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

Her Hair-Brained Scheme

CHICAGO – The parade of pink clothing stretches along the baseball field’s perimeter from the deepest reaches of centerfield down past third base.

Thing 1, halfway through the annihilation of her first box of chips drowning in industrial DayGlo orange cheese sauce, clears an airway,  “Who are those people?”

“I think they are people who had breast cancer. Since this is Mother’s Day, the White Sox are trying to raise awareness of a disease that tends to affect women and give people hope for a cure,” I say.

She digs back into her nuclear lunch and I return to filling out the lineups in my scorecard.

A few minutes and layers of glop later, Thing 1 has a new question.

“How long does your hair need to be to cut it off and give to kids?”

I set down my beer.

“You mean like Locks of Love? Where they make wigs for kids who lost their hair from cancer treatments?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Do you want to do that?”

She nods and the Midwestern spring sunlight shimmers off the drops of florescent goo on the corners of her mouth. “My teacher said she’s going to cut her hair for kids," she says.

As we talk, I’m internally dumbfounded. Thing 1 has been avoiding a true haircut for several years to the point that it’s approaching the middle of her back. This has led to endless demands for her to pull back her dirty blonde locks so they will stop falling into her food, which is followed by calls for her to wash it and comb it more often to extricate the collected bits of breakfast (maple syrup, you are thy enemy!), lunch and dinner from the tangled strands.

In addition to her teacher’s decision and the sight of all these cancer survivors and their families proudly treading around the White Sox’ warning track, I’m wondering how much just being here in Chicago is influencing this discussion. We have been trekking here every few months now for more than seven years for her to met with specialists who make her stretch and crawl, and draw dozens of rubber-topped vials of blood and study her muscles and bones with magical machines that see so many things we still do not understand. I think back to that first solo trip the two of us took, on a wet late winter day, and how right before the appointment Thing 1 fell limp and feverish in her stroller, a staph infection coursing through her steroid-swollen body.

“… so I think you only need to let it go a few more inches if you really want to do it,” I hear myself say.

Without even the pause of half a heartbeat, she asks, “And how much do they pay?”

“Pardon?”

“How much money do they give you for your hair?”

“It’s a donation, honey,” I say. “You give it to them for free so they can help a needy child.”

“Dang,” she says, looking at the nacho ruins in the cardboard holder on her lap. “I wanted to make some cash.”

+ + +

As I’m typing this, several hours later in a hotel room two blocks from the twinkling lights and retail holyland of The Magnificent Mile, I interrupt Thing 1’s viewing of a third episode of 19 Kids and Counting about the Duggars’ attempt to bring their premature baby, Josie, home.

“You still want to donate your hair?”

She nods.

“Even though you don’t get paid for it?”

“Yeah,” she says.

I don’t ask why. I stroke her long, grubby mane -- just once because my ring finger gets snagged in a knot of sunscreen, sweat and sugar -- then tell her to hit the showers.

Technorati Tags: mother's day,baseball,cancer,breast cancer,kids

My Son, The Literal-Minded Math Genius

When it comes to telling me about her day at school, Thing 1 stays fairly tight-lipped because, as dictated by Angst and the Art of Pre-Teen Disgruntlement, that’s the proven way to produce a grunting sound most appropriate to respond to any inquiries by a parental unit.

Still, the unsolicited information spilling forth from her the other day did not put me into immediate Code Blue cardiac arrest. That’s because it involved tattling on her little brother.

“Thing 2 one came into my classroom today,” she said between handfuls of lime-flavored tortilla chips. “His teacher had to come get him out. He started crying. Is he in trouble? You should punish him. Now. Chop chop.”

In the basement, Thing 2 lay sprawled on the couch, thumbs spastically waging another violent Pokémon overthrow on his Nintendo DS.

“So, Thing 2, son,” I said as I tried not to inhale the stench rising from the dirt-encrusted shreddings masquerading as his socks. “What were you doing over in your sister’s classroom today.”

“We were doing math and I got all the answers right, so Ms. Kowalsky said I was so smart I should skip the next grade and go right to fourth.”

“And that’s what you did. You walked out of your second grade class and went down the hall to Thing 1’s class.”

“Yeeeees,” he said over the beeps, blips and electronic death wails.

This was a serious step up. During our parent-teacher conference in March, his teacher told me she usually only told him to “get out of here and go right to third grade.”

Which, of course, he also would do.

“You know, dude, she’s kidding you, right? It’s a joke.”

“No. It’s NOT!” He lowered the DS and made … eye contact.

“Yes, it is. C’mon, why would you want to skip all the way up to fourth grade aside from the fact you’d finally be among kids closer to your own gargantuan height.”

