matthearn.com

Haha! You thought I wouldn’t post again for like 3 years, didn’t you? You were wrong! Although to be honest I think the odds on two posts in one week on this blog were 75:1 when I checked with my bookie yesterday afternoon (his name is Hmayek, he is from Armenia, he loves taking NBA bets, and you really really REALLY do not want to get to know him or his friends if there is any way you can possibly avoid it).

This will be the first post in the extremely long and unpredictable series tentatively entitled “How Matt Hearn Became Marginally Less Fat And A Little Bit More Muscular (But Let’s Be Real, It’s An Ongoing Process And Hearn Is Still Pushing Two-Fitty)”. It starts thusly:

In late September of last year, after a summer of trying to keep the fat at bay by running incessantly in my Vibram Five Fingers but still eating whatever I wanted, I was somewhere around 260 pounds, and my feet and shins were essentially destroyed by running in un-cushioned shoes. I had to completely stop running and wait for my feet to heal up, occasionally getting out on my bike a little but mostly sitting on my butt eating 4000 calories a day and wondering why I had so much trouble getting back to my fighting weight.

Then my good buddy Brian Smith sent me a link to the TNT Diet book, produced by Men’s Health. I flipped through the sample sections and said “Wow, this makes sense.” The book, among its other qualities, alerted me to fact that losing weight was a grand idea, but dudes like Daniel Craig aren’t just skinny, but muscular.

Duh.

I immediately grabbed a copy of the book off Amazon (for about $5, which I guess isn’t a very good sign). The TNT “Diet” is essentially a low-carb one, although it adds in a bunch of stuff about carb timing and insulin and stuff that was largely meaningless to me because unless you’re within about 15 pounds of your ideal weight you should be doing “Plan A,” which is: eat from this approved list of foods that don’t contain carbs. I’ve had great success on low-carb diets in the past (I dropped about 40 pounds in 2004 doing one), so I said let’s knock this out for a few months and see whatup.

The more important thing I learned in the TNT book was some basic muscle-building, however. Weightlifting, using a variety of techniques, to build muscle. The book says don’t even bother with cardio (although it mentions some High-Intensity stuff to do if you are insistent upon it). None of this was particularly revolutionary, I’d lifted weights a little before, but what I’d never done was focus on diet and exercise AT THE SAME TIME. Either I was running and lifting and going nuts but eating like a pig, and therefore seeing no fat loss, or I was eating well but doing no exercise so I would lose some fat (and muscle) and then watch it come roaring back as soon as I stopped “dieting.”

I specifically remember the date that I started the diet and exercise plan: October 4th. I remember this because my boy Josh got married on the 2nd, and the food we ate that weekend was unbelievable and rich. I probably gained 3 pounds just from red wine. That Monday morning, I weighed myself and the scale reported 265 (and cried out for a moment when I first stepped on it). Yeah, it was time to fix this.

The diet was a breeze, I’d low-carbed before. I loaded up on meat and cheese, avoided bread and potatoes, and dropped 5-6 pounds in a week, the usual water loss. The workouts were fun and interesting, with the exception of the “Dynamic Warmup,” which I did religiously, and which consists of jumping jacks, arm circles, lunges, various other calisthenics, finishing up with something called “groiners” which are about as enjoyable as they sound. The first workout contained “static lunges,” “incline dumbbell bench presses,” “hip extensions,” “seated rows to neck,” and finished up with the “prone cobra,” in which you lie on your belly and left your head and feet off the floor for 60 seconds, tightening the back muscles. The workouts switch up fairly frequently to keep you from getting bored, with “goblet squats” and “planks” and things, and the rep and set counts change as well as you get stronger. I was losing a little weight every week, mostly enjoying the routines, and hoping I’d be looking like Dwyane Wade by spring.

Then, while looking for more info on the diet and exercises, I stumbled across the Men’s Health Forums, and discovered a whole new world of exercise and diet advice, as well as some of the most outrageous douchebags ever to operate a computer, which is where the story will continue next time.

