As the fat burns ... through my bank account

Terror grips my every fiber whenever my wife opens a conservation with me using the phrase, “What do you know about …”

Her inquiry is almost never about something I:

a) actually do know something about, or
b) would like to discuss such as
     1) third-string catchers in New York Mets history, or
     2) what’s better for list making: letters or numbers?

But my pre-Google reputation for being a fount of useless knowledge, second only to my ability to tap a keg, was one of the charms she found irresistible in our initial courtship, so she keeps trying.

“What do you know,” she inquired shortly after New Year’s Day, “about PineappleHypothesis?”

The Skinny on Me

You’ve been seeing a lot less of me lately.

Roughly 30 pounds less.

(Oh. You meant my online absence. I’ll explain. In due time. Honestly.)

I had what you may call a transformative moment, an epiphany if you will, about 18 months back following my annual physical.

My blood pressure was slightly elevated.

My cholesterol, a few ticks into the red.

Most importantly, I had trouble buttoning my pants.

Having spent most of my adult life in a 34 waist, in the year previous I had moved to a 36.

Then, a 36 with a “comfort waist.” That’s a 36 with an extra few inches of elastic hidden in the belt line. Lands’ End is Genius.

Eeeeee-vil genius.

Gaining on The Biggest Loser

When it comes to exercise fads, I tend to adopt an attitude of wait and see. Unfortunately, this tends to turn into saw and weight gained.

Nevertheless, in the past few weeks I have gone to “Boot Camp" with NBC-TV's The Biggest Loser and shredded with Jillian Michaels.

Result: Nearly a pound … gained??

I suspect karma at work given my history with fitness trends.

Let's first return to the days when Jane Fonda and her leg warmers were still all the craze. My girlfriend at the time started badgering me into taking an aerobics class.

"It will be fun!" I distinctly remember her saying while she stood half undressed and handling a bottle of butterscotch Magic Shell. Obviously, I misinterpreted just what the "it" was to which she was referring.

After she found the right color headband and ripped sweatshirt (uh, for me), I followed her puppy dog-like to the gym. Here we paid a small fee to join a few dozen other people in what was essentially running in place for the next 30 minutes. When the cool-down period came, I took off the parking brake, shifted into fourth and hauled my sweaty self straight out the door.

Many years later, I was chatting with a formerly corpulent co-worker who was now obsessed with working out. How obsessed? When she found out that her and her fiancée were to be honeymooning at the same place in Bermuda that My Love and I had, her first question was not about pink beaches, room service or the quality of Egyptian cotton in the sheets, but "just how well-equipped is the fitness center?"

Anyway, our talk eventually turned to her slavish devotion to the hottest thing in exercise. At the moment, it was spinning. She relayed tales about the thrills and chills of pumping up imaginary hills through a visible fog of sweaty stench in a converted storage closet at her local Y, all to the ear-splitting  beat of rave music. Somehow my dismissal of her latest life-changing event as "paying someone to yell at you while you ride a stationary bike" didn’t go over well.

This past Christmas, the mailman brought us a mess of workout DVDs featuring Michaels and her Biggest Loser cohort Bob Harper (whose face is barely recognizable on the covers because of the excessive airbrushing to remove his trademark stubble/beard). This made sense as My Love and our kids love this TV show though I notice an unsettling tendency for them to watch it while gobbling down huge bowls of kettle corn.

Nevertheless, after four workouts with these fitness gurus, broken up with a day of running and two days of barely being to move because I was so sore, I'm proud to report that I am refusing to quit. This is despite the weight gain, Bob's indefatigable upbeatness and Jillian's ever-present sneer. If nothing else, when I haven't been in pain from all the flippin' lunges and pushups they make you do, I have felt better about myself -- mentally if not physically. This is a trend I am going to try to stick with until I fully reverse some of bad ones I have been living.

… until three days after I wrote this when I tried to outrun Thing 1’s soccer team during a sprinting drill and heard my hamstring pop.

Karma, you bitch.

Technorati Tags: Biggest Loser,Jillian Michaels,Bob Harper,diet,exercise

Play Win the Sausage! (Hiding It Later is Optional) - CLOSED!

THIS CONTEST IS CLOSED! 

