My name is Steve and I was a victim of bullying. Oddly enough nothing really happened while I was at school that I can remember. There were a couple of incidents during a gym class and in the locker room but it didn’t take long for me to figure out that if I showed up in the locker room before everyone else or after everyone had left I could head those off. It was mostly before and after school. Unfortunately, that was enough.

Here was the situation. There was a bus stop where we lined up our bags and then hung out in small groups. When the bus pulled up we would run back to our spots, put on our backpacks, and then file onto the bus. It’s like riding on Southwest – no assigned seats, but if you get on last you get to stare into the faces of strangers and hope one of them won’t sigh in disgust when you ask if you can sit next to them.

So, easy fix, right? Get there early. Put your bag in the front of the line. Get on first and then you can be as magnanimous as you want about letting folks sit with you. If it were only that easy. Getting there early meant you had to stand there and pray that the groups of kids didn’t turn their attention to you. They always did.

Okay, plan B. Get there, hide out where you can see the bus approaching but the bullies can’t see you, and then run to the line when it pulls up. This works well because you get to avoid the beating you would have caught had you been there early and the bus driver might (and I stress might) intervene if he/she sees something go down. Oh wait, now you’re left walking down the aisle where you get a mixture of “sorry, this seat’s taken” and “if you sit here I’ll [insert threat of bodily harm here].”

I think I went back and forth between the two options depending whether I was up for harassment or alienation that morning.

Coming home was a whole different challenge. The queuing was less complicated – I think they put us on the buses based on our class or something. Once on the bus though, it was all about staring out the window and hoping no one tried to mess with you. That never worked.

There was one instance I remember vividly. Did you ever see Child’s Play? I saw it years later but at the time I had no idea what this kid was going on about. He slipped into the seat next to me and said, “we’re going to be friends to the end! hidey ho! ha ha ha!” He said it over and over again in this creepy high-pitched voice while really pushing me into the wall of the bus. I remember pinching or punching, or something. It was just annoying enough that I was pretty sure it was going to continue once we got off the bus. It did, but that’s where it gets fuzzy.

Dealing with bullies sucked. It needs to stop. I’m reading up on the current projects and am figuring out how I can get involved.

You ready for the hind-sight 20/20 moment? Here it comes. I had two brothers 11 months younger than me. There were three of us. I don’t know of any bully who would have wanted to tangle with the three of us at the same time. For the life of me I can’t remember where they were and why we weren’t together. Ah well, we’ll leave that to the therapist I’ll have one day.

If you haven’t seen the flick, check it out. Take your kids to see it. If you have multiple kids make sure they’re watching out for one another. If one kid is getting bullied and their siblings aren’t doing anything to help them they need to be grounded for eternity. Okay, maybe not eternity, but you get the idea.

Image by: Terry Freedman

There is some serious ebb and flow to my weight loss efforts. I’ll go from tracking everything and eating evenly balanced meals to a full-blown destructive “oh, M&Ms would go well with this Monster energy drink—wait, peanut M&Ms, yes, more fiber is good…”

As I write this I’m coming off of the latter, big time. I got up this morning and weighed in up 6 lbs from a week ago. Before you start tapping out that comment about how it’s physically impossible to put on that much weight in a week, yes, I know. It’s more than likely the aftermath of overeating and under-hydrating. A couple days of eating normally and drinking water like a fish should put me back in the realm of you-screwed-up-but-not-terribly.

Still, why does it keep happening and why to such an extreme? I bought Hostess Cupcakes at the store last night. Who does that? And my reply to Kayla’s patented Have You Lost Your Mind, Klassen™ look was “what? dessert…”

A friend of mine, @billmdee, asked me what got me off the gaming and into fitness. Well what do 455 lb gaming addicts have in droves? Low self-esteem. Sure, I might have been the best tank (gaming parlance for the leader of the group) on my particular shard of my particular game of choice, but that was easy to do sitting a pair of sweats and an over-sized T-shirt. And it fed that slice on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—self-esteem, confidence, achievement (can you say quests?), and respect.

