Feeling Thin When You're Still Fat

(Fernando Botero, Ballerina to the Handrail)

Lake Mileage: 5.8k
MP3 Player: Vangelis, Chariots of Fire

Currently Reading: Born Round (Frank Bruni)

I have to say, even at the risk of jinxing my current progress (I'm a superstitious dieter, no question!), that I'm currently at a point where I'm feeling good about what I've accomplished since February. I'm now in the mid-to-low 230's (233 this morning), about 50 lbs. lighter than what I weighed then. That's close to 20% of my worst-case body weight. I feel lighter, I feel thinner. I move more easily and less awkwardly, especially now that solving the running shoe problem has been a major breakthrough on the exercise front. I've gone down several sizes clothes-wise: in the winter I was wearing 42" jeans and 44" khakis from Lands End, now I've dug into the closet and retrieved the 36" jeans and the 38" khakis from 2006-7. People volunteer approvingly that they notice the difference.

The problem is, of course, that in reality I'm nowhere near as thin as I feel. For a 5'8" guy, even an endomorph like me, 233 is still fat. 36" jeans and 38" khakis are still fat clothes. Someone meeting me for the first time would still consider me seriously overweight. I've read any number of books and blogs where a formerly fat guy describes how disgusting and grotesque he was at my current weight, or worse, when he weighed even less than I weigh now. Runners World columnist John "the Penguin" Bingham, whose cheerful embrace of non-elite athleticism I like a great deal, talks about being frightened into weight loss when he weighed 240 - and we're the same height. "I was well past stout. I was rotund," he writes in one of his books. In another he talks about his "ever-widening waist and sagging arms" and describes himself at that time as "a fat cat", as "old and overweight and out of shape." Charlie Hills, whose blog Back to the Fridge I follow and enjoy, talks about the horror of passing 200 lbs. for the first time and makes jokes about hardly being able to see the scale numbers with his gut in the way - but if, oops, when (be positive, people always say) I hit 200 again, I'll be ecstatic. I may faint right there on the scale, in fact.

If a dieter isn't careful, this reality check can take a lot of the gratification out of actual progress. I want to celebrate losing 50 lbs., because it's a big accomplishment. But at the same time, I know that my weight loss so far is only half - and the easier half - of my 100-lb. goal, and even then I'll still be overweight by most people's standards. According to the BMI tables, so far all I've managed to do is go from "Morbidly Obese" to "Obese"! Maybe I shouldn't start celebrating yet.

On the other hand, losing nearly 20% of my body weight is something that a lot of people don't manage to do. And I do in fact feel better, I do in fact move around less effortfully, and I am in fact seriously thinner. If I didn't lose another ounce from today onward, I'd still be healthier living at 233 lbs. than at 284 lbs. And even if other people are still correct when they classify me as fat, that's not the whole story. It's like the stock market - the current price of your shares by itself doesn't matter; what matters is whether that price is higher or lower than what you paid. Maybe my current weight isn't impressive, but compared to where I was, I'm already showing a profit.

It's All About the Shoes!

Lake Mileage: 5+k

MP3 Player: Torchwood: Golden Age (BBC)

Currently Reading: Strides (Benjamin Cheever)

Maybe the Wicked Witch of the West, Glinda the Good Witch, and Dorothy were right all along: you just can't get anywhere without the right shoes. A few years ago, my running was going well; I was putting in 4-6 miles/day, which made it a lot easier to control my weight and gave me much more energy. Then I let myself get talked into buying a different running shoe: the Brooks Beast, which is marketed to "heavier runners." Since I definitely fit that category, even when I was fitter, I thought using shoes designed for endomorphs might be a good precaution in my early 40's. For the first year or so, they were comfortable enough, but then in June 2007 I had a huge flare-up of my old enemy, Plantar Fasciitis - and somehow I managed to blame this on my own "over-training", without even considering the fact that I'd just started wearing the newest 2007 model of the Beast. Since then I've sporadically tried to get running again, but I could never build up any distance without the PF causing progressively more pain, so I always had to give up and settle for the elliptical or something far less satsifying.

