Cocktail Confessions

Before I get to the site updates, here’s a but that’s going on:

The step-daughter has moved into our house.  At 17 years of age it has been somewhat of an adjustment to undertake and a lot of people are giving us advice.  However, all the advice in the world cannot change the attitude of someone who doesn’t care about school.  Overall, she’s a good kid: she’s polite to neighbors and friends, she doesn’t drink or smoke or do any drugs that we are aware of, no tattoo’s, no errant piercings, no foul mouth.  She just doesn’t do her school work and likes to ditch which has caused her to slip behind….far behind everyone else her age.  And in California where our state is ranked pretty low to begin with in education…..well, as the guidance counselor recently told us….she’s setting herself up for a long life of retail employment.  Sigh.

As far as my diet goes that I self imposed on myself last Sunday, it’s been going ‘okay’.  So far, I only broke down last night when I got home from work and had one Bud Light, otherwise I’ve been drinking water.  I’ve had a few cookies here and there, but overall, my portion sizes have been reduced (although I am a bit hungry and have a mild headache…more so due to my allergies I figure than not enough food), and I’ve been eating a bit healthier.  I could and should even alter my diet a bit more and eat healthier foods (salads, veggies, etc) and need to start some additional exercise.  I had planned on doing some exercise this past week when I get home, but I just haven’t.  No real excuse. I just haven’t.

Halloween is tomorrow, and quite honestly I just don’t care.  I have a costume…more so because my wife wants us to go to a party…but I have no real desire to dress up.  I’m sure I’ll have fun at the party, but I know the temptation of too much drinking may be a factor.  I went to the same party last year, drank a lot, and fell on my ass where I believe I fractures my tail bone.  No joke.  I also had a mild hangover as well…something I’d like to avoid this year.

I have a podcast with my grandfather that I need to complete editing so I can post, and I hope I can do a few recordings this next week as well and supply a bit more content here.

Feedburner: I noticed the other day my regular Feedburner was no longer updating itself correctly and I’m not 100% sure why.  I haven’t made any changes at all to the FeedBurner settings, and after spending quite sometime looking at the various settings pages, account, and some basic troubleshooting it appears it all boils down to possibly a missin “/meta” tag somwhere.  After pinging and validating my pages and getting the “congratulations” response, some further digging revealed that FeedBurner is conflicting with itself somewhere else.  A search of the FAQ stated that this can indeed happen when you copy and paste from MS Office applications like Word or Excel.  Well, I do know I had done some recent cut and paste work from Word and unless I scan line by line the HTML code for the last few posts for a possible errant tag (which I may or may not find), it may or may not fix the issue.  Bums me out since I think WordPress should be smart and compliant enough with Word to not insert additional XML tags, but apparantly not.  Hopefully this will eventually correct itself in the future when I post enough new content to bury the old stuff way down.  So let this be a little knoweldge to you: WordPress, FeedBurner, and MS Word don’t play well with each other.

Site notes:

• BluBerry Power Press updated to v1.0.3.  I think I may try the full service soon as my podcasts aren’t showing up yet on Zune Marketplace and I don’t know why.
• Sociable upgraded to v3.5.2.  No real change for me as I didn’t change my options.
• The Hacker’s Diet – installed v0.9.8b.  This is a plugin behind the scenes in which I should be updating my weight.  You won’t see anything unless I take a snapshot and post it as a picture in a regular post.
• Count Per Day – Updated to v2.4.2 and I use this again behind the scenes.  Traffic monitor.
• WordPress – Still using v2.7.1 although v2.8.5 is available.  I’m a little hesitant to upgrade.  I’m sure it’ll be fine for the most part, but there is always some hidden thing that gets screwed up.

I’ve been saying that for wee…..I mean months now.

The fact is, despite dropping some weight a few months back and being relatively proud of it, I’ve been feeling a little heavy as of late and kinda new something was up by the feel of my work pants and blue jeans as of late.

Also, the fact that I almost don’t recognize the profile of the guy walking past the windows at work (my reflection) due to the slight protruding bulge located directly above the waist yet just below the chest has been somewhat….disheartening.

My friend Brian was a ‘heavy’ individual the last few years, tipping the scales at over 300 lbs although I would never have labeled him morbidly ‘obese’.  But through the determination of a friendly competition he had with a few friends and his modified take on the Atkins diet, he has lost over 80 lbs to date.

I, on the other hand, seemed to have gained weight.  Granted I did have a little ‘bender’ this past Friday night (I recall 2 pints of Bud Light, 1 bottle of Racer 5, 1 Stella Artois, 3 Jack & diet cokes, some Jim Beam & Pepsi, and a little rum) where I am sure the calorie count was pretty much up there for the evening.  The following day, I went to the gym and weighed myself and was personally embarrassed and ashamed I was clocking in at 238lbs!  Even though I did have breakfast only a few hours before, and it was smack in the middle of the day, I have never weighed that much before.

