The last week has been, yet again, incredibley busy for me. Aside from posting my weigh in every morning, I’ve not had any time for the site.

I’m out of town for the next 4 days, so that isn’t likely to change in the near future.

Stress, combined with not taking the time to prepare the best meals has had a negative impact on my most recent weigh-in’s, but overall I’m still making forward progress, and this trip is just what the doctor ordered to get me refreshed and focused again.

I’ve missed a few posts this last week, but mostly due to being really busy, as opposed to being disinterested. I ‘back filled’ what I could accurately remember, but it seems I’ve finally got my weight moving (if slowly) in the right direction again, so the days I didn’t log don’t bother me so much.

Now, to make good on my intentions and up the intensity in the gym today.

I imagine that everyone who’s ever tried to run with stock iPod headphones knows what pain in the butt they are. Aside from being slightly too big to begin with, that shiny white plastic they’re made of slides out of a sweaty ear faster than Jay Leno can steal a talk show. I wasn’t even past light jogging before I knew I had to get something new.

One day I swung by a big name electronics store, looking for a new pair that would work better, but didn’t find anything that looked too appealing. I didn’t know what I was really looking for, I mean, I assumed athletic people needed to listen to music while they ran just like I did, so it stood to reason they’d already solved this problem, but if they had, I wasn’t finding it on the shelves.

When I got home, I hit up Google, and in less than 5 minutes I found myself with an incredible selection of ‘sport’ headphones of all shapes and sizes. Still not really knowing what I was looking for (and hating to spend money on something I might dislike) I was pretty reluctant to buy anything without being able to physically inspect them first – especially when every single set of headphones I checked had a mix of rave and terrible reviews. Eventually, I found myself coming back to the Sennheiser MX85 Sport Series again and again, so I figured I’d take a shot.

I’m really glad I did, because I think these things really rock. I’m not an audiofile, so I can’t speak intelligently to the sound quality, but I don’t have any complaints. What I can say, is that these things stay in your ears, even when you’re a big lumbering dude who has no idea how to run properly, and even when you drop your iPod shuffle while doing said lumbering. They stay in your ears, and they’re comfortable, and that’s exactly what I wanted. All in all, I couldn’t be happier with them.

It feels a little odd to be raving about a purchase I made months ago, and even odder still to think that this post about my headphones is twice as long as my post about my 5k. So odd in fact, that I almost didn’t write this out. For someone with steady employment, buying something in the $30 price range isn’t really an accomplishment, particularly when compared with running farther than you’ve ever ran before in your life, so what’s the big deal?

It might sound a bit silly, but buying those headphones was in investment in my health. I didn’t buy a home gym, or a treadmill, or some gimmick on tv telling myself that once I had it, I’d start using it to get healthy – I was already in the gym, doing the hard part, and when an opportunity to make an excuse not to go came up (“I need to get new headphones”), I refused to use it. Instead, I invested in the commitment I’d already made to myself and, in doing so, strengthened it.

So, when I say I love my headphones, I really do. Not because of how they sound, or because they don’t fall out, but because they serve as a reminder of how I’m slowly changing my life for the better.

My mother and I went to my Uncle’s for Passover Seder today (Yeah, it’s not the right day, but I’m not Jewish either, so sue me). My Uncle Paul is a great cook, I definitely ate too much, and I’ve no idea how to log the calorie I consumed (I mean, how many calories are in gefilte fish anyway?).

Still, it was wonderful to see the family, and (did I mention) the food was really good. So aside from having no calorie total, and feeling like a stuffed pig, today was a good day.

I’ve decided I must seriously be messed up in the head. it’s the only way to explain the mental roadblock I’ve been having with the site recently. I mean, I know I haven’t been eating well enough to really lose much weight, but there are plenty of things I have been doing right.

I’ve been to the gym at least twice a week for a month now – I’ve actually been killing it on the stairmaster recently. I can run (or at least jog) over a mile now with no walking whatsoever. I’ve been lifting after every cardio session, and I can definitely see improvements in both how I look and feel. So why don’t I post about that? I even take pictures of the machines I’m working on with the intent of posting, but when I get home I seriously have some sort of odd aversion to sitting down and posting to the site.