This spring and summer have been no different. As you know if you've looked at previous entries in this blog, I've been trying to get back to running at the nearby lake with its 5k running loop, partly with the help of the Podrunner intervals. At first those were great because they didn't put any strain on me, but as they shifted the proportion of running (okay, jogging, shuffling, pick your word!) to walking, my lower legs and arches were starting to complain. Anything much past 3k of steady running/jogging would leave me sore, sometimes limping, and not sore in the good way of having sore muscles after a real workout, either. This was a bad kind of sore, the kind that's warning you about being headed for serious problems. I was happy that I could at least cover the whole distance, but I still wished I could run/jog all of it, and I could foresee that soon I wasn't going to be able to keep up with the Podrunner's pace. I was doing this, of course, wearing this year's version of the Brooks Beast (I never bought the 2008), which I'd bought - ironically - for maximum protection, in an effort to cure the PF.

Then a couple weeks ago, I happened to be glancing through an old issue of Runner's World. An article about shoe selection said something about how the Beast was one of the good shoes for the runners built like me (they like to call us "Clydesdales"), because heavy runners nearly always over-pronate - that is, we roll the foot inward when we stride, putting lots of weight on the arch of the foot. The Beast compensates for that by being what's called a "motion-control shoe." This kind of running shoe is rigid and engineered to correct that inward roll, shifting the runner's weight outward away from the arches. Readers could confirm that they're over-pronators, the article continued, by looking at the wear pattern on the inner soles of their own broken-in shoes.

Well, guess what happened when I felt curious enough to check out my shoes? On every single pair I looked at, all the wear was on the outer edge of the shoe; on the running shoes, it was absolutely obvious that I push off at every stride with the outside of the foot, digging in with the last couple toes rather than the big toe. My foot doesn't roll inward at all when I stride.

This was when I began to wonder if the Beast was helping me or hurting me. If I already tend to supinate, wearing a shoe that effectively causes extra supination (to correct pronation) is going to exaggerate the imbalance rather than neutralizing it. Maybe this was why I couldn't seem to run even 5k without the various pains starting? Maybe the arch supports were stretching and hurting my arches instead of supporting them? Maybe the 2007 Beast was even the reason for the sudden return of my PF?

So I did more research, and decided to try a different shoe: a "neutral" shoe that's not engineered to correct a runner's motion, and one with enough cushioning to take my weight. I found a sale with a great price on the Nike Air Pegagus, now 25 years old, which was one of the first expensive running shoes I ever bought in college! (I seem to recall a pair of Saucony Jazz in there, too, but the Pegasus was definitely my favorite then.) The Pegasus is a straightforward neutral cushioned running shoe, I remembered liking it back when Reagan was president, and the price was definitely right. More important, I had the gut feeling I was onto something.

Well, guess what?! On my first run at the lake wearing the Pegasus, I intended to run the first 2k, walk the third (and middle) kilometer, and then run the last 2k. When I got to the 2k mark, though, I felt so pain-free for a change that I decided I'd keep on running, wait to walk at the 3k mark instead, and then run the last kilometer. That seemed like a fair plan, but I still felt fine at the 3k mark, so I decided I'd run the first 4 kilometers and just walk the last one for a cool-down. But again there was no trace of pain at the 4k mark - which meant that I ran the entire lake loop for the first time in over 2 years!

A few more runs confirmed this: the pain I was having whenever I ran wearing the Beast just didn't happen when I wore the Nikes instead. Once I knew that, I decided to trade up beyond the Pegasus, to the Nike Vomero, which is their top-of-the-line neutral cushioned shoe. So far they feel great!

Maybe it really is all about the shoes.

My First 100 Days!

