After two and a half months of Atkins & exercising, I’m still fat. But I dropped 23 lbs so far (and probably put on a few pounds of muscle), and can pretty much fit into one of my off-the-rack suits. So that’s progress1. Still can’t fit into one of my custom suits though, which I got fitted for after a previous round of Atkins2.
Chery’s made better progress — she’s now about the same height & weight as a few of the female MMA fighters on Friday night’s Strikeforce card, though they’re carrying a little more muscle than her. She wants to lose a few more pounds and and a few more pounds of muscle. We’re suspending the diet this week though. Plus, we’ll be suspending it for a couple of dinners the week after. Then back to the diet, so I can drop another 20lbs, or maybe more, if I get ambitious.
Second stop on Atkins-suspension week: a Minado sushi buffett (photo from bridgeandtunnelclub.com).
We’ve worked up to jogging for an hour on the treadmill, before lifting. Moving up gradually in weight on the lifting too, though I was a little wiped out Friday night and made such a hash out of a set of dead lifts that before the blood had rushed back to my head, a stranger had materialized beside me offering unsolicited advice about the distinction between dead lifts and good mornings.
Sunday night at the gym, I asked a fellow to hand me a dumbbell for a set of military presses, and he made a hash out of that. This fellow looked like he spent a good amount of time in a gym, so I figured he’d understand that if I’m going to grab the dumbbell by the handle, his hand can’t be there at the same time. Ergo, you grab the the dumbbell by the ends with both hands so I can grab it from you comfortably in the middle. Instead, he did it the dumb way, which precipitated a bit of energy-sapping wasted motion. He stuck around to spot me though, which was good, because I was spent just from wrestling the dumbbell from him and getting it balanced properly.
1The thought of progress brought to mind the line “Progress is a comfortable disease” from the E.E. Cummings poem Pity This Busy Monster, Manunkind, so I thought of using that as a title for this blog post. But a quick Bing search showed about 7.5 million results for that phrase, another example of search engines rubbing our noses in our unoriginality.
2I ordered those suits years ago through the representative of a Hong Kong-based operation who advertises in major papers in the U.S. He travels up and down both coasts, taking measurements and orders, and then a month later you get a box from Hong Kong with your suits and shirts. The shirts were fine, I guess, and at first I thought the suits were too. They cost enough to make me think so. But a few years later I went to a local tailor who makes custom suits to have one of them let out a little and got a look of disdain from him, followed by an itemization of the particular suit’s imperfections. I had my suspicions about that one anyway. I’m no fashion expert, but I can sort of tell the feel and drape of Super 120s wool. I got that in one or two of the Hong Kong suits, but I think I got the bait & switch in the others. If I get a custom suit in the future, I’ll have to do a little more due dilly first. Live & learn.
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