Words from a winner

I would like to congratulate all of my fellow competitors on their efforts in Week 1. Flocons, you are ever so close to reaching 1% weight loss; continue to fight for your dreams!

My success this week can be attributed to the love and support of The Storymaster, because money equals caring. Also taking credit: Mother Nature; by turning Toronto into one large sauna, I sweated my way to the top of the competition.

Speaking with friends about Thinspiration XXL, I have come to realize that everyone is trying to lose weight. Jennie, Jason, Jessica: I salute your efforts, and ask you to take the money that you would spend on food and place them in my trustworthy hands, instead. Ken: you have no interest in losing weight because you are an android, but look into that void where a human heart would reside, and realize that supporting my charity is the logical decision.

I will match every British pound equivalent donated.

Sweat and starvation were the tactics of choice for Week 1. Week 2, I will trying...exercising. See you at the scale.

good idea bad idea...

I biked home from work yesterday at 4:30pm, had some water and fruit, then immediately went for a run around 5:15-ish when it was still insanely hot out. Only 6k. It was stupidly hot. I did it anyway. I learned two (three) things:

1. I am incredibly out of shape mentally even more than physically, I am lacking on the discipline I once had. In the muggy heat which never used to phase me, my legs just never felt like moving and my will was sapped. Calves and quads felt like jello. Here's the rub: In realizing my legs felt like jello, it only made me hungry for jello. I don't even like jello. Is that a bad thing? Hunger occurred to me wayyyyy before I realized it was from the combo of the lack of training, biking home, and the heat. I don't like jello.
   
2. It was stupid. To run in that heat and humidity. Regardless, I am still likely to run in this heat again to make a desperate attempt at getting my heat tolerance and endurance back up.
   
3. I do not have "pecs" anymore. I have man-boobs. Yes. There I said it. I ran shirtless for the last half to get some air contact directly onto my skin and saw my reflection in the window of a store. Not flattered.
   

Fatty Weigh-in: Week 1

Competitor	Current Weight	Tally	Total
celestialspeedster	126 lbs	- 3 lbs	- 3 lbs ( - 2.3%)
Doctor Cook	181 lbs	+ 1 lb	+ 1 lb ( + 0.6%)
Flocons	210 lbs	- 2 lbs	- 2 lbs ( - 0.9%)
Opiate	183 lbs	- 0 lbs	- 0 lbs ( - 0%)
Royal Pinguo	143 lbs	- 1 lb	- 1 lb ( - 0.7%)
Thorn	172 lbs	- 4 lbs	- 4 lbs ( - 2.3%)

Competitor Profile: Royal Pinguo

Thinspiration Competitor Profile

Name: Royal Pinguo

Current Weight: 144 lbs

Goal: 130 lbs

Lowest Adult Weight: 110 lbs

Dietary restrictions (specify physiological or moral): Minty Gum, Diary Product, Foie Gras

Favourite food(s): Apple

Least favourite healthy food: Cabbage

If you could eat only one food for the duration of your life, what would it be: Apples! There are so many different kinds and I am hoping I won’t get bored of eating them.

Number of times you have woken up with food in your mouth: Never. I have nightmare of toothache so no food for me at night not even in the dream.

Number of fantasies you have had featuring food or food covered celebrities: Same as above, fear of toothache

Exercise strategy: Join expensive Gym and hope I will go since I have paid for it. It failed badly.

Thinspiration celebrity: She-Ra Princess of Power. I always wanted a waist like that and the super power is nice too.

Favourite workout music: No music for me. I like to watch TV on the Treadmill in stead. Prefer any of the murder show.

Weighty sob story: I have to go to many weddings every year. It gets harder and harder to find dresses that fit me nicely and remain the same size.

Celebrity you would eat first, if the situation became dire, of course, not just as an enjoyable past-time: Matthew McConaughey. I really don’t like him and definitely do not feel bad to grill or BBQ him when desperate.

Charitable beneficiary: World Wildlife Fund - I miss being vegetarian not only save many animals from being eaten by me also save many pounds from growing on me.

Mind over fatter

I've been thinking of strategies on how to lose weight, when I have failed so many times before. After some soul searching, I've found some answers. Why did I fail to lose weight in the past?

• The belief that exercise alone could compensate for terrible eating habits.
• The belief that shoot-from-the-hip zeal could compensate for lack of a structure or plan.

With this in mind, I've decided to implement some structure in the weeks ahead. In fact, there have been a lot of health initiatives that I've been putting on the back-burner until now. My weight loss strategy is a 3-pronged plan of attack.

Exercise: A few months ago, I started doing P90x for a few weeks. It provided awesome results, but I fell off the wagon during week 6. Despite this, it was the most structured and intense workout that I've ever done. I'm re-starting the program for Thinspiration XXL. I'm also encouraging Royal Pinguo to participate with me. We all live busy lives, but exercise will improve your energy levels and quality of life. I'm also going to make the time to get my exercise in.