Newsflash: I am a HUGE nerd. Like, staggering. Wait, let’s back up.

A few weeks ago, Brian revealed to me that he had ordered a new diet book, the TNT Diet, off of eBay for like $4. I found it on Amazon for like $6 (the price appears to have gone up), and since I have free Prime 2-day shipping, I had it in, well, two days; Brian’s took longer, eBay being what it is.

The book is basically a low-carb diet (specifically high fat, and we all love fat, right?), along with a detailed program of weight-lifting to build muscle. I’ve had good luck with low-carb diets in the past, so I figured this would be a fantastic way to get back under 18 stone and maybe develop those wicked arms and shoulders that drive the ladies crazy.

This is where the nerdiness comes in. While reading up on TNT, I discovered that Men’s Health (the publisher of the diet book) maintains a kickass forum for asking questions and chatting with other dieters, sharing your knowledge and goals and successes. From this, I learned all kinds of completely awesome things, like how ideally when trying to build muscle you should take in 1 gram of protein for each pound of “lean muscle mass” (which technically includes bone and water, anything in your body that’s not fat), and on the diet you want to try and stick to a 60/30/10 ratio of fat to protein to carbohydrates.

So during the roughly 30 minutes a day when I’m not at work or being bossed around by my family, I’ve been making nifty little spreadsheets to show me how many calories I need to take in, how much protein powder I should eat every day, fantastic stuff. I’ve even ordered a set of calipers and tape measure to reasonably-accurately calculate my actual fat percentage, which led me to some interesting data.

I currently weigh 254 pounds, and am roughly 6’3″, depending on time of day. My best guess, based on a number of online fat percentage calculators, is that I’m probably about 30% fat, and no more than 32%. (I’ll know more Friday night after my kit arrives.) If I’m 32% fat, that means I’m 68% muscle/bone/water, or about 172 pounds. Now, according to Wikipedia, if I get myself down to 14% fat, I would be very, very fit, almost “professional athlete” fit. Assuming that I gain no muscle (and I intend to, if possible), 14% fat on top of 172 pounds of muscle is 200 pounds. Someone who is 6’3″ and 200 pounds has a Body Mass Index of exactly 25, which is still technically in the “overweight” category. How crazy is that? Even if I was as fit as I had ever been in my entire life, a doctor might look at my BMI and tell me to lose a few pounds.

Sorry, are you asleep? My bad. I enjoy this stuff. See also: Nerd, Matt Hearn is a.

I started the diet at 257, so in about 10 days I’ve lost 3 pounds. Here’s hoping I can keep it up. I haven’t seen my wang in months.

Happy belated New Year! Did you make a resolution? Jonah Lehrer bets it falls apart!

Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it’s an extremely limited mental resource.

Given its limitations, New Year’s resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the entire year.

My own resolutions are unsurprising: I need to lose a whole bunch of weight, and I want to have a complete early draft of a first novel. I’m scared that the first resolution will be easier, given that I still don’t know what I want to write about.

I’m a little leery of setting an actual “weight” goal, because I intend to facilitate slenderization via dieting, a little cardio, and a whole lot of muscle-building. It would be foolish to say “I want to weigh 200 pounds” if I get myself crazy ripped and still weigh 235. I think what I’m going to do is set a goal of having a waist measurement the same as my inseam (34), which is a good long way off. I’m around 40 inches around now, so frankly if I get down to 36 I’ll be pleased as punch.

What are your resolutions? To be more awesome?

The New Yorker explores why we’re mostly fatties. The topic of “Supersizing” is particularly interesting:

In the early nineteen-sixties, a man named David Wallerstein was running a chain of movie theatres in the Midwest and wondering how to boost popcorn sales. Wallerstein had already tried matinée pricing and two-for-one specials, but to no avail. According to Greg Critser, the author of “Fat Land” (2003), one night the answer came to him: jumbo-sized boxes. Once Wallerstein introduced the bigger boxes, popcorn sales at his theatres soared, and so did those of another high-margin item, soda.