Why would I trade that for sweat, pain, embarrassment, and muscle soreness in a Zumba® class and a weight room?

The answers I give for “why Zumba?” and “why do you lift weights?” are valid, sure. They’re even seductive. But people like me with a serious self-esteem void to backfill don’t do things for the valid reasons. We do them to make the pain stop.

So why Zumba? Well it’s a fun workout that incorporates high intensity interval training (HIIT) which keeps the calorie burn high throughout the class. I burn anywhere between 700 and 1000 calories per hour. More when I’m teaching. The truth? Because men don’t typically take Zumba classes it makes me feel unique. I get a lot of attention. That, and the people in the classes look like the ones that wouldn’t give me the time of day when I was growing up and somehow it makes me feel like I’m not the loser I felt like I was then. For a while anyway.

And why lift weights? Lifting weights can be fun after a while, but more importantly it raises your lean mass which raises your basal metabolic rate (BMR) so you’re burning more calories doing all the other activity you do (even sleeping). I want to lose weight and having more muscle helps me do that. The truth? I hate what I see in the mirror. When I lift weights those muscles are sore for a couple of days and if I cycle through them I’m always sore somewhere so I can feel like I’m strong (at least underneath the fat). When I don’t lift weights and can’t feel the muscle soreness I feel especially fat.

I wish I could have offered some epiphany about getting fit. Some pithy quotable quote or other tidbit that you could apply to your own situations and produce the same results I’ve had. I can’t. Losing weight is incredibly hard. It’s like spinning plates on poles. Stop overeating. Move more. There’s no easy way to do it and that’s why these companies who claim to have that magic bullet weight loss solution are going to continue to rake in the profits. We want an easy solution. If it weren’t for vanity I don’t know how many folks would even bother. Is that the reason so many of us don’t eat right and work hard in the gym? I thought lack of vanity was a good thing. I’m sure I read that somewhere.

My lovely girlfriend, Kayla Marie, and I have been working the Weight Watchers routine that I talked about last month in the post Spending Points. We’d lose a little, gain some of it back, and then lose a little (though not enough to get back to par again). Knowing the “value” of the food going into your body is helpful but if you don’t spread those points out evenly it doesn’t work out. We were both pretty disheartened after an especially disappointing weigh-in last week.

We made a pledge to eat perfectly for seven days. No flaws, no compromises, no mistakes. Six evenly-sized nutritious meals taken at 6am, 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm, and 9pm (rising around 5am and going to bed at 10 or 11pm). I fired up a Google Docs page which later became a spreadsheet and we both logged our meals. At first we actually planned ahead a couple days to help with shopping. We stuck with the workouts we were already doing – lifting weights Mon/Wed/Fri and fitting in Zumba and other cardio where we could – and we were off to the races.

The result: Kayla is down 6.2lbs and I’m down 7.2lbs.

Neither one of us really ate poorly before. We’d kind of go back and forth between “being good” and “oh hell, we’ve earned it” all week long. So why was this time any different than before? Evidently it was the “bright line” that Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney talk about in their book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength:

These are clear, simple, unambiguous rules. You can’t help but notice when you cross a bright line. If you promise yourself to drink or smoke “moderately,” that’s not a bright line. It’s a fuzzy boundary with no obvious point at which you go from moderation to excess. Because the transition is so gradual and your mind is so adept at overlooking your own peccadilloes, you may fail to notice when you’ve gone too far. So you can’t be sure you’re always going to follow the rule to drink moderately. In contrast, zero tolerance is a bright line: total abstinence with no exceptions anytime. It’s not practical for all self-control problems—a dieter cannot stop eating all food—but it works well in many situations. Once you’re committed to following a bright-line rule, your present self can feel confident that your future self will observe it, too. And if you believe that the rule is sacred—a commandment from God, the unquestionable law of a higher power—then it becomes an especially bright line. You have more reason to expect your future self to respect it, and therefore your belief becomes a form of self-control: a self-fulfilling mandate. I think I won’t, therefore I don’t.