But don't leave empty handed! Go back to my home page, read a post or two and grab a laugh.

-- The Uncool Management

 * * *  

Did my last post make your mouth water? I know it wasn't my scintillating writing, so it must have been the lure of ...

YOUR CHANCE TO WIN A YEAR'S SUPPLY
OF HILLSHIRE FARM PRODUCTS

The lovely Liz from Hillshire's PR/marketing agency sent me an e-mail last month that:

• Didn't refer to me by the wrong name or gender.
• Offered a product I can actually relate to. I'm thinking Liz made the "meat for a meathead" connection, but I'm hoping it was something far dirtier yet more flattering, you sweet thang, you.
• Wasn't tied-in to a worthless reality star. Yes, I know I'm being redundant.

Liz's minions (which I'm sure she has many of and she dresses them in lederhosen and St. Pauli's Girl outfits) shipped over some Hillshire Farm Beef Smoked Sausage and Polska Kielbasa, both of which survived the great Uncool Power Outage of 2010.

I was planning on making one of the recipes she also sent, but My Love got a hold of the sausage (that's what she said) and tossed it into a pot with some crushed tomatoes and a mess of red and black beans.

Simply: Oh, baby, goooooooood!

Here's what you can do to get a chance at

WINNING A YEAR'S SUPPLY
OF HILLSHIRE FARM PRODUCTS

1. Leave a comment on this post by no later than 11:59 p.m. EDT, April 22, 2010. Any kind of comment will do, but if you want to entertain the judges, we do like originality, poise and the occasional naughty limerick.

2. Earn extra entries by Tweeting a link to this post (just include @homeanduncool in the Tweet so I can count it).

A winner will be selected at random on April 23, 2010. The winner will be announced shortly thereafter so you'll need to check back.

Meanwhile, Go Meat!

NaBloPoMo in Reverse (or, Life Is What Happens When You're Not Blogging)

My son did not slice me like a honey glazed ham on Halloween night.

Unless he did and my disembodied hands typed this up. Awesome.

That would, however, prove that you don't need brains to blog.

Insert your own joke at my expense.

(Sorry.)

(Must. Stop. Thinking. About. Ham.)

I haven't posted anything in the last three weeks because I'm protesting NaBloPoMo.

For those not in the know (and a belated happy hook-up anniversary to you, My Love), NaBloPoMo -- short for National Blog Posting Month -- is an annual event in which bloggers attempt to post every day in the month of November.

Makes no since to me either.

Didn't we all get into this blogging thing to avoid drudgery, responsibility and hard work?

We were going to write a few good posts early on, be discovered and get a book deal or a movie commitment, then live the rest of our days off residuals and the revenue from our Google Ads (in the last month, I've nearly cleared $4.50 -- thanks for clicking, Mortician Babe!).

We were all going make something out of ourselves without making much at all. It's what real Americans do, right? I mean, when they are not telling their story to Oprah. Or Sean Hannity. Yep, real Americans -- just like you.

So someone please get the memo to those NaBloPoMorons -- stat! You're making the rest of us look like sloths!

Or are you?

Since my last post, I've been doing things that require me to actually get away from my computer. And I don't mean watch TiVo. Well, not all the time.

It all started on Nov. 1, known to me as the holiday El Día Del Lastre, or The Day of the Dead Weight.

That's when, after an All Hallow's Eve traditional indulgence of Mexican food, margaritas and the Butterfingers that never made it into the trick-or-treat bowl, I step on the scale to assess the past year's damage.

It's never a pretty figure -- the one I cut physically or the one my scale gives me numerically. That's the price to be paid for a summer of grilled meats, sweet straw-colored ales and dipped cones from the outdoor Dairy Queen in our town. Frickin' butterscotch Magic Shell.

This year, the numbers were pretty awful and I faced the choice of getting off my ass (actually, mah belly -- she is the problem) or going the Homer Simpson "moo moo and fat man cap" route. I think what drove it home was us buying Wii Fit Plus and, after my first weigh-in, my Mii suddenly looking like he engulfed a mini-Cooper.

And a VW Bug.

And the state of Delaware.