Eating: This has always been my Achilles heel. It's no secret that I love to eat. Over the past week, I've asked people who have succeeded in weight loss. The advice that really hit home was this: "It's a lot easier to say no to that slice of cake than to go jogging for an hour." I've been fooling myself into believing that exercise could actually counter eating. It's not true. With this in mind, I'm starting to count my calories on this website: caloriecount.about.com Let's be clear, the results are not good, but it will help guide me to better eating in the weeks ahead. I encourage my other competitors to use this service as well. It even keeps track of calories burned during exercise.

Pooing: Royal Pinguo has been encouraging me to use detox supplement pills. We bought them on sale a few weeks ago, but I've been reluctant to use them. Well, I've started using them. It's called FirstCleanse, and it's designed for first-timers like me. I might add fiber pills into the mix too. I started on Monday, and I have to say that my poo is a force of nature now. Thank you FirstCleanse.

That's my strategy for Thinspiration XXL. It's no secret that I am the heaviest competitor. I plan on closing the gap in the coming weeks.

Competitor Profile: Thorn

Name: Thorn

Current Weight: 176

Goal: 163

Lowest Adult Weight: 155

Dietary restrictions (specify physiological or moral): I have no moral or religious dietary restriction. The more morally ambiguous the better. I have an aversion to ginger. The root and also the hair colour.

Favourite food(s): Instant noodles. I can eat mountains of the stuff. If I buy a full box it would be gone by the end of the week (there are usually more than 30 packages to a box). I think they put something in MSG that's akin to heroine.

Least favourite healthy food: Brown rice. I thought I'd like it. It is rice after all and I'm naturally attached to that amazing starch. However, the texture just kills it for me. It makes eating rice a chore when it should be a pleasure. I don't want to work when I eat.

If you could eat only one food for the duration of your life, what would it be: See above re: instant noodles. Why wouldn't you want to eat your favourite food for the rest of your life? I guess the alternative would be strawberry icecream from Häagen-Dazs. This is what originally made me fat. I guess I loved it enough to ignore the fact that my waistline was expanding.

Number of times you have woken up with food in your mouth: None.

Number of fantasies you have had featuring food or food covered celebrities: The only time was wanting to re-enact the food scene with Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks. I saw that when I was way too young to see those sorts of things.

Exercise strategy: To reduce the water weight in my body. If the body is 80% water, I suppose I can drop it down to 70% and still be alive. I figure that's enough to get me below my desired weight. Okay, so I'll be severely dehydrated but at least I'll still eat good food without the need to exercise.

Thinspiration celebrity: Gerard Butler in 300 and not Gerard Butler in 300 Pounds.

Favourite workout music: I tend not to workout with music but if I had to then it would be this one. Or random dance/pop music.

Weighty sob story: When my size large shirts started feeling a bit snug I knew I had to stop eating those quarts of Häagen-Dazs ice cream every few days. I was wearing big people clothes.

Celebrity you would eat first, if the situation became dire, of course, not just as an enjoyable past-time: One of the Two Fat Ladies. The living one. Imagine how marbled she must be. They cooked with lard their whole life, it's like eating Kobe Humans.

Charitable beneficiary: Habitat for Humanity, because everyone deserves a place to live. Even me. They didn't build my house though. Bastards.

This is etched in stone

Whatever claims the other competitors may make, I can produce a concrete result: sponsorship! The Storymaster has agreed to back my campaign to thinness along with my chosen charity. As a yoga and martial arts expert, she has already provided additional benefits such as deftly slapping cookies out of my hand, and putting the fear of failure, and her subsequent wrath, in me.

I hastily march out The Storymaster's financial support of my cause because the first weigh-in is fast approaching, and I am not sure that I have made enough progress. What with Doctor Cook's hunger strike, and Opiate's gauntlet throwing, my simple strategy of eating less and moving more might not produce the results that a taskmaster like The Storymaster expects.

To be clear, you cannot back out of your financial commitment now, The Storymaster. Everyone knows about it!

I will continue following a sensible weight loss strategy until panic sets in and I resort to more colourful methods...stay tuned!

Are you going to eat that?

You know the situation is getting dire when the image above makes you hungry. Not horrified? Well, you should be. I wasn't just talking about the pasta!

It's been almost a week of the Thinspiration competition and I am most assuredly losing weight. My strategy so far has been to cut out those horrible foods that so easily cause weight gain: all of them. Kate Moss, eat your heart ou- Oops, what am I saying? Kate Moss, starve your heart out! Right. Much better.

The "internet" tells me that I presently burn around 3000 calories per day on average.

Presently, I've been consuming in the range of 1500-2000 calories per day, with some notable exceptions, for a daily deficit of 1000-1500 calories.

