Adjusted Reality

So I’ve spent some time researching plateaus over the last few days.  I have to share with you some of the most interesting and odd tidbits so let’s bring on the internet hodgepodge of factoids!

This site pretty much tells me that I should never have gotten on a plateau in the first place and my body is a freak of nature.  They advise to keep a food diary (I track my food religiously here and have for over a year), break up your meals (I eat breakfast in three segments from 9 to 11:30, lunch at 12:30, a snack in the afternoon, fruit before my workout, dinner right after, and then usually a light late snack), eat more (been on that for the last few weeks), get support (check), shake up my workout (they advise once a month, which is spot on with what I do), weight train (check – increased it but was definitely doing between 1 hour – 2 hours before per week), drink plenty of water (8 glasses or more a day without fail).

The only things they suggest three things I haven’t done: cut out alcohol (you can have my whiskey and diet coke when you pry it from my cold dead hands), cut out all refined carbs (again, you can have my bread and potatoes when you pry them from my cold dead hands… they even mention salad dressing and ketchup), and moving more outside the gym.  Honey, I work my ASS off in the gym for the hour I have, I don’t fuck around and chit chat and day dream while I’m doing my squats, I rest only as long as it takes to get my heart rate low enough that I will not faint dead away during my reps.  That’s why I could never have a workout buddy (one of their suggestions).  Workout time is NOT social time.  It’s business time, and I love it that way.  I would resent someone that couldn’t keep up.  Back to the point though – I feel like my workouts earn me a little couch time.  I mean, it’s great if you go up and down the stairs instead of elevators and try to get up and talk to people instead of emailing (which I do) at work and you take a 10 minute walk on your lunch break (which I don’t).  If that’s your main form of exercise, I am not belittling you, I just need balls-to-the-wall sweat sessions or I get cranky.  And I think those allow me to not have to get up and march in place during commercials or wear a pedometer and walk circles around my house to amass 8 or 10 or 100k steps per day.

Anyways, so besides asking me to give up two of my main food groups (seriously, do these people know what it’s like to be 29, have a full social calendar with friends that are a bunch of lushes, and not home cook every meal?  srsly…) and start a nightly parade around my living room 12 times, I’ve got it all down.

The site also recommends Free Trainers (though sadly they don’t actually link there – bad), so I hopped over and decided to check it out.  They suggest that I eat 2238 calories (168 g protien, 336 g carbs, 27 g fat – how is that even possible to consume that much fat free protien?) with a slow metabolism and being sedentary to lose weight.  That’s about 1k more than I was consuming on a normal lo cal day a month ago.  So what to do after I resign myself to a daily diet of pretty much beans and lentils to get that much protien on that little fat?  I need to do my advanced workout 5 days per week of doing 5 minutes on the treadmill to warm up, stretch, and then do 3-4 different weight lifting exercises per day.  Gee, I thought I was cutting down with MY workout program, I could be in and out of the gym in less than 30 with that plan.

So instead of deciding to undertake a fitness plan which can only end in extreme flatulence, on with the googling I go.  This next site only has 5 tips, so at least I can dismiss them quickly.  Cycle calories is the first tip, which I do naturally (I mean seriously, who can eat exactly 1500 calories per day), but not with any schedule.  I’ll eat 1500 one day then 1800 if I’m going out for a steak dinner, and then 1200 on a day I’m just not super hungry so it averages out over a week.  I just can’t schedule it day by day.  Then again, strength training and changing up your exercise routine and eat more often – gee why didn’t I think of that?  The only new advice was to change your macronutrient ratio, which I have been doing with pushing fruits and veggies and adding nuts to my diet.  So, besides a nice ancedote at the bottom about chilling out if you’re having trouble, not helpful at all.  Next!

This looks like more of a body builder site but still seems applicable.  Sadly, it looks like they’re saying the same things in a different combination.  Tighten up your diet (which can’t help but remind me of tightening up the graphics) once again advises cutting out processed foods and cutting carbs.  Then there’s calorie cycling again, eating more often, varying your workout, journal your progress, and don’t overtrain – but go ahead and try working out twice a day for a few weeks or doing 6-7 days of cardio, and while you’re at it why don’t you work on upping the intensity.   Clear as mud, right?

