Day 28: Meat Puppets

I'm a child of the '90s. My heyday was the age of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and especially Nirvana. I was a big Nirvana fan. I did the whole flannel/wallet on a chain/long unruly hair thing. I even dyed my hair fuscia for a while (you can see the picture on my Facebook page, but I'll spare you the image here; suffice it to say, I looked awesome). I also fancied myself pretty deep at the time, and I ate up the nonsensical lyrics of the grunge scene.

What does this have to do with my health journey, you ask? Well, I'll tell you. There was a band at that time called the Meat Puppets. I was never a fan myself, but they had a song called "Plateau" that is relevant for today's discussion, and which was covered memorably by Kurt and the boys in their fantastic appearance on MTV's "Unplugged."

Yes, as you may have guessed, I'm on a bit of a plateau. This week I gained 0.01 Jesses. It's not wholly unexpected, as it often happens, when I embark on an plan to lose weight, that I gain around the three- to four-week mark. I guess that's the way it goes. It's rather annoying, though, since I fastidiously tracked what I ate this week, and I ate good stuff (including some rather good homemade vegetarian soups), and I worked out at least four times.

So in an effort to salve my bruised ego, I will draw some inspiration by interpreting the Meat Puppets' memorable anthem. So here we go.

"Many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau / Some belong to strangers, some to folks you know"

You know what? Lots of people have been in this place before. We're all making an effort to better ourselves, and we all end up here sooner or later. I'm in good company.

"Holy Ghosts and talk show hosts are planted in the sand / To beautify the foothills and shake the many hands"

Hm ... I guess, you'll meet a lot of people on the journey. Along the way, you might start feeling so good that you'll join some of those people in trying new things, like community service or volunteering for a political campaign.

"Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about birds"

Striving toward a goal is always a chance to clean up ourselves, and our lives — and you just might learn something while you're at it.

"You see a lot up there, but don't be scared / Who needs action when you've got words?"

Change can be scary! Your vantage point will be completely different, because you'll be different. And you'll be wiser, apt to look and consider before you leap.

Thanks, Meat Puppets. You gave me a deep-sounding, bizarre song to pretend to play on my guitar while scaring girls. And now I've learned a little about myself.

Day 21: Pood

Weigh-in day. This week I'm down 0.03 Jesses, for a grand total of 0.31 Jesses. Yes, I've lost nearly a third of a whole person. Not a very big person, but still.

I did my bodyweight/kettlebell workout today, and I feel great. So allow me to rhapsodize a bit on the virtues of the kettlebell.

I've done a lot of weightlifting in my days. I've done higher reps and lower reps, lots of sets and not so many sets, this exercise split and that exercise split. Mostly what I've done over the past few years is heavier weights and lower reps. When I stick with it, I get good results; I can gain strength pretty quickly.

I have felt more and more over the years, though, that what I want is not to be strong, it's to be useful. I want to be able to do things in real life, not just in the gym. And while I can gain strength lifting regular weights, it's so strict and regimented that it never really made feel that I was gaining that usefulness.

So I've done some fooling around with designing bizarre exercises in hopes of mimicking real-life actions. They never really worked out that well, and I often felt like I was a millimeter away from injuring myself.

Sometime last year a read an article in Men's Health about the way that the Army is revamping its fitness program. They're going away from just running, push-ups and sit-ups to more functional exercises to prepare soldiers for the battlefield. The new program has six principles:

1. Train movements, such as pushing, pulling, planking, stepping, and squatting, rather than muscles.
2. Train to your side and three-quarter view, not just to the space in front of you.
3. Train on two feet.
4. Learn to control your body weight in a full range of motion, with good form, before adding loads.
5. Train speed.
6. Train the reduction of force — the ability to land and catch and absorb force and decelerate — as often as you train the production of force.

These ideas really appealed to me, so I've begun doing bodyweight exercises and more explosive-type stuff than I'd done before. I'd never really done much bodyweight stuff, 'cause I figured that's not really working. I mean, I carry my body around all day. But it really is a workout. So I added that to my kettlebell stuff.

Ah, the kettlebell. If you've never seen one, I can tell you that it's basically like a cannonball with a handle attached. The thing that makes it cool is that the weight is not centered in your hand, as it is with barbells and dumbbells, so the center of gravity shifts as you swing it around, causing your body (and pretty much your whole body) to adapt. As a result, you get a workout that trains you for strength (if not size, which I don't really care about) as well as cardiovascular fitness and endurance. Good stuff.

Now that I've been training with a kettlebell for a while, it's time to move up. I have a 20-pound kettlebell, but I plan to get a 35-pound one. See, kettlebells were invented by Russian weightlifters, and the standard weight was called a pood (an old Russian unit of weight), which is about 16 kilograms or 35 pounds. So I'm going after it. I'm sure I'll be jacked and lifting cars off of old ladies in no time.