A pound of fat is 3500 calories. So that basically means I should be losing a pound every 3 days or so.

This leads to an important mathematical safety-conscience question.

At this rate, how long will it take until I lose so much weight that I will literally disappear?

The answer: between 3 and 5 months.

If you use a bunch of probably completely made up numbers, my 180 lbs of weight, last I checked, can be broken down into:

23 lbs of fat [13% body fat. :( ] x 3500 = 82,000 calories
30 lbs of protein x 1800 = 54,000 calories
112 lbs of water
15 lbs of random fairly important stuff, like bones

I'm sure celestialspeedster, our resident cannibalism enthusiast, is perking up at this. One medium sized human could theoretically feed a person for months.

...

But, the point I'm trying to make is, I'm very very hungry. All of the time. There is a constant nagging buzzing feeling in my stomach. I dream of food. I even smell food when it isn't there. There was a distinctive smell of peanut butter earlier. I wasn't having a stroke, so perhaps it was a starvation-induced hallucination.

As the saying should go, I'm hungry enough to eat a Michael Moore. Almost, anyway.

Seriously, look at him.

He's just asking to be eaten!

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

I like to eat and I like to drink.

Very much so.

So much that I'm amazed I'm not 300lbs. I could be. The very morning after the start of this challenge I had bacon and eggs for breakfast in no small quantity. No fruit, no juice, just grease. I'm not entirely sure I'd gotten started on the right foot here.

I have always known that I have to continually work to stave off a family trait. All the guys in my family lineage are well....huge. The fact that at 5'6" I'm also considerably shorter than both my father and older brother doesn't escape me either.....that's a lot of fatty bulk packed into a smaller frame and it shows, I can't hide it head to toe like my 6'2" brother does. I already have an uphill battle ahead of me to take everyone down.

Especially celestialspeedster who is resisting all attempts at cookie bribes from her fellow competitors and orders water at dinner when we order beer. Grrr.... Curse her public resilience!

All in all I am officially announcing that I will be matching pound for pound, any pledges towards me and in turn towards Partners In Health. To make this a feasible possibility and to ensure that PIH is actually going to be getting a donation out of this I will be personally donating an amount as a minimum and all pledges will be doubled by me then added to that amount.

So there!!

To help maximise that potential donation my basic plan of attack is based around some key elements in my life right now:

1: (percieved) athletiscism: I run, bike and dragon boat. A lot. Just not enough. I have the Montreal Marathon less than two months away and the 15k Midsummer's Night Run in August only weeks before that. This realization of that invisible wire I'm coming down to....has me somewhat rattled. I really need to actually start taking this a bit more seriously as I have not logged any real consistent miles for some time. Biking to work every day helps, but unless we start hitting 40c outside and I wear a parka it's not entirely my ace in the hole so my running regimen MUST be ramped up.

2: Stress and eating habits: Just over a month ago I became single again after 4 years. Just this past weekend I moved apartments. Sudden doubling of your rent and utilities bills, shopping and cooking for only yourself and no longer sharing meals makes ones eating habits take a very different turn. I still consider my ex one of my best friends, but living with her was like sharing a kitchen with Chef Paul and can be summed up by the image of a grilled 12oz prime rib slathered in melted cheese and gravy with fried bacon on top. Pure and simple. I love her cooking, she even owns her own deep fryer. Yes a deep fryer. No longer having ready access to her incredible BBQ'd ribs, lasagna, and other edibles of artery clogging awesome messy goodness will help me drop some significant poundage.

3: Beer: Smithwick's is my symbol, my honour, and my favourite beer in the world if I had to choose. I like to drink. I like heavy dark beers which pack on pounds like eating slabs of butter. I like to drink with friends, before during and after all kinds of activities and always have a beer after a long hard run, bike ride, dragon boat race, farm work or helping someone move. It is a celebration and a victory in one. The culmination of effort, and the justification of itself and it's awesomeness. This also means I drink way more than I should. This is going to change. Beer will not lose it's luster and it's glory. But I will not have so much in my fridge at any given time. I will not have so many on nights out. I will not drink as much beer.

Gasp in shock now.

4: Self-abuse and video games: Akin to no. 1 I like to be outdoors doing things. I consider myself relatively competitive and try to perform better in every event I do. I also sit on my ass at home and play a lot of video games. When I run I'm trying to tire myself out and make myself hurt. I beat myself up, not emotionally, but push physically beyond my normal endurance and try to get that happy endorphin rush from an effort worth the pain. Herein lies progress.

When I don't go for a run, yoga class or bike ride and I chose the slothful path of xbox, herein lies stagnation and deterioration. Like beer, I play video games a lot more than I should and the Gears of War 2 TicTicBoom weekend being incredibly fun hasn't helped any. I set up my xbox after the move before nearly anything else. This is also going to change because drinking beer while sitting on my ass playing video games is hardly progress.