Lake Mileage: 5+k

MP3 Player: Thomas Hampson, "American Song"

Currently Reading: Full Dark House (Christopher Fowler)

100 days! 100 is yet another one of those magic numbers for us, no doubt courtesy of having evolved with 10 fingers and using base-10 mathematics. And it's certainly true that 100 is no more special a quantity than 99 or 101, except in some arbitrary sense. But nevertheless, even knowing all that, I'm feeling good about the fact that today marks my 100th straight day of exercise: every day since April 24th, I've either done at least 5 k at the lake or done 30-40 minutes on the elliptical when the weather's foul. This may not seem like a major accomplishment to you athletic types out there, but for me, it might actually be a lifetime record! And, better still, real improvement in terms of endurance is happening at the lake: I'm able to run (jog? shuffle? huff and puff?) nearly the entire 5-k loop now, though I still walk the initial part of the first kilometer to make sure I stretch enough and don't get myself into trouble again. Soon, though, I should be able to do the whole distance and then start working, very gradually, on incrementally adding speed: two years ago, before I got injured, I was able to run the entire loop in a little under 30 minutes - far from spectacular, but not awful for a non-athlete. Today I'm nowhere near that, since my "speed" is very modest indeed, but if I work at gradually adding faster segments to the total run, progress shouldn't be out of the question.

On a Diet Plateau, No One Can Hear You Scream (in Frustration)

Lake Mileage: 5+k

MP3 Player: Podrunner, "First Day to 5k", Week 4

Currently Reading: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Jane Austen/Seth Grahame-Smith)

Sorry for the unexpectedly long hiatus! I'm tempted to just say that I've been distracted by the summer course I'm teaching this month - in other words, to lie. But the real reason, to be totally honest, is that I found myself stuck at a plateau when I weighed myself on July 10th - no weight loss in 10 days, despite continuing the exercise streak and sticking more-or-less faithfully to the diet. I was at a plateau, and I just did not want to talk about it.

It's not that I'm new to plateaus. I've been on enough diets to know that they inevitably happen at certain places in the weight loss process, whenever my body gets nervous enough about the ongoing loss of stored fat reserves that it demands a full-scale internal investigation and freezes my progress. But plateaus are always dispiriting nevertheless, especially because I'm always half-afraid that this will be the weight at which the entire diet effort grinds to a final screeching halt before the numbers on the scale start creeping upward again. So I didn't much feel like posting about no progess whatsoever, though I know this makes me a bad weight-loss blogger indeed! On the other hand, though, I did actually post the July 10th weight on this page and on the graph, so at least I didn't conceal it - but I didn't want to discuss it, either.

Furthermore, I wasn't really making no progress. I did keep up the exercise plan, which is why I'm on Day 88 of the streak today - less than two weeks until I hit Day 100, which will certainly be a record for me since I was 20-something. And each week I've advanced to the next level of Podrunner's interval mixes moving me toward running an entire 5k loop again, so my fitness was improving even if my weight wasn't.

And sure enough, as at least half my mind knew (just not the half I was listening to, typically for me), that discouraging plateau was going to lead into a sudden burst of weight loss, almost like free fall when you go sky-diving. Today the scale gave me the very welcome news that I've lost 10.5 pounds since July 10th, bringing myself down to 238 lbs. - as I've said before, not exactly svelte, even still "obese" according to the BMI calculators, but compared to the 280.5 on the day I started the diet back in February or the 284 that was my worst weight for 2009, it's a great improvement. It even feels within striking distance of the 50-pound mark, having started at the low/mid 280's and broken through to the 230's, though admittedly not yet by a lot. And I had to dig into the closet again for smaller pants, which is always one of dieting's biggest satisfactions.

I suppose I could wind up here with a cliche or two about the value of perseverance - and they'd be cliches because they're true, since weight loss really is all about perseverance over the long haul. But I already know that, even when I get discouraged. Next time I hit a plateau, though, I hope I won't avoid posting.

A Shout-Out to Podrunner!

I want to give a quick shout-out to Steve Boyett's Podrunner site, where he offers up free (that's right, free!) mp3 workout mixes. I found his site courtesy of Jennette Fulda at PastaQueen, where she recommended his interval workout series to train for a 5k run. I've never been good at interval training, but I thought alternating between walking and running when the mix tells me to might be something even I could handle. So far I'm liking it as a change of pace (pun intended). Boyett also has other kinds of workout mixes for free download, so check him out.

