What a Difference

As of yesterday, I’ve been back in the carpentry business for three months. In that short time, my body has undergone an impressive change.

My weight has gone from 183 pounds to 166 pounds at my lightest. (I weighed 167 pounds today.) I’ve lost 17 pounds in three months, that’s impressive. The important thing is that the weight I’ve lost isn’t just water weight, or lack of food, but real weight loss through body transformation. My fat pockets are burning off.

The pants that I purchased before this all started don’t have a chance of staying up without a belt anymore. I’ve dropped four inches off my waist in three months. My arms and shoulders have developed a nice muscle tone to them, and I’m getting those little muscle-ly things that connect your shoulders to your neck. The woman loves my new “buffness.”

Even my gut and double chin have been shrinking, and those are the hardest to lose. I still have some pounds to take off, but the progress so far is incredible.

The key to the whole thing is that I’ve eaten whatever I wanted the entire time. I didn’t go on a meat only diet, or cut out junk food. I drink beer, eat snack cakes, pound Doritos, and devour fatty meals like it’s going out of style. The difference is that I’ve been active and working off the things I eat.

I think I’ve proven (As much as a statistical test with one observation can prove something) that it isn’t our diet which shoulders the blame for the fattening of America, it’s our lifestyle. Our grandparents and great grandparents spent their days toiling away performing mostly manual work. The few fat people you saw were usually lazy business owners or politicians, hence the term Fat Cat. Our ancestors didn’t gain weight because they worked off the calories that they ate; we’re ignoring starvation and poverty for the time being.

Our current American standard of graduating college to live life trapped in a cubicle (How do you think outside the box when you spend all day trapped in one?) does nothing to improve our waistlines. While an office job brings the luxury of controlled heating and paper cuts as major injuries, it also creates the responsibility of maintaining a regular fitness regimen.

Our bodies require a certain amount of use to stay fit, there’s no way around that. With my blue-collar job, I can knock out fitness and work at the same time. What’s more efficient that that?

Given that it’s been three months, and that I’ve pretty much made my point about weight loss, I’m going to wrap up the project at the end of this week. The website will still be up for people to read, I just won’t be adding daily updates. I may periodically add postings, but not at the schedule I’ve been maintaining up to this point.