago when I used to think nothing of eating 4 grilled cheese sandwiches, or an entire large homemade pizza. Maybe even a dozen perogies, boiled, then pan fried with several slices of bacon, topped with a healthy bit of sour cream.

Well, needless to say, that ship has long since sailed, and I hope it has sunk or been dashed to bits on some reef somewhere. I’ve been engaged in the battle of the bulge for about two months now, and much like the trenches of World War 2, victories are an inch at a time.

So what brought about a desire for such a change? Feeling pathetic would be one of them, questionable blood pressure is another, but mainly it’s because my wife and I hope to have kids in the near future, and I want to be around for them, and able to chase them around in turn.

It took me a little trial and error to get going. First I had to start making use of my gym membership, which took a while to ease into, as well as dietary adjustments and general lifestyle changes. I call this Phase one, where I’m focusing on improving my health to a certain goal weight and fitness level, at which I’ll enter the long term Phase Two, which is maintenance.

Interested in detalis? Well here is a general rundown. On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, I get up at 5:00am and head down to the Gym for my workout, which alternates upper and lower body training, plus cardio. Those workouts last about an hour, which gets me to work around 8:00. You figure out the transit time. I’ll very shortly be adding an additional intense cardio workout in the evenings 6 days a week, which should expedite the process a bit more and improve conditioning.

Dietary changes involved reducing processed foods as much as possible, mainly processed grains such as white bread and the like. I’ve also cut out the high glycemic index foods as much as possible. (you did know that carrot sticks are basically sugar smacks with vitamins in them, right?) I’ve added a good multivitamin, and the wonderful protein shakes (I used to call them cement shakes) several times a day.

It’s working. I’ve lost 10 pounds over the space of about 5 weeks, and as I further refine my program, I’m hoping to shed another 30 over the next 4 months, leaving me at my goal of 220 in time for Christmas. At that time I’ll make an assessment of where things are, and decide if things need to go further before maintenance can begin.