Losing Weight; Maintaining Muscle

I posted a few months ago about being pleased to have lost fifty pounds.

Well now I have lost seventy pounds, and have maintained it for about a month. My diet is about the same, with only two intentional changes.

First, I am no longer eating fruit with lunch. I’m just not as hungry for sweets midday.

Second, I am eating more protein after exercising. I am eating larger portions of meat at dinner after swim practice, and either a vanilla yogurt with fruit, or some hard-boiled eggs. For weekend breakfast after running or biking, I am eating more eggs in my omelets, and adding more meat and cheese.

Why? Because my wife always worries about me, and she was concerned that I was losing weight too fast, or as she put it, “you’re just melting away.” My stepson theorized that by doing mostly aerobic instead of strength training, my body may have been burning away muscle mass. I was initially not concerned because I have been lighter than my current weight as an adult. I was only training about an hour and a half each day, and I felt that there must be an anaerobic component to swimming, cycling and running. But, I’ve learned the hard way that I should listen to my stepson, and I am at the age when men often begin to lose significant muscle mass. I also noticed that while I have become much smoother in the water over these last few months, I haven’t yet regained that much speed. And, there were little flaps of skin dangling from my upper arms – whether from losing fat or muscle, I don’t know.

So I did some research and found that the body is constantly burning mostly fat but also constantly breaking down lean tissue, like muscle, tendons, ligaments, etc. The body uses what you eat to replace the fat and lean tissue. The body needs enough calories to replace everything, or you lose weight. The body also needs the right types of foods to replace what it breaks down, or you lose what gets broken down. In particular immediately after exercise, the body will need protein to rebuild muscles. Hence the added protein in my diet after workouts.

I also decided to address my stepson’s concerns with specific strength training. The apartment complex already has a full set of barbells, and a simple lifting machine, but for my pre-practice warmup, I bought a kettlebell. I felt that it would be best to work on my core strength first.

There are any number of youtube videos with specific kettlebell exercises, but that big swing routine felt a bit scary. So I first tried a very safe looking basic routine, Kettlebells 101: How to Get Started + Beginner Kettlebell Workout with Brittany van Schravendijk. I went with her weight recommendation and bought a 16 kilogram Ethos kettlebell.

Basic Kettlebell
-Dead Lift (from between heels).
-Two Arm Clean (to neck height).
-Goblet Squat (hold clean during squat).
-Overhead Press (clean to over head).
-Halo (circle head each direction).

Following Brittany’s most basic advice, I’ve also concentrated on keeping my back flat while sitting at work and while riding my bike. That has helped to relieve some lower back pain.

Later I found a more advanced routine, Enter The Kettlebell, by a proud-to-be-Russian fellow named Pavel Tsatsouline.

Advanced Kettlebell
-Two Hand Swing.
-GetUp.
-One Arm Clean.
-Press.
-Groove.
-Lower the Kettlebell.
-Snatch.

Tsatsouline’s workout is a lot more aggressive, so I have something to work towards.

Bodies and Lifestyles

Men marry a body, women marry a lifestyle.

I ran across the above statement in the comments section of a youtube video, probably the one called How to Fix a Broken Heart. After citing A Tale of Two Brains in a previous article, I had watched the full, five-part Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage, and of course if you watch anything on youtube they will lead you to more of the same. So I watched a lot of TEDx talks, the best of which was, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton.

Again, Laugh Your Way was very amusing, and probably helps more than it hurts. But Mark Gungor is a minister, and in religious fashion he asserted that access to sexual relations should be reserved until after marriage. Why? Because he believes sex is a sort of bargaining chip that women should hold to induce men to commit to marriage. I think a situation where one person only “performs” sex to get marriage demeans both parties.

The most interesting TEDx talk was Maria Røsok’s The Unknown Greatness of the Clitoris, which I would recommend for anyone who either has one, or who wants to be intimate with someone that has one. Spoiler: there’s a lot more to it than that little button-sized glans most old textbooks labeled as clitoris.

Botton is a philosopher and essayist, born in Switzerland, but raised in Britain. Having attended Harrow, Cambridge and Harvard, he is extremely well-read, but uses a disarmingly dry wit to bring things back to earth. Botton writes on a wide range of topics, and even hosted a three-part television series called The Perfect Home, in which he decries the English developers’ penchant for building safe neo-Georgian and neo-Tudor tract houses. Here in America, you could probably substitute neo-Colonial, and perhaps neo-Spanish Colonial in the West.

One of Botton’s premises was that when we seek a love partner, we are unconsciously looking for the familiar. Over the years a lot of people (often girlfriends) have given me pearls of wisdom from magazines, like, ‘men secretly want to marry someone like their mothers,’ or ‘women want to marry someone like their fathers,’ and one girl swore that ‘both men and women want to marry someone just like their mothers.’ According to Botton, as infants and children we become accustomed to certain behaviors as we receive love from our parents, and are attracted to familiar behaviors in a potential mate. That can be very sad, of course, if someone had a dysfunctional childhood, and seeks to find someone just as violent or perverted as dear old Mater or Pater.

But usually these accompanying behaviors are a lot more innocuous. So if your mom or dad was demonstrative, you may be attracted to demonstrative people rather than reserved types. If your mom or dad delivered love with humor, you might look for funny partners. My parents were very smart, and Mom could tell great stories. I was an introvert, and Mom always felt compelled to jolly me out of a bad mood. I know that I was initially attracted to bright, sunny and cheerful women that could do most of the talking. However as I adapted to become less introverted, I would say that I became much less reliant on later mates to cheer me up. Now I’m often the one that makes my wife laugh, though she certainly has her moments.

Botton also believes that the overarching theme of the romantic age – finding our one, true soul-mate – has been good for quite a few industries, but tough on individuals. He believes that instead of searching for the one and only, we should be searching for someone who is good enough. My wife and I had a lot of fun with this concept one morning. I asked her if she felt she had married the Wrong Person, and she replied, ‘No, I found you and you’re Good Enough.’ To which I replied, ‘Honey, you’ve just made me the happiest-enough man in the world!’

Regarding the title, I have found articles that support the idea that men marry primarily for the person while women marry for the lifestyle and children that go along with marriage. I’ve never been one to believe we are from Mars and Venus, though. Although men and women are different, I think both genders hope for a certain life to go along with their partner. I do think that with certain individuals the potential lifestyle, or perhaps the physique, will drive the romantic attachment, though.