Sunday, March 04, 2007

Namsan reboot

After staring at the horror of my gut in that picture over at Charles's site, I decided a few days ago that it was high time to start hiking up Namsan again-- something I haven't done for months, much to my shame (not to mention discomfort). My first night of hiking brought home the fact that I have completely de-trained: I did the easiest route up the mountain, and had to stop twice. The second night was better: no stopping on the way up, though I did huff and puff a great deal.

I'm going to continue with daily hikes, building back up to what I used to be able to do: my ass-kicking route involving about 1100 steps up the mountain. That's going to take a few weeks, but I'm confident that, with some consistency and self-discipline, I'll do fine.

I'm also going to start... I can barely type this... watching what I eat. You have my apologies in advance, because foodblogging might be a bit boring in the upcoming months. But this is necessary. I'm doing all this to be more or less presentable to my family when I see them in June. I have no illusions that I'll have turned into a lean, mean fighting machine by then, but at the very least I'll be less puffy.

I'm not looking forward to hiking Namsan during the day as the weather continues to warm up, but because one of my friends will be hiking along with me, I might have no choice: he's not a vampire like me, and can't hike during the late hours without getting sleepy. This semester, my Tuesday and Thursday classes end around 10AM; I might go do my hikes right after class on those days, then hike alone on the other days.

The point is to reverse the awful process you see below:



The above sequence is 2005, 2005, and a couple weeks ago. Yikes. Not how I want to celebrate the Year of the Pig.



_

5 comments:

Sean said...

Kevin,

Kudo's to you for getting back on track. Last year I lost 12kg. I did 5km on the running machine 4 days a week and didn't eat anything after 8pm.

No diet, I ate whatever I wanted, including complete costco pumpkin pies in 2 days, but made sure I checked the scale daily and didn't eat after 8pm.

It also helped have a goal and writing my target on my office wall so I could see it daily. The final bonus was my wife giving me 1,000,000 won for my personal slush fund if I succeeded.

Again, good luck. Maybe my method will work for you, maybe it won't, maybe you'll think I'm crazy, but I wanted to share.

Anonymous said...

Kevin,

The best of luck to you. My advice: stay away from Charles (his Stromboli post had me drooling). Heh...a little willpower, and some exercise thrown in will do the trick. And as EFL Geek said, no eating after a certain time.

Anonymous said...

It's true! I am your nemesis!

We're going to have to figure out what to do besides eat when we get together... I guess you could always take up drinking.

kwandongbrian said...

I have entered a Simpsons style "Tontine" with some coworkers - no one dies in this one, but the first person to loose 5% of his or her bodywieght wins the cash. We each put a thousand won into the kitty per week so the longer it takes, the more money will be there.

Actually, we haven't started yet, but there is a scale in the Phys Ed building at the university we will weigh in at (this week, I hope).

By the way, I didn't know how to spell tongtine and wasted like ten minutes searching online for the Simpsons episode (Curse of the Flying Hellfish, if you care).

I have to admit that reading about your plans for losing weight and your foodblogging seemed to really be at cross-purposes. I guess we'll see the goofy grin in the photos start to fade as more and more low- and non-fat alternatives start to enter the recipes.

Kevin Kim said...

Brian,

Noooo cross-purposes! As I wrote in my post, foodblogging is likely to be boring for the next little while.

I've seen so few Simpsons episodes that I wouldn't know one from another, so I have no idea what a "tontine" or a "tongtine" is, or even how it's supposed to be pronounced ("tawn(g)-teen"?).

Charles,

I'll probably keep my workouts to myself; if I visit you, it won't be for the express purpose of suffering.

Nomad & EFL Geek,

Thanks for the advice.


Kevin