As luck would have it, the weather this month has been amazing nice for November in New England. I've been taking Murphy on some extra long walks, cleaning the garage, fertilizing the shrubs, chopping up or disposing of the last wood pile in the yard (I even bought a chainsaw ... after Halloween, of course), stringing Christmas lights around the yard (nyah -- hate me), getting the Minivan of Manliess winterized, taking the Things to an indoor waterpark, volunteering at their school, etc.

You know -- real life.

Oh, I'm still bulging in the belly department (down three pounds, though). But, for the first time in a while, I'm feeling a physical sense of accomplishment.

Why, then, am I posting today just 7 days shy of my goal of sitting out the month?

Am I lonely?

Of course, but that's a peril of at-home dadness in the 'burbs. Word.

Is My Love suspicious of my non-blogging goings-on?

A bit. That new Webcam I bought probably didn't help matters. Honestly, it's only so I can now video chat with my favorite blogger in Utah.

Maybe I'm just afraid that I couldn't handle the success.

Can't Spell 'Diet' Without It

A co-worker and I were once returning from a meeting when, overwhelmed by the munchies, he asked me to pull over at a 7-Eleven. He needed a hot dog, he said, because he had gone to a nutritionist who drew some blood, analyzed it and determined that his body chemistry made him "hot dog tolerant."

After I stopped the Slurpee from shooting out of my nose, he explained that it was something about his body reacting extremely well to the "protein" and burning it at a highly efficient rate so he didn't gain weight. Eating a wiener, for him, would be like pumping the highest grade octane gas into your car.

Considering the hot dogs looked like they had been on that roller grill since Madonna really was a virgin, I think he had another kind of gas coming.

I forgot about this until sometime ago a friend, in an effort to improve her health and drop a few pounds, consulted a nutritionist who drew some blood, ran some tests and gave her a thick binder full of test results along with a list of foods. Try one food for a few days, record how your body reacted to it (heartburn, pus-filled boils, speaking in tongues, etc.) and how much you weighed the next day. Bad reaction and/or weight gain -- never eat that food again! Your body is having a type of allergic reaction to it, causing water retention, battles within the autoimmune system and justification of the nutritionist's exorbitant fee.

I'm no scientist, and I certainly don't pretend to be one on this blog, but I think you'll agree with me when I say "What the flock?"

(Literary alert: "Flock" is foreshadowing.)

This seems like a good way to test for food allergies and conditions like celiac disease, but is it the most cost-effective way for someone who is otherwise healthy and happy to get into some skinny jeans?

My doubts grew when my friend ate nothing but lamb for lunch and dinner. For about three months straight.

OK, lamb may not top your list of diet foods but I give the nutritionist credit here. When your dog has skin or stomach issues, one of the first things many vets recommend is a switch to a lamb-and-rice based food. It's either that lamb is a kinder, gentler meat or just that most dogs -- and humans except for gyro fanatics -- don't normally eat much lamb so it's a good control to test if their normal food is making them sick. So from me -- two paws up!

Then there were the martinis. Apparently all kinds of wines made my pal gain weight, but a good stiff Bombay Sapphire martini (hold the olive -- please) did not add to the scales. I was glad to hear that because I feel gin is highly under-appreciated by today's Grey Goose swilling masses (apologies to Vodka Mom and Aunt Becky -- you know I'd hit the potato juice with you two any time). Other than that, I was a tad concerned about the pile of empties I noticed in her recycling bin.

This went on for months, by which time my friend should have gone through the list and determined a wide variety of good and bad eats for her. Unfortunately, every few days, tired of baby-sheep breath and juniper-scented hangovers, she snuck in a pizza or helping of nachos and had to start from the top of that list again.

Then, one day, it stopped. No more obscure ancient grains to try or eating Food A only after digesting Food B before taking an intravenous hit of Food C in puree form. She was back to normal, but with a simple commitment to more fruits and veggies, less processed foods and regular exercise.

I was proud of her because, while I too often stray from the good food path, deep down I know those are all right things to do to maintain a healthy life.

What turned her around, you ask?

Publicly, she'll say it was the long-term restrictions and the boredom of the diet and the price of the program.

Privately, though, it might have had something to do with her nutritionist suddenly dropping dead.