On and on.  This site gives me advice I’d like to believe works – forget about your diet one day per weekend or take time off.  However, I think that’s what got me into this mess.  Wiki how looks great until the “Tips” section.  Doing my resistance training (aka full body strength session) before intervals would only end in tears.  I’m so worked over after 20 mins I need an extra long cool down and I start with something easy to give myself time to recover.  Doing that last?  No thanks.  Doing more than 5 days of cardio a week?  Sure, I might take a walk or swim or do something passively active on a day off but I need my 2 days off – just like I need them off work to recharge.  Take one away and I break down after a while.

According to this site, it’s simple.  I’m either eating too much or not enough.  If I’m eating at least 1200, it’s enough.  And god forbid homegirl wants a damn sandwich – it says not to mix your protien and carbs (who can possibly do that?).  Carbs are still the devil, and though I’m exercise at the max duration they suggest, perhaps I should stop just taking a walk around the block and do something more intense like a slow jog *eyeroll*?  And I have so many options with this site!  I can either workout either more intensely, with more variety, longer, or more often.  Or, if that’s not enough, workout twice a day because celebrities do it and working out with no fuel in your body is supposed to be good for you (what a crock of shit).  And according to them I should be eating…oh, just about what I do now, but in 300 calorie mini meals every 3 hours, again, foiling my plans to sustain any sort of normal life and to be able to eat socially with other people, oh, ever.  And if that doesn’t work, just do the Atkins diet!  I mean, Atkins worked so well for me before (read: I hated what I could eat so I starved myself).

After my time with the big Goo today, I’ve come to these conculsions:

1.  I am pretty much smarter about this than the internet.

2.  Their only suggestions are things that…

a.  I am doing already (varied exercise, correct calorie range with some fluctuations over the week, eating often enough to keep my stomach not grumbly, water, journalling my food and exercise, etc)

b.  Things that I refuse to do (cutting out all refined carbs and/or alcohol, cardio 6-7 days per week, two-a-day workouts, etc)

c.  Things that make no sense (like eating 2300 calories a day, not eating carbs with protien, and cutting way down on workouts)

I think in light of the situation at hand and the information in front of me, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, and just aim to bet a bit better at it.  In other words, lessen the amount of nutritionally void things I stuff my face with without eliminating food groups, make sure I’m getting my fruits and veggies everyday instead of some days, use the more sane October gym plan as an opportunity to do 100% of my workouts this month.  I guess it’s all about moderation and consistency.  It has to be, because if carbs really are the devil and running is evil, sign me up to be a crankypants in hell.

So, since we discussed the epic fail of last workout, this time, I wanted to try something more sane.  I also was inspired by Charlotte to drop the amount of cardio I’m doing (although she’s way more hardcore than I).  So this month is going to a big change, not necesarily as to the equiment or exercise I’m doing, but how and how frequently I’m doing it.

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Day 1, 3, 5: 20 minutes running intervals, full body strength session

Day 2, 4: 40 minutes Dance Dance Revolution, 15-20 yoga session

I am cutting down to 180 minutes of cardio max per week, and greatly upping my weights time.  My inkling is that even though I can’t technically log the calories in the strength sessions (at least without a heart rate monitor, and I think that would induce a whole other slew of neuroses), it won’t be trivial.  So I’ll be burning about 2400 per week (way down from last month) PLUS whatever the strength sessions are – which for me is going out on a limb because I don’t have math to work with.  Just faith.  I like math better.

Also, these interval workouts are supposed to not only burn calories during them, but keep you burning more after.  Great, but more faith-not-math ideas that I have to believe in.  I couldn’t really commit to them when I was actually losing weight, I’d think “that’s a nice idea and all, but what I’m doing is working, and I don’t want to mess that up”.  Well, what I’m doing isn’t working anymore, so it’s time.