The Spirit of St. Louis

(Franz Marc: The Little Mountain Goats)

Lake Mileage: ~6-7 k

MP3 Player: Betty Buckley

Currently Reading: Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France (Michael Steinberger)

I've just come back from a short summer "culture blitz" in St. Louis, which was a big deal for me diet-wise: it was my first out-of-town, overnight trip since starting Atkins. I had no idea how it was going to go from a food and fitness point of view. I worried about doing all my eating in restaurants, at least partially accomodating the wishes of the friend I travelled with, working out, etc. But everything turned out all right: I managed to drag myself down to the Hampton Inn's fitness center every morning for a full-length stint on the elliptical, I ate sensibly in restaurants (despite some worry when one Italian place served me sole cooked differently than the menu had described it), and ... (drumroll, please) ... I didn't gain any weight! I also didn't lose any, it's true, but for me it was a big accomplishment to stay in control rather than simply going into "vacation mode" - which for me usually means eating whatever and however much I want, sleeping in rather than exercising, and absolutely refusing to think about what's healthful and what's not.

As far as the cultural side went, St. Louis has a lot to offer. My primary reason for the trip was to catch two performances at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, which does a great summer opera festival, complete with pavilion tents and picnic baskets. The first night we saw a production of the young Mozart's rarely-performed opera Il Re Pastore, or The Shepherd King. I considered the performance quite successful musically, but much less dramatically. Heidi Stober was a first-rate Aminta, and young tenor Alek Shrader sang Alessandro's arias very well indeed; I also liked Paul Appleby's Agenore and Maureen McKay's Elisa. This opera is not easy to stage, though: it doesn't have the psychological depth of either Idomeneo or La Clemenza di Tito, but it presents the same portrait of an exemplary Enlightenment monarch who is ruled by reason and as a result rules justly and compassionately in the name of his subjects' good. Director Chas Rader-Shieber, however, said quite frankly in the program notes that he would replace this central conceit - which is only the subject of the opera, after all! - with one that he considers more philosophically worthwhile:

"For each of the characters in Mozart's story, there is the fulfillment of the dream that a noble nature alone can change the social order, but there is no such fantasy in our world. Mozart's tale of uncomplicated transformation becomes, in this new setting, a reflection of the eternal desire to become other than who we really are, and who society commands us to be."

This statement, of course, really raises the question of why Rader-Shieber wanted to stage an opera the message of which he considers utterly irrelevant to modern audiences. It also raises the even deeper question of "relevance" - even if the ideals of Mozart's Enlightenment are no longer shared by our society (and I think this is simplistic on Rader-Shieber's part), then shouldn't a perceptive staging of an Enlightenment opera address the complex philosophical relationship between the two cultures, rather than simply dismissing the allegedly irrelevant ideas in favor of more modern ones? Rader-Shieber's play-within-a-play device, turning the opera into an amateur performance of Mozart's score by a group of young aristocrats and servants in an Edwardian country house, did solve the "problem" of having a woman play Aminta, since here there was no effort at actual impersonation, and it did allow tenor-of-the-moment Shrader to be paired off with "Aminta" at the end (since the aristocrat singing her music was his future wife) rather than standing alone and blessing the couples whose marriages Alessandro has decreed, but it created so many incongruities, confusions, and contradictions of the text that by the second act, the performance might as well have been a concert in Edwardian costume. Beautiful though the set and costumes were, Rader-Shieber's perspective was just too smugly contemporary, philosophically speaking, to do justice to Mozart.

In great contrast, the next night's performance of Corigliano and Hoffman's The Ghosts of Versailles was profoundly moving - in fact, it was arguably much truer to the spirit of Mozart in its wisdom and humanity than Il Re Pastore. Underpinning all its wit and invention, all its evocations of Mozart and Rossini, is the fact that Ghosts is about the power of art itself: it begins with the dead Beaumarchais's idea that he can change history itself with his opera A Figaro for Antonia, thus altering his beloved Marie Antoinette's fate and restoring her to earthly life, one of its key moments is Figaro's conversion from loathing of the queen to pity for her after he witnesses Beaumarchais's re-enactment of her so-called trial, and it ends with a truly Aristotelian catharsis in which Marie Antoinette finds herself purged, by means of Beaumarchais's dramatic efforts on her behalf, of her anguish and longing to return to the life she loved so much; she can now accept her fate and live contentedly in the unique afterlife conjured by Corigliano and Hoffman. Art, in Ghosts, is a path to redemption and wisdom, and OTSL's production embraced this without cynicism.