A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was serving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a similar problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft drink or a bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded to buy more? Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted skeptically by the company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that if people wanted more fries they could always order a second bag.

“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let himself be convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing.

On the subject of overeating and large portions, James Joyner writes (via Andrew’s guest blogger Patrick Appel):

…[O]ne of the things that has long occurred to me about restaurant dining is that, because every customer must be served the same portion size (within allowances for human error) they’re naturally going to provide huge amounts of food. If you serve a 275 pound man an amount of food that would be appropriate for a 125 pound woman, he’s going to still be hungry at the end of his meal and therefore a dissatisfied customer. Because the marginal cost of additional food (especially pasta, potatoes, and the like) is negligible, it’s just good business to pile it on. Naturally, everyone else will be given too much to eat and all but the most disciplined will overeat.

It might be “natural,” but it’s still stupid. I myself weigh roughly 250 pounds, and if I go to a restaurant and am very, very hungry, I’ve been known to order and eat two meals; they arrive at the same time and I shovel them both in at the same time, usually in under 10 minutes.

At higher class restaurants, the servings are smaller, but because they usually have more courses (appetizer, salad, meal, dessert), which are spaced out over the course of over an hour, I find that I’m just as satisfied having eaten less, of higher quality food.

Big chain restaurants can argue that they’re just offering what Americans want, but that’s a cop-out. Drug dealers are only meeting a demand as well. I’m not saying we need to enact legislation to limit how much food chefs can put on a plate, and I’m certainly not saying “if it weren’t for McDonald’s I’d be totally skinny,” but big chain restaurants who focus on stuffing food into their patrons need to stop dodging their share of the blame for the obesity epidemic.

I’ve lifted weights twice in the last 5 days, and here is what I can report on the subject: I don’t really care for it. You know? It frickin’ hurts, is why. I begin to see why people do steroids and HGH; I’m going to be crippled for days.

Hey, wait a second. What are the symptoms of steroid use?

• Macrocephaly (large head): already got that. My head’s a size 8+. (The plus means my head is probably bigger than an 8, but I’ve never found a hat larger than size 8 to test this theory. I just wear an 8, if I can find it, and live with the headache.)


• Shrunken testicles: Mine appear to be normal, but their functionality is highly suspect.


• Back acne: I have zits in a variety of disgusting places. (Something I’m sure you’re excited to know.) Check.


• ‘Roid rage: as the closet door in my basement can attest, I am capable of staggering fits of anger when I get frustrating.


• Sudden massive, rippling muscles: not yet.

If I’ve got all the symptoms, why don’t I just start doing the drugs? Get me Victor Conte, stat!

On a more positive note, I do enjoy the first few hours after lifting, when each of my biceps muscles are the size of a Prius. So I’ve got that going for me.

Gained a pound since yesterday. I guess that’s the Good Sweet Lord Crying Baby Jesus burning me for enjoying a single beer last night, despite finishing the day 300 calories under my 2-pounds-a-week rate. (By which I mean: in order for a 265 pound man to lose 2 pounds in a week, I need to take in approximately 2231 calories per day; yesterday I ate 2235, but also burned about 323 calories exercising.) Still, I’ve been good so far today, including a long walk over lunch, and I’ve done a little research at work into tasty recipes with minimal calories.

I came across this one, from Alton Brown: Vegetable Curry. Some calculation seems to indicate it has less than 700 calories in the entire recipe, which purports to contain two normal-human servings. Obviously I’ll just eat the entire thing in one sitting and then look around for more, just like I do with bacon. Still, it starts with a pound of frozen veggies, yogurt, a little vegetable oil, and that’s about it from a calorie perspective. It calls for about thumbnail-scoop of sugar and a bit of cornstarch, not enough to greatly affect the diety-awesomeness. The end result is probably about a pound of deliciousness! I’m super-excited to try and make it.

