back to the discipline

Tomorrow marks the return to dietary discipline. I've got 2 months to get myself down to 95 kg, and while I managed to get my weight down a bit before my last doctor's check-in, I've since ballooned back up to 110 or 111 kg, so this means I need to lose 15-16 kg by Moon Landing Day (i.e., July 20; my doctor's appointment is on July 21). Wish me luck. I have a series of exercises I hope to be doing daily, and my dietary routine is going to involve (1) 72-hour fasts Monday through Wednesday, (2) Newcastle-style eating on Thursday and Friday (3 chicken breasts + Paris Baguette salads or salads from the Salady restaurant up the street), (3) a smoothie on Saturday, and (4) a single keto meal (max. 1500 calories) on Sunday. There may be diet drinks to help keep me sane, but I'm going to try to minimize those in favor of straight water (the best drink) or boricha (barley tea; some brands have 0 grams of carbs and 0 calories) or fizzy water, i.e., Perrier, Trevi, or even Seagram's.

Long walks simply aren't enough for weight loss unless they include lots of hills, so I'll be doing stairs training daily, while wearing a weight vest. I'll be starting easy, with only 5 kg in the vest, and only 0.5 staircases (i.e., to the 14th floor, where I live). After two weeks, it'll be 5 kg and 1 full staircase. Another two weeks: 5 kg and 1.5 staircases. Two weeks of that, and we ratchet up to 10 kg, 1.5 staircases. That gets me to my doctor's appointment. After that, I'll work my way up to 20 kg and 1.5 staircases.

My friend Neil mentioned that he does stair work, too, but his workout involves taking 2 steps at a time. I've been hesitant to do this because of balance and mobility issues, but after my doctor's appointment in July, I want to try Neil's approach at least once, just to see how I'd do. While wearing a weight vest is one way to increase leg strength on the stairs, taking the stairs 2 at a time increases your legs' range of motion and forces your muscles to exert themselves at more oblique angles, thus making you stronger over a wider range of motion. In the end, the most badass thing to do would be to combine the weight-vest routine and the 2-steps-at-a-time routine, but I admit that that's pretty hard to imagine right now.

Other exercises I'll be doing in this regimen will be:

• Squats
• Knee raises
• Planks (despite my frozen shoulder; I think I can bear the pain now)
• Chest-press machine (next-door park)
• Bent-over rows, 10 kg per arm
• Biceps curls, 10 kg per arm
• Shoulder presses, 10 kg per arm (if possible; I'm not sure about this one)
• 1-kilometer jog, 10-min time limit (slow!)

Every 2 weeks, I'll ratchet something up, probably reps. I'll be starting with only 30 squats, but in 2 weeks, that'll be 35, and so on. With knee raises, I'll start with 60 reps (3 sets × 20 reps); I'll probably add 5 reps per set every 2 weeks. Planks will start at 30 seconds and go up 10 seconds per 2 weeks. Chest presses will start at 15 and go up by 5 every 2 weeks. Bent-over rows and biceps curls will start at 3 sets × 7 reps and go up by 1 rep every two weeks. Shoulder presses are probably going to be agony, so I'm not even sure I can do these. I'll try them, though, starting at just 5 reps and increasing by 1 rep every 2 weeks. For my 1-km jog, I'll go from a goal of 10 minutes (which I've already done, actually) to 9 minutes to 8:30. When I was in college, I jogged a 7:40 mile (mile!) once, but I think, at my age, and with my ankles, that's asking a little too much, especially with summer coming. If I do eventually do a kilometer in 8 minutes, with my stroke-y brain, I'll be proud of myself (that's a 7.5-kph pace... slow, but faster than my current 4.8-kph walk).

Some of the above exercises are meant to be rudimentary, and they'll give way to other, more difficult exercises. For example, the chest-press machine will give way to doing pushups on my knees, and that will eventually give way to doing full-on pushups (I hope, shoulder permitting). Biceps curls and bent-over rows will probably give way to incline pullups, then negative chinups, then full-on pullups (that's a long way off—and again, shoulder permitting). I wish our park actually had one of those pullup machines so I could start at an easy weight. I saw such machines on the walk along the Joongnang-cheon toward Uijeongbu, but I'm not going to travel across town every night just to use those machines.

I may eventually begin adding exercises to the above routine as well—resistance-band work, for example, and jump rope (which I haven't done in a while since I hurt my back last time). We'll see how that goes and what I can plausibly add over the coming months.

Anyway, by doing this simple starter routine every day, I ought to begin putting on a bit of muscle, which will increase my basal metabolic rate and have me burning more calories even when all I'm doing is sitting still. That, in turn, will help me start to shed weight, and shedding weight will positively affect my blood pressure. I don't expect to look like a weightlifter by July, but maybe I'll look distinctly slimmer by then, and I might look even better by the summer of 2023. Gotta start somewhere.

Speaking of "starting somewhere," with summer almost here, I need to take advantage of the cool nights to do my 60K crazy walk to Yangpyeong, so I'm planning to do that this coming weekend. I'll start Friday evening, probably leaving straight from work around 6:30 or 7 p.m. and arriving in Yangpyeong the following day by about noon. That's my hope, anyway. I'll get the bulk of the walk done at night, but I'll still have to endure a few hours of sunlight Saturday morning. Still, it'll be a good walk, I think. I normally do that walk in February, when the weather is a lot cooler, but I missed my February window for whatever reason, and I need to get this walk in before it's too hot even at night.

Oh, yeah—one last thing: the routine described above will be over and above the walks I'll still be doing: 140-minute walks MWF, 90-minute walks TR, and at least 18K walks on Saturday, with Sunday as my day of rest. Gonna be an interesting 50-some days.