Perfect means perfect. It doesn’t mean “mostly perfect” and it doesn’t mean I’m never going to have a piece of chocolate again. It means that I’m going to have one at the end of the seven-day period. Oh and believe me, after we weighed in we hit the yogurt bar with a vengeance, but we’re back on the straight-and-narrow again and we’re excited to make more progress this week.

What “bright line” will you draw in the sand this week? It worked for us. It can work for you.

GeekFit Episode #49

• Kayla joins the GeekFit podcast!
• Steve wakes up at 4:30am on Christmas like he’s a 3 yo.
• Steve & Kayla are on Weight Watchers – counting points!
• Activity Point consumption; why is it so hard to stop eating?!
• Lifting weights Mon/Wed/Fri and Zumba® whenever we can!
• Kayla has three clean PET scans, so her cancer has been beaten down.
• Steve mentions Android phones for some reason? And Ada, OK?
• Steve & Kayla using JeFit (web-based and android/iPhone based) weight lifting tracking.
• The inquisition of Kayla – are you or are you not from Sacramento… ?
• Kayla plays yo-yo with the same 30 lbs, has 86 lbs to lose.
• Tucker busy with his new consulting and will join us when he can.
• Kayla can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/holdingthestars.
• Steve can be found on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/mrxinu.
• Steve’s Zumba® information can be found at www.mrzumba.com (class schedule, etc.).

The difference was, I wasn’t in the pool anymore, but I was still soaking wet.

When you’re overweight, you sweat. It happens pretty much any time you move more than a little bit. You sweat when other people aren’t sweating. It sucks. But you know what? When you walk into a gym, or a Zumba® class, or head out to do any kind of physical activity – you’re supposed to be sweating.

Yes, you sweat when you’re in your work clothes. You sweat when you’re in your school clothes. You sweat when you go through security at the airport. You dash into the bathroom and grab handfuls of paper towels to get that moisture off your face and neck. I’ve been there. I’ve done that.

Now that’s out of the way – I challenge you to put down that towel. The only time you need to be mopping your face in the gym or in a class is when it’s impeding your vision. Until you’re sweating so much that it’s blinding you don’t touch your face with the towel. Sweat is meant to cool you off, and it means you’re doing something right. Keep doing it.

I had to force myself to stop mopping my face on the treadmill. It was almost obsessive. Every few minutes I was wiping my face down. It was like I was trapped in my own body watching myself do this ridiculous thing over and over again. I had to force myself to leave it alone. Wear a head band if you want to keep it out of your eyes (I personally love the BondiBand style) but stop trying to convince everyone around you that the activity you’re doing is easy. It’s not easy. No one is in the gym for easy. Just because your workout is at 3mph walking on the treadmill that doesn’t mean it’s any less worthy than the gym rat next to you running at 8mph.

You’re worthy. You’re rocking it. And no matter how slow you’re going, you’re still lapping that guy/gal sitting on the couch back home.

The folks marketing food aren’t dumb. They know what we want to see. No trans fats, sugar-free, fat-free, low-sodium? It’s a shell game. If it’s low-fat it’s high in sodium. If it’s low in sodium it’s probably loaded with sugar. If none of those tricks marketing maneuvers work, there’s always the serving size tactic confusion. Yeah, that food might only have 50 calories but there are 8 servings in a box. You didn’t plan on eating 1/8th of it and putting it down, did you? No, of course you didn’t.

The only way to truly know what you’re putting in your body is to look at the entire nutrition label. And how many of us really know how to read a nutrition label? Sugar tastes good, so it must be bad for me. Fat? I don’t want to be fat so that can’t be good, either. What about carbohydrates, fiber, and sodium? If you’re not into nutrition, how would you even know what those words mean? I went to public school. I remember the food pyramid. That was what? Third grade? It’s been a minute y’all.