I can give you feedback on the initial few days – Monday I did my first interval session – 20 minutes alternating minutes between 5.0 and 7.0 to 8.0 (roughly 12 minute mile pace the first minute then 9 to 7:30 minute mile pace during the next minute, rinse and repeat, starting with the first interval being 9, then 8:45, up to 7:30).  At first I was gloating at how easy this was, by the end I had to take a double long cool down and felt like my ass got kicked sufficiently hard.  I then challenged myself to up either weights or number of reps on most exercises, and went home and felt tired a lot earlier than normal.  Success!  Tuesday, I needed the lighter DDR and yoga workout and didn’t feel indulgent doing it instead of something harder.  Yesterday, it felt just as hard, but good after.  I got that glowy tired you feel after a good workout instead of the exhausted tired I felt last month.

So far, so good.  I’ll be back to report at the end of next week how things are going.

Over the last year, I like to think I’ve made some pretty healthy lifestyle habits.  Oh, I am not an angel by any measure of the word, but I’m better than I have been.  Through this “being mostly good most of the time” workout and diet ethic, I’ve easily lost at least 5 lbs per month (or more).  Somehow, the month of September was the end of the ride.  That, or 165-170 lbs is a huge sticky point for me.

I didn’t experience anything new this month that I haven’t before.  I’m not denying it was a hectic month, because it was absolute crazy-sauce!  But I’ve wrangled crazy before and rocked the house with it.  I’ve dealt with a parental visit before, but this time it drove me to exhaustion and eating more.  I’ve dealt with March, the other OMG-birthdays-and-events-every-week month, but this time I actually skipped workouts because of either exhaustion or time crunch.   Just dealing with that all at once, plus various stress at work…I wish I could say it sent me over the edge and I all out binged and didn’t work out a day – because that would explain it better.  Instead, I’ve been still “pretty much” good and “pretty much” followed my workouts, but I still kept flucuating between those 5 frustrating pounds.

Besides life contributing to an epic fail – the workload was just a little bit overbearing.  Maybe it was just a bad month to try really ramping up my workouts, but I think it was also just too much, too quick.  Instead of jumpstarting my metabolism, I think it shut down the first two weeks.  I was constantly exhausted, constantly freezing, my workouts got harder instead of easier, the weight I could handle went down instead of up, and I wasn’t losing at all.  It got better performance-wise the last two weeks because I ate more good food but still – no loss, just floating around.

Let’s take the workouts day by day…

Day 1: 20 mins on Cybil, 20 mins arms/squats, 20 mins running

This is the one I did most often, and loved (sometimes with the other strength set of abs/bootie).  I liked the break in between 2 different cardio sessions, and I could go as hard or easy as I needed.  It was also a good workout to do when I was a little sore and/or tired because it was only 20 mins mild pounding.

Day 2: 5k run for time, 20 mins core/bootie, 15-20 mins yoga at home

I only did this twice and usually skipped the yoga for a good stretch.  I did actually perfect my treadmill stretch program but yoga is still better.  I’m glad I did put this in because I accomplished my goal of running a 5k in under 30 mins (29:35).  However, this was too much workout at once.  With warmup and cooldown it was 40 mins, then stretching, and then half a full body workout and THEN YOGA?  What was I thinking?  I think a 5k + yoga OR one body part is about all I can do in one day.

Day 3: 40 minutes of DDR, 15-20 mins yoga at home

Not much to say about this, although I did it MORE than once a week because I didn’t have to leave the house and it’s easy to just substitute a quick stretch for yoga when I am pressed for time and don’t even have an hour for the gym.  This his been and will probably continue to be a once or twice a week staple in my workouts for a long time to come.

Day 4: 1 mile run for time, 20 mins full body strength, 20 mins on Cybil

Again, glad I did this (although I think I only did 2 or 3 times) because I have a new best time of 8:45.  However, 20 mins full body strength is a retarded thing to say, because a full body strength train session is about 40-50 mins if I’m rushing it.  And how do I figure out what to skip if I’m supposed to work my whole body?  So I spent way too much time on this one, or skipped it.  1 mile run + half body strength train + cybil is about all I can take in one workout.

Day 5: 4 mile run, 15-20 mins yoga at home

I enjoyed these, but again, usually replaced the yoga with a treadmill stretch.  This was a great day to just space out to music and/or whatever was on the TVs and not have 3 parts to my workout.  I think I did this every week.  I’m a little sad I’m not doing any long runs this month, but I’ll add them back in November I think.  Unless I fall in love with what I’m doing and run away to Vegas and marry my exercise program.  Zliten might be sad but hey, these things happen.