“Because I already know everything,” he said before setting his jaw and roaring with a steam engine’s force of conviction, “and I WANT TO MOVE ON WITH MY LIFE!”

Son, my, son. So big of body, big of brain and short of patience. Some day, you’ll want to reverse all the clocks whose hands you have whirled forward with childish haste, but you won’t be able to.

If you’re lucky, though, you may be able to slow them down just a tick or two.

In the meantime, I hope what I can teach you about long division and complex fractions will do the trick.

Furry Vengeance!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I promised you a post about my brush with the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Ain't happening today.

Why?

Murphy woke up at 3 a.m. violently shaking his head like a bobblehead doll in an earthquake. My Love guessed it was an allergy-related ear infection, gave the poor dog a Claritin and stuffed her head back under the pillow.

I slept through it all.

My brain must have automatically shut itself down to rest up after deducing that my waking day would be spent leaving a trail of cotton balls and tea tree oil around the house as I tried to corner a veterinarian-hating, 75-pound Labrador retriever whipping his long floppies from side to side like a hula dancer on crystal meth.

Or maybe I knowingly ignored all the wee-hour commotion. Maybe I was exacting revenge for the countless early mornings past on which I answered someone's needy barks to go outside. And for the six months spent picking up someone's parasite-laced intestinal explosions around the yard. And all the many power-washings and disinfections needed to remove unplanned detonations from someone's kennel, an activity done while I repeatedly muttered "crap in a wrap, what died up inside you, dog!" and wondered if certain student loans really, truly needed to be repaid given this unpaid, full-time job they had netted me.

Nah.

Must have just been my subconscious just trying to help stockpile needed energy. My brain is a far more complex beast than I am.


Video:"All Men are Liars," Nick Lowe

Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy

Nothing of great consequence today, friends, unless you want a second chance to:

WIN A YEAR'S SUPPLY
OF HILLSHIRE FARM PRODUCT(S)

My favorite meat pushers (wow -- that didn't sound right) have authorized me to give away another load of sausage, deli meats and other products, this time by hosting a drawing on DadCentric. Entry rules are similar to what I did here last week, so get over there and comment.

Come back soon for a new post about my brush with the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Meanwhile, enjoy Hanson doing a wicked Blues Brothers imitation.

Thinking 'Bout Somethin'

HANSON | MySpace Music Videos

And yes, that is Weird Al on tambourine.

My Meaty Weiners ... I Mean -- Winners

Sure, you love me, your humble scribe and beleaguered at-home dad, but I know where your true affections lie.

They lie on the grill.

And in the oven.

Maybe even in a crusty cast-iron frying pan, smothered in sauteed onions, peppers and artery-clogging yumminess.

Yes, my friends, you love your Hillshire Farm meat.

And you love it free.

For one whole year.

In all, you submitted more than 240 entries into my "Win the Sausage!" giveaway, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (assuming you didn't enter a similar once-in-a-lifetime affair elsewhere in the blogosphere) sponsored by the generous, intelligent and totally smoking hot folks at Hillshire Farm.

And I have sorted through them all and come up with this ...

First, some surprise "bonus" prizes so I can:

• better comply with FCC regulations,
• avoid problems with the IRS, and
• hide the evidence of any possible sausage abuse from my doctor.

Runner-up prize No. 1: A copy of The Hillshire Farm Cookbook
This 64-page, full-color paperback includes a whopping 42 meaty recipes featuring Hillshire Farm products as well as tips on cooking, grilling and entertaining. And, it goes to an entrant -- chosen at random -- who happens to be named ...

James (aka Seattle Dad), author of the "Luke, I am Your Father" blog

Runner-up prize No. 2: An official "Go Meat!" white apron

This must-have article of cooking attire is being awarded to the person I believed submitted the most logical, literate and honest rationale (in the form of a naughty limerick to boot!) for her winning the grand prize. Here's her entry:

There once was a woman from Weaselville

She had very sore knees due to ... (cleaning well)

A year's worth of meat

Would keep her off of her feet

And focus her efforts in pleasureville.

The apron and congratulations go to WeaselMomma!

GRAND PRIZE: A year's supply of Hillshire Farm Product(s)

The winner, chosen at random, is a Midwestern man with

• a heart of gold (soon to be replaced with saturated fats) ...
• a unibrow of steel wool, and ..
• The Cheek of God on WordPress. 

It's ...

 Brian (aka TysDaddy)

Congratulations to all my winners and thanks to all of you for entering, commenting, tweeting and making not-so-thinly-veiled penis jokes. I hope the many of you who entered but are not regular readers at Always Home and Uncool will come back even when I'm not offering free animal products. Special thanks to the folks at Hillshire Farms for providing the goods.