Most folks know someone who’s on Weight Watchers. They’re the ones carrying around little calculators emblazoned with their cute little logo. They’re turning boxes on their sides in the supermarket and plugging numbers into their super-secret formula to get a number: the points. They only get so many points per day so they’re spent like hard-earned currency. If this item is worth 4 points and this other item is worth 15 points it really boils down to two things: first, is the second item worth that many of my points; and second, am I willing to spend that many on a single item. The higher-point item would blow 1/4 of my points for the day. It’s funny what happens when you attach a sense of loss to something. The moment you have to “spend” to eat, you think about it a little harder before you pop that tasty morsel.

The real fun comes when you start plugging in the foods that you would normally munch without giving them a second thought. The Outback Steakhouse is one of my very favorite restaurants. If you haven’t had the pleasure, their appetizers are worth many hours in the gym. Aussie Cheese Fries – mmm, delicious. A half order? 36 points. Alice Springs Chicken – basically a chicken breast smothered in cheese and bacon? 27 points. Some fries on the side? Another 11 points. That’s 74 points: 12 more points than I usually roll any other day of the week. That was my standard order when I’d hit that awesome Australian eatery. Is it any wonder why I put on the pounds when I’m not focused on what I’m eating?

Those same points could break out like this instead: egg substitute scramble with ham, cheese, and salsa (5 points); 4 strips of turkey bacon (3 points); raspberry yogurt (4 points); FiberOne™ chocolate peanut butter bar (2 points); Panda Express 2-entree with Mandarin chicken, black pepper chicken, fortune cookie (15 points); baked Parmesan chicken breast (6 points); mixed green salad with tomatoes, croutons and dressing (4 points); Tastee Freeze chocolate-dipped cone (11 points). Boom, 50 points with 12 left to spare. I didn’t starve myself and I enjoyed some of my favorites, but ditched a lot of food that I would have grabbed without a thought before they had 20+ point values associated with them.

So I’m back in the gym lifting weights and I’m shedding the pounds again. What’s more, I’m rediscovering how to eat well again. I’ve skated for a long while doing a bunch of Zumba and eating whatever I wanted, breaking even every week. It’s time to get to my goal weight, folks. Let’s do it.

Updated 12/06/2011 @ 8:15am: Much thanks to Lia of the A.R. & Proud blog for dropping a link talking about how the sizing is done on products. What I thought was marketing trickery is just plain old consumer confusion (are we tired of alliteration yet?). Remember to read the labels and multiply those numbers by the serving count or you won’t know what you’re getting!

Kayla and I were in a restaurant that was on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives called Pizza Junction. They have an appetizer on the menu: “Stuffed Hot Peppers – As Seen on The Food Network.” The description? “A large banana pepper filled with our homemade pepper stuffing and pepperjack cheese.” Awesome. Banana peppers are those sissy yellow things they put on your sandwich at Subway. I can handle that. Seems a little tame for the home of the Buffalo wing but it still sounds tasty.

Our waiter (the bartender, I think) brings them over and I carve off maybe an inch of it to commence munching. As soon as it hits my tongue it’s on fire. I start cramming pieces of bread into my mouth to put out the flames. Eyes watering, I ask the waiter what kind of peppers these are.

“Oh it’s a Hungarian pepper.”

Oh good. A Hungarian wax pepper. Only 10x hotter than a banana pepper on the Scoville Scale ranking right up there with Serrano peppers and Tabasco sauce. Ah well, you live and learn.

Am I an object at rest?

I think of myself as having initiative, having a drive. I have a tattoo that boasts of my “transformation,” which, at its core, is wholly incomplete. 294 lbs and 34% body fat is not where I want to be. I looked at the pictures of me getting the tattoo (albeit in a the least flattering position ever), and it’s obvious where that last 17% of body fat is hiding.