Anyways, I definitely learned a lesson in how much working out I can tolerate.  Someday, if I’m ever part time or unemployed or the fiance wants to start training for marathons or my friends all decide they hate me, I could perhaps consider more time.  But about 1 hour 5 days a week is all I can handle with my current life.  And to make myself feel better, it’s not necessarily about my capacity to handle the actual workout load.  Sure, the hard ones tuckered me out, but I wasn’t passing out on the gym floor.  It was mostly the time commitment.

I would get off work at 5:30pm, change in the bathroom at work (I just got used to it when I worked out at work and it stuck), and by the time I’m at the bottom of the parking garage its 5:45 – then a 15-20 min drive to the gym, then 10ish minutes parking/showingpass/locker-room deposit-bag-and-pit-stop and then I’m working out at 6:10.  A particularly demanding day and it’s 7:40 after a workout, then 5 mins to collect crap and drive home, then shower and dry off and get dressed and HOLY SHIT ITS ALREADY 8pm and I’m just having dinner.  2.5 hours since I left work.  Time gets sucked into a black hole somehow when I hit the gym.  I wish I could squeeze more workout and less other stuff in that time, but until I figure that out, them’s the facts.  And I can’t have it suck that much time.

So that’s that.  Epic fail, with lots of lessons learned.  Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the plan for October, which is actually underway, being that it is the 8th of the month!

Something I hear on MMORPG message boards fairly often is “OMG, the devs must have hired a psychologist to figure out how to make us play more” or something to that effect.  While I haven’t ever witnessed this first or second hand, having an understanding of how human behavior and interactions with human controlled characters or humanized AI generally works can definitely be beneficial.  In plainer words, just stopping and thinking how you would react to the scenario you have thought out and planned to impose on your player base.  Now ask a few other people, hopefully of varying backgrounds.  Having the ability to pull the proverbial puppet strings of a whole world for a few years really taught me more than I could have ever learned by theories – and thus the exploration of psychology of games.  A quick intro into WHY this interests me is probably warranted – so the first installment (and second part) is an introduction of sorts.

So, I’m going to try to go over this as quickly as possible.  I like to try to weave a good story and all, but there is just so much I can say.  The functional awesomeness of thousands of people running around together in a virtual space, feeling free to interact with each other with little fear of repercussion…

Ok, truly getting ahead of myself.

Back to business.  After finishing up dealing with college stuff and deciding I was going to take a year (forever) off school, I halfheartedly looked around for waitressing jobs while Zliten found this Monster ad saying “Do you want to make money playing video games?”.  He took the job at SCEA and called me the first day at lunch saying that I HAD to come work there, I would love it.  So I applied the next day and a few months later I was starting my first day of work.  Which made my poor, maxed out credit card very very happy.

It is a very interesting psychological situation to thrust 2 females (myself and another new trainee were the only women there) into a workplace with over 100 young, geeky, mostly neanderthal-like guys.  Some went back and forth from looking at us and drooling and muttering “girrrrrrrl” to belittling our video gaming skills.  Some also gave us special treatment – which was good by me.  I got the good assignments and while some boys got laid off and called back when work was scarce, I kept a continuous job for a year, my boss always found me something to work on.

Basically the way I survived there was to act the opposite of the way that anyone should in the workplace.  If they said something gross, I said something grosser.  I laughed at all their dirty jokes and told my own.  If they picked on me, I picked on them back harder.  If they found obscure bugs, I found the MOST obscure bugs (my proudest moment was getting the company’s IPs banned from dalnet on IRC because they thought we were hackers).  If they geeked out, I geeked out harder.  And it worked – I fit in (at least better than if I was playing up the girly girl side of me).  Lesson learned?  Sometimes you have to embrace the native culture to get a good experience out of life.  When in stinky boy land, do as the stinky boys do.  I had MUCH more fun there than if I scoffed at their antics.

Life then was working, or playing EverQuest with people I worked with.  This is a whole ‘nother 31 part series so let’s leave it at that.

