Exercise, its not a board game.

6 ft, 155 lbs. here. I think I'm doing pretty OK as far as weight goes.

It helps that I have a crippling, intense, pants-shitting fear of elevators, so I'm up and down stairs all day. Today, I was feeling pretty good, so I jogged up 10 flights of stairs.

When I get severely stressed out (getting dumped, getting fired, getting robbed), I tend to lose my appetite. At one unhappy point in my mid-20s, my weight plummeted in a few down from 175# to 160#, which is very skinny for 6'1". My ribs hurt, my wrists hurt, pretty much all of my joints were in pain. I don't ever want to be that thin again. Fortunately, it's usually very easy to gain weight.

I was 6'4" and 140-145 lbs.! People would throw sandwiches at me. Today I'm still 6'4", but 195. I'm no athlete, but I try to move regularly.

I'm a personal trainer, teach self defense and to most people I spend a lot of time training myself. I'm also about to start teaching rock climbing again. And I'm vegan. Was straight edge (or wasn't now!) for a decade before I got into making beer which inevitably led to drinking it. I also do a lot of generally physical stuff for fun.

I'm 6'3" 195lbs, I'd be happier if I was about 210-215 but I have a hard enough time eating 4k calories a day to generally maintain my current mass. If I focused on just lifting and ate like a madman I could do it, but fighting is way too much fun to give up sparring a few times a week.

I also totally feel the pain of shitty vegan junk food getting way too easy to get over the last few years, it was a lot easier to avoid garbage when I just couldn't eat it to begin with.

Hrm. 5'9" 185#. Was told by the doctor and her handy BMI chart that I was supposed to weigh 155. I came in at 165# at one point and, without noting my weight on the chart, she said "you don't look healthy." I had to laugh at that and had her measure frame and muscle mass as opposed to just consulting the BMI chart (which assumes everyone is built essentially the same). Her conclusion was that 170 was probably more accurate for my build. Ok, so, take that BMI nazis.

Same visit she discovers I'm diabetic. Insulin comes next and, with it, 15 new pounds-- the side effect of no longer pissing out 1/3rd of my caloric intake every day in the form of sugar in my urine. Another 5-10 suddenly appeared on both the wife (who is extremely active) and I (who isn't) right after the wedding. We can't figure out if it was stress, the constant eating out at the time, or some combo of both. And, closing in on 40, those pounds are much harder to take off. Fucking irritating.

Nearly 15 years ago now, I clocked in at close to 240#. Tired of that weight, I went on an extremely restrictive diet and took the weight down to 175# or so, which I had more or less maintained up until very recently.

I despise "organized" exercise. Nothing bores me more than working out. I know lots of people feel great after exercise and thrive off the endorphin "rush" it provides. My wife, for example, uses exercise to help control the depression that has haunted her off and on for years. I, on the other hand, have done lots of drugs over the years and apparently use a far different mental scale for what constitutes a "rush."

However, I do want to avoid slowly devolving into a complete bag of goo; previously I used to use a combination of long nightly walks and practicing Kendo. Unfortunately, when I bought my house, I moved from a densely populated urban area to a suburb where there are no fucking sidewalks outside my development. The nightly walks lost their luster because there's just nothing to see and nowhere to go (I loved walking around the city after midnight--it's a very different view of DC) and, unfortunately, I'm too far from my old Kendo dojo to maintain that practice. Now it's to the exercise bike a couple times a week if I'm not doing any "joys of homeownership" manual labor to burn calories.

The easiest means to control weight, though, is to control diet. We still eat out a few times a month (and tend to eat big when we do) but I cook (as does my wife, though baking is more her domain) and generally adhere to the "if my grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food then it ain't food" rule--save for some vegetarian pseudo-meat products, if it's in a box, tube, or other prepackaged form, we generally don't eat it. We also grow a fair amount of produce (I've picked a bushel's worth of tomatoes out of my deck-garden so far this year. I also just hit "hot pepper hell" where the plants are producing faster than we can eat and the freezer and canning shelves are just full.)

The biggest hurdle? My wife and her @#$@#$ baking. I love the woman and I love the output, but she tends to bake as a stress reliever. She also burns a hell of a lot more calories than I do, which would help if she ACTUALLY EVER ATE ANY OF THE SHIT SHE BAKES. Aside from bread, she tends to not actually eat more than a wisp of whatever she's baking. I, on the other hand, view any # of cookies present as "a single-serving size." I've had to declare month-long baking moritoriums since my own willpower in the face of a pile of cookies is nearly nil.

And, I have to say, living with a mostly-vegetarian is tough for a diabetic since some form of starch is the foundation for a LOT of her diet. (It's also amazing to me the number of people I encounter that think diabetics only have to avoid sweets. Pasta, rice and potatoes are FAR more troublesome for controlling my blood sugar than any flippin' coffee cake.)

I need to step up the exercise though as I would really like to rid myself of this 10 extra pounds that crept on since last October. It just pisses me off....

I try to play flag football once a week for a couple of hours and would love to do some biking. But with a seven months old kid and work lots of evenings I have a hard time finding an hour or more. However I'm a skinny type and don't really have to watch what I eat. Which is great since I love them cockies cookies. And when I'm going somewhere without the kid I usually ride my bike.

Some years ago I used to fence once or twice a week and was quite fit. I'm not in good shape, but still weigh the same (around 68 or 70 kg and I'm about 181 cms tall - fuck you and your insistince on not using the metric system), meaning - I'm afraid - that I'm probably a lot fatter than I would like to be.

mads b. wrote:

However I'm a skinny type and don't really have to watch what I eat. Which is great since I love them cockies.

Freud's smiling

Dammit. Cookies. Cookies. I don't love teh dicks, of course. I prefer them one at a time.

I find having a job where I am on my feet six hours a day helps a lot. I'm convinced sugar is the one to cut back on if you want to lose weight. It is highly addictive. It messes with your moods. It is turned into body fat with less processing than anything else, including saturated fat.

I had been going to the gym 3 times a week, but hot summer, a thrown out back, guests in town, etc derailed that.

I'm out of shape, but not dreadfully so. I'm 10 lbs over my ideal weight (5'9 and I want to be about 155/160). My biggest problem is that I tend to be settle into a sitting-in-front-of-computer routine.

I didn't get a car until I was 26. I admire people who can do that. I was getting to where I was spending almost 2 hours a day commuting via bus. That 2 hours was mostly spent reading, but in the end, I just kind of wanted that time back, and the freedom to go camping, go on roadtrips, and not have to go grocery shopping every week because I could only ever backpack/bike 2 bags home at a time.

I'm going to start yoga, investigating classes. I'm over 30, and getting noticeably less flexible as I age, and everyone who I have talked to after I messed up my back said it's the way to. I just don't want to be a yuppie

Thaadd wrote:

I just don't want to be a yuppie

Screw that, do what you want (or need to do) in order to take care of yourself.

I guess I'm too old to give a shit about labels.

yeah, who cares. You either are a young urban professional or you aren't. It's nothing to worry about.

Just enjoy life and don't lose sleep over this kind of stuff. high school is over

Yoga is awesome!

Try to end up someplace that actually knows about yoga, not just someone at a regular gym who took a weekend class and is now a teacher. Not to say that you can't find a great teacher at a general gym, just that you are a lot more likely to find someone who actually knows some depth to their practice if you go somewhere that specializes in it. I've worked with people who were just amazing and others who were terrible and the difference is really mind blowing, probably more so than in any other type of fitness training I've done.

I heard that a meth habbit will trim the pounds off pretty quickly without all the exercise. Sounds too easy....must be a catch...