Tag: exercise

Another Weird Morning

I wrote about some stomach weirdness yesterday. I am pretty sure I know what it was, and it was not gastric bypass related. I am not going to say specifically because it goes big time into TMI territory. Suffice to say it happened again today and it has thrown off my whole daily routine.

I got up, felt a little off, but started my day as normal. I was trying to drink a water bottle while doing my daily exercise but after about 10 minutes and 12 ounces of water I was hit with a mild case of The Foamies. Something was trying to get into my stomach but was having trouble along the route and must have gotten stuck. I didn’t feel like anything was stuck, but I got into saliva over-production mode and had to stop exercising and take care of it. It was involved enough that I had to go upstairs and ride it out for a while.

Once I felt better I ate breakfast, which I never do before I finish my exercise for the day. At that point, the whole morning workflow is down the toilet. I still had 35 minutes of exercise left to do so I restarted. I ended up doing the whole daily goal instead of just finishing the first attempt. Due to that I managed to hit all of my Apple Watch activity goals for the day. Well, not the 12 stand-hours goal, but the exercise and move (calorie) goals. That’s nice.

Now that I’m punched into work for the day I think I am back on schedule. I just hate it when the routine goes south like this, even a little bit. I feel pretty normal now. Whatever it was seems to have passed. I felt that way yesterday too and then it came back before lunch. Let’s see how things progress today.

Good luck, Robbie.

Up and Unmotivated

It’s an office day today. I’m up early to start my exercising and to get some shite* done and here I am typing in this completely useless blog post.

Motivation level = Zero.

Hey! I am trying to pick off another episode of Torchwood because I am trying to finish off the show (even though I don’t exactly love it) and here is season three episode one and Peter Capaldi is in it! Doctor Who Number 12’s actor in his second of two Doctor Who related roles from before he was actually cast as The Doctor. Fascinating.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. The morning routine. Let’s start my exercising and maybe get some shite done before I have to drive in to work.

*Back in the 1980’s I started obsessively reading the novels and short stories written by Clive Barker. Mr. Barker, in at least one of his works, used the word “shite”. I had never heard or read that word before. Mr. Barker is from Liverpool. Is shite a Liverpudlian thing? I don’t know. I do know that I am currently a little more than half way through the audio book version of Weaveworld and hearing the word shite get used again is making me feel nostalgic for the old days of language discovery and shite.

Exercise is Fun?

Daily writing prompt
What’s the most fun way to exercise?
View all responses

Wait a tick here… you put the word “fun” into the same sentence as “exercise”? That does not compute. Exercise is fun in the same way that breaking bones is fun. In the same way that surgery without anesthetic is fun. Am I being over dramatic? Yes, of course I am. Does that make my prior statements false? Absolutely not.

I do 45 minutes of exercise each day at a minimum. I jog (pronounced “yog”*) in place for what my Apple Watch tells me is about 10 kilometers worth of trotting steps and then I stop. As the day goes on I will do a little more jogging (yogging) in place to try to get my daily calorie count higher and higher. Sometimes I’ll walk in place while doing other things. I just picked up one of those stair stepper things too in the hopes that I’ll use that for at least a few minutes each day. I have an exercise bike and I look at it every day, but I haven’t been able to make it part of the daily routine. I want to move it next to my work from home desk in the hopes that I will be inspired to jump onto it for a few minutes a day. We’ll see.

Is any of that fun? No. Not even a little bit.

I guess there are some things that are fun to do that also just happen to be exercise. Walks in the woods. Visits to theme parks. Stuff like that. Want to know one super fun thing that shouldn’t really be thought of as exercise but always gets my heart rate up nice and high and works up a sweat and leaves me worn out like I’d had a major workout? Band practices. Yes, you read that right. I’m not the jumping around rock and roller type, but it does work as an aerobic workout somehow.

I guess what I am trying to say is that exercise in and of itself is never fun for me, but some things that are fun sort of double as exercise? Yeah, that’s the ticket.

*I make the “pronounced yogging” joke on this page all the time. I stole that from a movie. If you aren’t familiar with it, go watch Anchorman with Will Ferrell (and about 100 other A-list comedy celebrities). It’s one tiny throw away line that bares no significance for the rest of the movie, but it’s a funny movie so it’s worth a watch.

Long Day Alert

Wow… Wednesday… am I right or am I right?

It’s a work-in-the-office day. I woke up nice and early, though about half an hour later than I was hoping. I had a lot of meetings on my work calendar today, the first of them being very early in the day. I wanted to make sure I could get through my whole morning routine, including 45 minutes of jogging (pronounced yogging) in place and making lunch and packing emergency protein snacks and all of that stuff while still leaving enough time for me to get to work a little early.