James Robinson staged this very complicated piece with admirable clarity, aided by Allen Moyer's marvelous set and James Schuette's sumputuous costumes. Soprano Maria Kanyova gave a really great performance as Marie Antoinette, singing superbly (the high pianissimi near the end of the opera showed no signs of weariness) and digging deep into the character's emotions. OTSL stalwart James Westman was a dramatically subtle Beaumarchais. Among his creations, Christopher Feigum offered an engaging Figaro, Dorothy Byrne a shrewd Susanna, and Matthew DiBattista a show-stealing Begearss, especially in his bravura performance of the "Long Live the Worm" aria. Sean Panikkar and Hanan Alattar were well-matched as the Almavivas, Panikkar noteworthy for his comfort with the Count's relentlessly high tessitura. Michael Christie conducted an assured reading of the score.

Seeing these two productions on consecutive nights felt paradoxical - or, as the King of Siam would say, "a puzzlement." It seemed quite ironic that the authentic Mozart opera, first seen in 1775, was staged in a spirit of disillusionment, contrasting the original libretto's faith in Enlightenment nobility and the power of Mozart's music with the soul-grinding compromises of the modern world, while Corigliano and Hoffman's undeniably postmodern opera, written over two centuries later, so emphatically affirmed such "old-fashioned" ideas as forgiveness and wisdom.

While in St. Louis, I also spent some time in the St. Louis Museum of Art, which has a very fine collection of German Expressionism (including Franz Marc's The Little Mountain Goats, shown above, which uses colors in a way I love) and also had a great exhibition of Ansel Adams's photographs taken in Yosemite. Highly recommended!

A New Breakthrough, The Psychology of Numbers, and China Miéville

Lake Mileage: 5+k (power walk)
MP3 Player: Cleo Laine Sings Sondheim
Currently Reading: Perdido Street Station (China Miéville)

It's an interesting phenomenon, I think, how certain numbers on the bathroom scale matter so much more than other ones. After all, a pound lost is a pound lost and a pound gained is a pound gained, right? Is it any worse going from 152 to 155 than it is going from 158 to 161? Obviously, it's no different in terms of weight gained, but for most people, it would feel lots more discouraging to move from the 150's into the 160's - arbitrary though those numbers are. In the same way, moving down a "decade" when you're losing weight feels like much more of an accomplishment, even if the incremental weight loss that accomplished it is no different than the same loss in the middle of a decade.

And even if you know that, it's hard to fight off the temptation: I was certainly excited today to get on the scale and see 249.5 lbs.! Maybe I just barely squeaked past the line, but it was still very gratifying to see myself weighing less than 250 - I feel like I'm at least in the lower half of the 200-300 lbs. range rather than in the upper half. 250 might be a purely arbitrary number; everything would be totally different, for instance, if I weighed myself in kilograms or stone or whatever. But the numbers we've internalized do have a certain power over the way we perceive weight loss or gain.

Nevertheless, this 249.5 is real progress. I now weigh less than I have anytime this year or anytime in 2008; the last time I weighed under 250 was fall 2007. I've lost 31 lbs. since the start of the diet, more than 20 lbs. of it on Atkins, and I'm nearly 35 lbs. lighter than my worst weight for 2009. This also means I've lost more than 10% of my initial body weight, so my cardiovascular system as well as the rest of my organs and my knees have to be happy about that. And if you look at the graph to the right, "The Plan and the Reality", you can see that for the first time since I started the diet, with a goal of losing 100 lbs. by next summer, I'm actually ahead of where I need to be to stay on track - another good bit of motivation.

On the book front: a big shout-out to author China Miéville for his thoroughly amazing novel Perdido Street Station. The power of imagination at work in this book is extremely impressive - it's this wonderfully mind-expanding (or mind-warping!), incredibly detailed portrait of a striking fictional reality, with a setting, characters, and situations I couldn't have imagined if I sat at a desk for twenty years. I'm just awed by how good he is.