Skip to main content

Settling In

I'm closing in on a year since I started this plan, sort of on lark. I finally feel like the person I always was and not who I allowed myself to become, getting pissed off in the moment seeing photos of my fat self and then resigning myself to the idea that changing would be next to impossible as I got older.

I have no regrets. I miss nothing because I deprive myself of nothing. I've scaled back from the more austere weight shedding calorie budget and phased in some additional light workouts in exchange for turning off the calorie meter for big weekends and big events. I still count calories as best I can during the week and weigh myself every day that I have access to a scale. That's really the key: the knowledge feedback loop prevents you from gaining weight because you know exactly when you're over-indulging and need to start making adjustments before you snowball back into relaxed fit jeans.

I bought a tux for the couple of family weddings I have this summer (cheapo did the math and if I wear it a third time, it'll have paid for itself over renting). It's a size 40, slim fit. I cannot believe I'm wearing a slim fit.

I still get a thrill from thinking about all the money I'm saving by preparing my own food, how all those other chumps on the road are wasting time and money pulling over to fast food restaurants and paying $8-10 for a value meal. I have my 200 calorie walnut ziplock bags in my glove compartment that cost me pennies ready to deploy whenever. I pack fruit and Cheerios with me when I travel, figuring most people where I'm staying have milk and eggs, so that I can assemble my power breakfast every morning and take charge of my diet for at least part of the day.

I've sort of given up the Navy Seal workout plan and settled into a mid-range variant of it: 25x5 sit-ups, 25x5 push-ups and 8x2 pull-ups, MWF. I mix in a little running here and there, but some weeks I won't run at all. I still cycle to work every day. I wrecked the other week but I'm ok and back on my bike. I still do a lot of walking but not as much. My dogs aren't getting any younger, and it seems kind of cruel to push them hard during the summer months.

I've kind of become a cheapo diet evangelical, but I try not to be pushy. Everyone needs to find themselves when they're ready. If they ask, I give them my best tips. If they're still curious, I point them to my blog.

I ended up buying a new car, breaking one of Cheapo's cardinal rules. I got it for $0 down and 0% interest. I still don't feel great about it, but the car is growing on me. I plan on running it into the ground too.

That's pretty much all for now. It's been a hell of a journey, but it's inspired me to take charge of other parts of my life, like tuning out the imbeciles on social media and its legacy, live broadcast deadbeat cousin, TV, and subbing in additional professional development lessons and a little bit of Spanish. Most of people on TV and social media are genuine morons whom you shouldn't feel the least bit bad about ignoring.

Social media is really a highly addictive toxic poison with enough photos of people's kids to prevent wholesale abandonment of the platform. If used improperly, which is how 99% of people end up using it, it makes you a dumber, more insecure, attention and validation seeking lemming.

You have a limited amount of time on this Earth. Not all of us will do great things, but all of us are capable of doing some pretty cool things. One thing I know for goddamn sure is that none of those cool things will ever happen by wasting most of your spare time on Facebook or whatever, wallowing in the jealousy of others or getting into internet fights.

Take your time - your life - back from these lowlifes trying to pad their bank accounts by hooking you on their digital Soma. If you can't quit altogether, at least limit your time or your feeds to productive things like keeping up with your family or hobbies things related to your work or the kind of work you'd like to do someday but have been too busy wasting your time on Twitter to actually pursue.

The internet is a tool. Use it how you need to maximize your life and happiness, and don't let it take control of you.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chopping Down Costs & Fat

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my...
Post a Comment
Read more

Low Tech, The New High Tech

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller. Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that th...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Second Look at Exercise

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances. My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here. It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily...
Post a Comment
Read more