Unfortunately when I got out of bed I saw that we got a dusting of snow overnight. Not a lot, but enough to cover everything and guarantee a terrible morning commute. I was hoping to get out onto the road by 7:15. I made it by 7:20, but I had to cut my exercise in half to pull off that feat. That means I am going to have to yog tonight when I get home and I really do not want to do that. I wasn’t late to work, but it did take me an hour and a half to drive the 40 miles. 

Now that it’s about 2:30 in the afternoon, I have survived two big meetings and I have a third coming up in half an hour. I’m stressing out, big time, but once I get through today I will not have to worry about this sort of thing for a while and I am happy about that idea.

Tomorrow and Friday I will be working from home. I am optimistic that I will be able to get a lot of music done before work both days. Fingers crossed for some guitar playing and car vocals and fun stuff like that. I’m also thinking it would be nice to mix a song or two over the weekend. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

For now though, I am really tired and can’t wait to get through my next meeting so that I can relax a little. Maybe if I can get my exercise finished right after dinner tonight I might be able to go to bed early and enjoy not having to stress over a work project for the first time in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed, right?

Two Years Ago Today

Two years ago today I went to the weight loss clinic for the first time. It was not for an actual appointment of any kind, it was just so they could take my vitals and then have the first appointment later via Zoom.

The vitals they took included my weight. It stands as the heaviest I’ve ever been. Well… I may have gained a little weight between that day and the first actual appointment, which was when they told me to make some dietary changes in order to lose a little weight ahead of my actual weight loss surgery, but it is the heaviest weight I’ve ever actually recorded.

On January 19, 2022 I weighed 452 pounds.

Today? Two years and one gastric bypass surgery later? I stepped on the scale this morning and weighed 213.2 pounds. That’s a difference of 238.8 pounds.

Holy shit.

Granted, I stepped on the scale three days ago and I weighed 209 pounds, so it’s like the theme from The Facts of Life: You take the good, you take the bad. Dig? Just kidding. This is freakin’ amazing. 238 pounds in two years. The last time I actually posted a weigh in was a couple of months ago (November 4, 2023) and I am down about two and a half pounds since then. I call that maintaining, which at this point in the process is very much my goal.

Happy Two-Years-Since-The-First-Check-In day. Celebrate good times, come on!

To Do List for Tonight

I was hoping my to do list for tonight would include hanging out with my wife and then going to sleep, but it’s turning out to be a little more involved than that.

  • Approximately 90 more minutes of work
  • Top off the cat’s food bowl
  • Cook dinner
  • Eat dinner while hanging out with my wife in front of the tube
  • Shovel the 4-5 inches of snow we got today off of the drive way so that I can drive to the office tomorrow
  • Bring the trash barrel out to the street once there is a path shoveled to get it there
  • Finish today’s exercise and close the last ring in the Apple Watch’s activity app
  • Pack up my work laptop along with a bunch of things to put onto my new desk, which officially becomes my desk tomorrow
  • Keel over from exhaustion and sleep

How do I type the word, “yikes” in such a way that it accurately demonstrates how I am feeling as we approach the tail end of the work day on this gloomy Tuesday?

Yikes!

Favorite Physical Activities

Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?
View all responses

You know there is one physical activity… the real, honest answer for nearly all of us… you know… when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…

Now that that is out of the way, what is my second choice? There are two that come to mind. One is going to seem obvious if you read the previous post. The other is a little bit of out of the box thinking.

First, I like to go for walks. Imagine driving into the city with my beloved wife and a camera or two, then just picking a neighborhood and walking around while enjoying the company and the sights, and snapping off a ton of pictures that I can post to this page after we get home. That’s a quality piece of physical activity right there. The setting can be swapped out for other places. For example, instead of walking around Boston we could walk around a Disney World theme park. Perfect.

My second, less conventional idea for a favorite physical activity? Band practice. Yeah, you read that right. There’s no running around or anything like that, but band practice generally results in a bumped up heart rate and working up a serious sweat. You heard it here first. Band practice is cardio, babie. Rock and Roll.

Both of those are much more fun than the exercise I did just before I wrote this post. I ran in place for 45 minutes. My legs feel like rubber. I’m toast. I literally sit down and post something after my morning faux jog (pronounced “yog”, with a soft “j”) just to give myself some time to recover. That’s what I do for exercise every day, but it sure as hell ain’t my fav.