Maybe it’s cus I’m not seeing results on the scale, so I feel like it’s all in vain? Maybe I’m afraid this is turning into just another failed attempt at losing weight? Maybe I’m just still lazier than I care to admit?

Honestly, I don’t know what it is, but I’d better figure it out, this is starting to piss me off.

Even if I’m not doing well with my food intake, or my workout schedule, I need to maintain the habit of posting here regularly. Otherwise I end up were I am today, where I have 5 days worth of food to enter, and I just can’t recall everything I ate anymore.

I drove through Carl’s Jr. last night, sometime around 2 am, and got a burger and a shake. That’s over 2000 of the worst calories you can consume about an hour and a half before I went to bed. That’s so bad, I’m at a loss for words on how else to describe it.

I ate that burger last night because I don’t feel like I deserve to be happy or healthy – a feeling that has been steadily reemerging in me for some time now. It’s no coincidence then, that my resolve and dedication have slowly fallen apart over that same time period. Whatever it was, that I had, which prompted me to lose 40 lbs, I’ve lost it. That sense of self worth that made me want to be better is gone, and without it, I feel powerless – I’ve no reason to fight.

Does stress do this to person; break them down until they feel as if they deserve it? Or, does the feeling that one deserves to be broken the thing that drives us to create the stress that breaks us down? I don’t know. I’m not even sure whether I’m posting this as sign of defiance, or self pity. I hope it’s the former, and am terribly afraid it’s the latter.

The proverbial “they” say that the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. What’s step 2?

Second day in a row my weigh-in has jumped 4 pounds. That’s 8 pounds in two fricking days! Seriously, wtf?

These are the kinds of results that cause people to quit. I mean, I know I haven’t been eating like a saint or hitting the gym like a champ, but an 8 pound upswing just feels like sucker punch straight to the gut. I didn’t see a jump that bad from day to day during the holidays, even when I ate cheesecake multiple days in a row.

I know I’ve really got to get more disciplined if I want to keep seeing results as I lose weight, but I had felt like I was doing alright this last week; not great, but alright.

My only real option is to soldier through and work harder. Maybe alright isn’t good enough.

I’m a big fan of Buckminster Fuller who’s book I Seem to Be a Verb takes its name from the following passage:

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.

Conceptually, that’s a pretty important concept I think. The idea that there are no nouns in nature, only verbs, only processes; that a person is not a known quantity and therefore not subject to the limitations that come with a single definition.

For the last few months I’ve definitely fallen off of the weight-loss path I’d set for myself. I set goals, and failed to meet them. I started each day with the best intentions, but ate poorly. It wasn’t long before I was updating the site less frequently, and shortly after thereafter, not updating at all.

There were, of course, outside factors that contributed to recent my struggles – Holidays gave me an excuse to eat more, technical issues kept the site unavailable to me, external stress factors wearing me down, etc. I’m not making excuses, mind you, as I am the one that made poor choices, these are just some the justifications I used to make them.

Now for the stupid part – those justifications have nothing to do with why I haven’t gotten back on track. For the last few weeks I’ve really been anxious to start tracking my food and hitting the gym again, but I haven’t, and the reason I haven’t is because of this site.

I realized last night that the notion that I was somehow behind where I ‘should’ be and needed to somehow ‘catch up’ was the primary reason that I wasn’t posting anymore. It felt that, before I could just start again, there had to be some sort of an explanation as to why I’d stopped. I’d become bound by some definition of what I thought my weight loss and this site were supposed to be, and I felt guilty for not living up to it. I’d let my weight loss become a thing – a noun, rather than a process.

It’s the reason I didn’t post about the chicken & garlic pasta I made at home, or I didn’t post pictures of my new gym headphones, or post about how (despite not really losing any weight on the scale) I am down yet another loop on my belt. I kept waiting to write some post explaining why I’d been gone first. Oddly enough, the minute I realized that I don’t need to have a reason for not posting recently, this post more or less wrote itself.

Now I’m off to the gym.

Mary over at A Merry Life has the absolute best resolution I’ve read yet:

I’m just going to throw it out there that this year is going to be awesome. Seriously. My goal? Be awesome.

I’m totally adding that to my list.