The last few years I had been hovering around 225 lbs and at my weeding six years ago I had managed to get down to 216lbs.  Oh, and I guess I should mention I’m 5’11″.  Needless to say, this recent revelation hit me hard and I’m placing myself on a self imposed diet.  Does that mean drinking is out?  Kinda hard to have Cocktail Confessions when yours truly stops imbibing in libations.  Rest assured, I have not stopped drinking, but need to alter my habits:

1) No drinking during the week while at home watching television….Save it for the weekends..and even then save it for social gatherings (i.e. not by myself).  Instead, drink much more water or zero calorie drinks in the evenings at home.

2) Mix alcohol with diet drinks where applicable, and/or switch to light liquors (vodka, clear rums) and avoid sugar mixers for the time being.

3) Try not to binge…At 39 years old, it’s a bit tougher to shake off that dull headache/hangover than when I was 19 or even 29 for that matter.

4) Eat more portion controlled dinners and slightly earlier.  I have a bad habit of eating around 8pm, and then hitting seconds as well.  Nope, need to eat earlier, smaller, and more veggies as well.

5) Dust of that Wii Fitness I spent $90 bucks on last year and now haven’t touched in a few months.  Although you would be surprised on how much I walk on a weekly basis.  I walk a lot both at work (between buildings) and when I get home to walk my dog.

6) I need to chart my weight on a semi-regular basis.  To measure my progress every other day or so as opposed to once today, and then recheck…say 4 weeks from now to never.  Maybe I’ll look for a little WordPress Plug-in widget that allows for charting/graphs that I can update and let you all give me shit if I begin to slip.

It’s not just a name for a recent Simon Pegg comedy flick, it’s how I feel lately.

I realize that people are different, have different lifestyles, different habits, and unique metabolisms and maybe ever perhaps a specific gene inherited from their parents that will dictate how skinny or husky one naturally is. 

Some people are prone to be more athletic than others always striving to shave a second off their personal best times, or jump a little higher, lift a bit more.  Then there are plenty of people who enjoy life, enjoy a nice meal not worrying whether the saturated fat count is 5g or 6g, but they enjoy the taste and experience of a meal with family and friends.  There’s another segment of society out there that eats out of some type of internal manifestation “issue” such as stress, boredom, low self-image, anxiety, and even depression.

I think personally I am subject to a mix of all of these factors above.  From a genetic standpoint, I’m a bit huskier than average.  I’ve always been slightly larger than ‘average’, but would never consider myself obese.  As a young child I recall struggling a bit with weight gain and no matter how much I played outside, I have always had a difficult time shedding weight.  A couple of weight milestones stick out in my mind for whatever reason:.  When I was 16 year old I remember weighing about 167lbs and pretty much weighed that most of my high school tenure until I took gymnastics and became a male cheerleader my senior year.  I’m pretty sure I graduated high school at 178lbs. 

As I entered college I took up two new hobbies: weight lifting and beer drinking.  While the weight lifting transformed my muscularity into something my friends soon began to notice, I’m sure the beer drinking didn’t help matters in other areas of my body that weren’t getting defined by muscle.  By the end of my freshman year in college, I not only had gained the ’freshmen 15′, I also had the beginnings of arms and a chest and recall weighing 197lbs.  When I got married I was able to shed a few pounds and at the age of 33, I weight 216lbs but I could also bench press 300+ lbs.  By the way, I’m 5’10″.

Fast forward a few years and here I am welcoming more and more gray hair into my temples and goatee, have had rotator cuff surgery twice on the same shoulder, and thus my involvement at the gym has gone down considerably.  I still go to the gym, but not as regularly as I once did.  While I still eat relatively healthy, I do have some bad eating habits, such as skipping breakfast most of the time, and eating dinner too late in the day (often 7pm or later), where I then just sit on the couch until I go to bed.  And let’s not even talk about dairy…I love my cheese (as most Italians do).  It doesn’t matter that I walk a lot at work, or walk my dog daily when I get home, or even only go to the gym on weekends now…..I’ve noticed my weight ballooning to a current 234lbs! 

I recently saw some pictures of myself  that my friend had snapped when I was shirtless afew weeks back in Palm Springs, I was a little disappointed with myself.  While my chest has shrunk a bit from the inability to lift heavily any longer, it appears that my once established pecs have somewhat migrated around my gut.  I’ve even noticed that my 36″ pants are starting to feel snug, and I’d really like to get down to a 34″ or better yet a 32″ waist again.

I doubt unless I get very sick or embrace some radical new diet and have the willpower to control myself everyday, I don’t think I’ll ever get under 200lbs again.  I think a nice comfortable weight for me would be 210-215.  I feel that is realistic and attainable, and I know when I am very stressed out about things I can easily drop 5-7 lbs in a matter of days….but that’s the unhealthy way.

So despite the fact that I talk about different libations (I’m not quitting that outright), I’ll have to be much more mindful of the amount of libations I consume, eat earlier in the day, exercise a bit of portion control, and try and step up my aerobic activity a bit more.

Perhaps I will start my own personal weight challenge and update it weekly here for the time being and track my progress.  Seeing that this past Saturday (July 18th) I weighed 234 lbs at the gym, that’s a good place to start.  By making some simple changes, I’m going to try and drop 5lbs in the next 2 weeks.  I’m setting a target of 229 by August 3rd.  I’ll keep you posted.