Meanwhile, my father’s day present has arrived a few weeks early: a basketball hoop! I’m hoping to

1. Lose a little weight slammin’ and jammin’ in the driveway


2. Teach Charles an unstoppable pull-up jumper


3. Try not to injure myself.

I intend to assemble it this weekend; if you are ready to go one-on-one against the unstoppable basketball force that is The Hearn, you just let me know, player. And prepare to be sweated on. (I mean that quite literally.)

I lost 6 pounds in one day! Of course, it was water-weight, whatever that is, so I still don’t fit properly into pants. Still, if you ever find yourself needing to lose 2% of your body mass in 24 hours, here is how you do it:

• 0630 – Wake up and step on the scale. Realize that you have become a small, lesser-fang’d walrus. Curse under your breath, and vow to fix the problem.


• 0800 – Eat your first “meal” of the day: a bagel with a small amount of butter. Fill your water bottle.


• 0900 – Fill your water bottle again. (I should probably point out that you must drink the water, not just pour it out before refilling it.)


• 1000 – Eat a banana. Look longingly at your boss’s bag of candy, but will yourself to merely fill your water bottle again, and maybe cry a little inside.


• 1130 – Go to the cafeteria for a salad; discover that they have “curry cauliflower,” which consists of, get ready for this: cauliflower with curry powder on it. Ice-cold. Purchase a pint of it and inhale it in under 45 seconds, along with a 20oz Diet Coke.


• 1200 – Go for an hour-long walk outside in the sweltering weather, get a sunburn, and saturate your clothing with disgusting sweat.


• 1300-1500 – Eat a large garden salad consisting of a crapload of vegetables, one egg, and a drizzle of olive oil and vinegar.


• 1500 – Eat a cheese stick. It’s the heaviest thing to hit your stomach in hours, and will feel like a moist brick.


• 1600 – Reward yourself with exactly 16 wheat thin crackers. It will be the worst reward since Keyser Soze thanked Dean Keaton for his help by shooting him in the face.


• 1700 – Leave work, pick up your offspring. He will demand that you go to “Red Robin.” Mutter a few lesser oaths.


• 1800 – Go to Red Robin. Get a California Chicken “Burger” with fries, totalling approximately 1400 calories. Eat half of the sandwich, and half the fries. Get really snippy because your stomach is digesting itself.


• 2100 – Eat the remainder of the sandwich and fries.


• 0000 – Go to bed, hungry as if you hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Do as many pushups as you can manage (11) to try and get your mind off of the debilitating lust for food. (Fail.)

That’s all you have to do! Warning: it really sucks.

Yesterday was the last day of church choir for the summer, so we had to make sure to dress up in our official finery, including khaki slacks and a blazer. The blazer was removed for the rehearsal and service, but we all put on our heavy polyester cassocks, which caused a great deal of sweat to build up in…um…The Area. If you catch my drift. The end result was that I sat down on the pew, and attempted to stretch my legs a bit, but the sweat caused the pantlegs to stick to my thighs, and I tore a big ol’ hole in my crotch.

I’d like to say this is an uncommon event, but no, it happens to me about once a month.

Before the afternoon service, I ran to the mall and bought new pants that better fit my prodigious bulk, but it was clear: I needed to lose some weight. I didn’t know how bad it had gotten until I weighed myself on my digital scale this morning and saw a number I’d never seen it display before: 271. This is roughly 10 pounds heavier than my last peak, in early 2004.

Unacceptable.

So far today, I’ve eaten a bagel, a banana, and about a pint of cauliflower (liberally coated with curry powder). Additionally, I went out over lunch and walked a solid hour at a “brisk pace,” probably totalling over three miles, and producing roughly a gallon of crotch sweat that has me concerned about the status of my current pants. (I’m sitting very gingerly and resisting the temptation to stretch my legs.)

I hate getting old.

From the everlasting joy that is This Is Why You’re Fat, I bring you: the deep-fried cheeseburger on a stick. Oh heck yes: