Oliver invited me to join him for a training, coaching, videoing session at the place where we met 15 years ago, when he was a precocious though clear-eyed youth seeking the secrets of the squared-circle.
Feeling my weight gain over this past injury-dominated year and not having been on the scale for four years, I followed Oliver up on to the humiliating device that all boxers, at one time or another fear.
From age 18 through 44 I weighed between 143 and 170, usually settling in at a competing weight of 157. The lighter weights were usually the result of working more than 70 hours as a laborer, not training.
I had an arrogant sense of my given weight, able to shape myself within the weak-hipped, big thighed and wide-shouldered, bt short-muscled parameters bequeathed by my creator. In the mid to late 1980s if worked 75 hours in five days, with Sunday and Wednesday off. On Wednesday morning and Sunday morning, when I got home from work, I’d weigh 143. When I headed back in the next night I’d weigh160.
Imagine my surprise when I had to lose 8 pounds in 2006 and was only able to get from 165 to 157 by severe dehydration.
That same year, I began a management job with such a strange schedule and such high levels of stress that I only ate once, t night, after a long shift and ate twice on holidays and on my two days off a month. I ballooned up to 194 by 2010, then managed to get it down to 185.
I heard the twerp heavyweight bell tolling as I stepped up on the scale behind Oliver, discovering that I was now 64 pounds over my optimal stick-fighting weight of 157.
Two-Hundred-and-Twenty-one-pounds!
Aggghhhhhh!
Surprisingly, I was able to put in a vigorous session that lasted about an hour.
The heart did not explode.
My goal now is to practice internet humiliation therapy buy posting my weight every week.
I’m eliminating most of my carbs, doubling my water intake and making sure I’m always hungry. My life is so messed up in terms of scheduling that I can’t handle anything kore complicated than that. The main thing is to increase my activity. My walking needs to get back up to 4-10 miles per day instead of the two it has fallen to over the course of the last year.
So here I wallow, on the boxing beach, the sounds of Eskimos sharpening their harpoons in the near distance…
Being a Bad Man in a Worse World
Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival
DUDE! Been there, done that, still doing it.
210 was a good weight for me, always felt good, do whatever I want.
Got busy, quit doing physical labor, strange schedules, lots of travel, and the weight had ballooned up to 295 pounds this past January.
Blood sugar through the roof, type-2 diabetes and ED onset, wearing 44-waist pants, body fat percentage 35%. Nothing good happening there.
Started treating everything I put in my mouth like a dose of medicine. What is it, is it good for me, how much? Average calories per day now 1550, where my "maintenance" calories are 3050 a day, so 2.5 pounds per week loss. Anything more than that is fake, just water.
Have lost 50 pounds since January, and 50 more to go, going for a body fat percentage below 20. Already coming off of some medications, my blood sugar has dropped from 200 to 98.
Bad news - it never ends. At our age, you CAN'T let it go back up, so you have to always watch what you eat from now on, it's easy to "lose the edge" and go back to an I-don't-give-a-shit attitude about weight and health ...
Weight this morning - 243. We're all in this together.