Ben Franklin had a journal that began and ended the same way each day: what good will I do today and what good have I done? I think that maybe Ben was on to something. Up at 5am to plan the day and eat, four hours of work, two hours midday to dine and read and/or review accounts, another four hours of work, diversion for four hours with an examination of the day, and then seven hours of sleep.

Doable, very doable.

I’ve said this over and over when we’re recording GeekFit and I’m blanking on who said it (Google failure) but the things we don’t measure don’t improve. If I were to write down three things that I need to accomplish in the day, how might I feel at the end of the day when those particular dragons were slain? Pretty good I’d imagine. Ready for that diversion time? Slipping into dreamland at 10pm for my seven-hour siesta without any grief about having not made headway that day?

Let’s see.

I think back to the early 2000s when I was hooked on Everquest and World of Warcraft, weighing in at 400+ lbs, an untreated diabetic, and generally sucking at life. I didn’t have any direction, any desire to do anything better for myself, and there wasn’t anything forcing me to change it.

Fast forward to 2011.

I’ve lost 175 lbs, about 33% body fat, and my addiction to MMORPGs is a thing of the past. Taking its place is my love for Zumba® Fitness, helping out by teaching at benefits, and traveling the country teaching folks how to use a particular suite of software (SolarWinds). Winning at life.

I chose two characters in Simplified Chinese: the former meaning “to turn, rotate” and the latter meaning “to change” and together “transformation” or “a marked change in appearance or character, usually for the better.” I had considered a Koi drawing depicting the change from fish to dragon, or possibly a Phoenix, but this seemed to be the most straightforward option.

Now, the experience. I had this explained to me a dozen different ways. Everything ranging from “it doesn’t hurt at all” to “it feels like a cat scratch over and over.” The second was probably the most accurate for me. It would have been nice if someone had explained that the shading and the outlining feel different. It would have probably helped me not feel so queasy thinking that I was going to have to sit through another half hour of the outlining – which I found to be the least pleasant part.

On to caring for the thing. 7 days of cleaning & ointment followed by 2 more weeks of lotion.

Sage advice, all of it, but there was one gem that I had to blog about.

You’re Confusing Our Relationship

A sentiment made famous by Ludacris when he rapped “get back MFer, you don’t know me like that.” There are going to be people in your life who behave as though your relationship with them is different than what it actually is. I’ll give you an example.

I had been asked to sub a Zumba class in south Portland. I showed up early and the instructor I was there to cover was a little surprised to see me because the class was the next day. Simple mistake, whatever. While I was there she wanted to go over the particulars of the job. This is how much a drop-in costs, this is how much a punch card costs – the usual fare. Then there was a bit about dusting the floor that was a little over-the-top, but hey, I’m flexible.

“Do you have a surprise for them tomorrow?” she asks.

“… um, surprise?” I ask.

“Yeah, do you have any really good routines?”

“Uh, they’re all really good. No complaints yet and my classes seem to like them.”

“Oh well okay, because I’ve never seen your stuff before.”

At this point I should have stopped her. What am I supposed to say to “do you have any good routines”? “No, actually my stuff is pretty boring, but the class will understand, right? I’m just subbing for the day.”

Of course, hind sight being 20/20 and all that, this is how the conversation played out in my head after I’d had some time to stew on it on the drive back to Vancouver.

“Yeah, do you have any really good routines?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“I’ve never seen your stuff before.”

“Then you you probably shouldn’t have me sub for you. Why would you insult me by having me down here on the wrong day and then ask me whether or not I have any good routines? If you cared, you should have asked someone who’s taken my class before – or y’know, gone on youtube for five minutes to look at my routines.”

It could have gone that way or I could have simply said “you’re confusing our relationship” and walked out. There are some amazing people in my life and then there are soul-sucking distractions. There are going to be a lot less of the latter very soon.