Sometime though, you have to graduate from junior high school to high school, and I did just that by moving to SOE’s QA department in 2002.  People were slightly higher-evolved in the primate chain, but not by much.  Since I was working directly with Zliten, I couldn’t really use the same “grosser than gross” tactics, because I didn’t want to ruin my perfect and angelic image (yeah, right) of his beloved in his eyes.  So instead of that, I had to posture myself as more knowledgeable about obscure things about the job (which I was), that I could keep up with everyone playing the games they played even though I did not in fact have a penis.  But mostly, I was just looking to transition to a full time position.  Not having paid time off and benefits chapped my ass.  Learned from that?  Sometimes subtlety has a place in negotiating and business, but sometimes, you just have to repeat over and over exactly what you want in plain language to as many people as you can until someone gives you the answer that you want.

The Customer Service department was offering the stability I needed, and back then it seemed like the only way to move up in the company was to work for CS, so that’s where I went.  Again, psychology and customer service is worthy of a whole ‘nother post or twenty.  Let it suffice to say that if you are patient enough to experiment at it, and rebellious enough to not give a flying fuck about numbers or quotas or minimizing the time you spend on contacts, you can really find out how to get people to do the right thing.  Or at least what you want.  I just remember spending an HOUR debating with one player about why kill stealing was wrong and why the rule was not just “stupid” but actually needed to keep order, and after a while he saw my point and ended up being an outstanding community member.  I could have just gave him a warning, logged off, and eventually banned him when he didn’t stop, but taking the time to talk to him made all the difference.

Then all I wanted to do was move to game design – I took the same approach as I did with attempting to land a full time gig, talking to everyone and anyone who would listen (after getting over the fact that it’s what I had to do, no one was going to hire me just because I might have been good at my current job – heck, I’d actually be less likely, but I digress), submitting design documents, writing, until finally the team I worked for took pity on me (or got tired of reading my submissions) and threw me an apprentice design job, which became the most awesome situation for a psych-type like me.  It was a vast world where I was given a paintbrush to make the flowers whatever color I liked, the whole garden, for that matter.  I like to believe I was a benevolent goddess, always trying to do what was right and good for the world overall.  The experience was a rush, a privilege, a great learning experience, and what kept me up at night.  Many, many long posts to come on my dev exploits.

A special thanks to Zliten’s friend D for getting my brain running this way again, and now that you know where I’m coming from, I look forward to delving deep into theory and grey matter.

1.  When anyone in the whole world could possibly read this page and attach that to me, IRL, there are a lot less things I feel comforatble ranting about.  I miss ranting though!  I think I need to generalize it.  Like ranting about people who park their SUV’s in the small car only parking.

2.  I’ve done some good on the treadmill lately.  I cut my best mile time down to 8:45 and my 3k down to 29:35!  Under 30 mins was a goal for me, and I actually didn’t even feel like running that day.  I guess I decided that if I was going to pry myself off the couch, I might as well make it worth it.

3.  Losing and regaining the same 5 lbs for 2 months is just about torture.  I’d like to think of something positive to say about it, but pretty much it just sucks and is frustrating me.  I think it’s one reason I haven’t been updating lately.  That and life-crazy.  But if I am going to do this blogging thing, I need to do it regularly.  I’ll probably expand more on this in another post.

4.  I got some really awesome shoes!  The picture is the closest thing I can find online to what I got, take away the peep toe and the buckle and skinny out the heel and you got it.  I got two other pairs, which I will photograph someday because I can’t find a damn thing online like them and I got them from a shoe retailer going out of business.

5.  On a related note, it’s now a dangerous world (for my finanaces and shoe closet) since I discovered I am no longer too fat to wear true heels.  To mitigate the damage to my closet, at least, I got rid of 15 pairs of shoes.  About 2/3 of them were falling apart so in the trash they went.  The others were ones that had been rarely or never worn because they were too uncomfortable are set to be donated to the thrift store next trip to plague someone else’s life!  I then organized what I have and my closet looks all purty!  I do have about 35-40 pairs left.  That’s a lot of shoes, but not too many.  You can NEVER have too many, no matter what Zliten says.