philph
Mon, December 15th, 2008, 10:10 PM
I'm now several months into a difficult and frustrating period of my life.
To cut a long story short, like all too many people I've been hit by the current economic situation. I'm now making some changes in my business that will give me a chance to keep my house, livelihood and marriage. This requires a lot of time and effort, and my general routine is as follows:
Work at computer for 60 to 62 hours, with breaks to use the bathroom or get food and drink.
Sleep every 3rd night, for 8 to 10 hours.
Sometimes (maybe one day in every week or two), part of the work hours involves travelling to locations to do my photo and video shoots, and on those occasions usually I'm standing up for much of the shoot, which is the nearest thing at the moment to not being totally sedentary.
The larger part of my diet (calories-wise) is cheese and nuts. When I can, I eat meat as well (especially my colleague's superb home-made Biltong), and usually manage to get salmon at least once a week. I also eat a little fruit, mainly clementines (which are like miniature seedless oranges) and occasionally apples.
Once in a while I eat eggs: there is a restaurant near me where, by experiment, I've discovered they charge the same for an omelette no matter how many eggs are in it (presumably because the person taking the payment has never thought of the possibility that an omelette contained multiple eggs). They also use real butter, which suits me well. I ordered some protein powder (= the cheapest protein source in the world, per gram of protein), but there is a delay with my order and I've been without that for a while now.
During this time, training is impossible. Apart from a lunchtime visit from my parents last week, writing this message is my first structured period outside of work, sleep, eating and (occasional) bathing for quite a while. But sharing my experiences always helps.
Not surprisingly, this situation has not done wonders for my physical condition. I won't go into details about muscle loss, as I don't want to dwell pointlessly on things that can't be helped. I miss the way my body was when I was training. But in my perspective this is only a reminder to myself about how happy I'll be when I've fixed my problems and can train again.
One interesting thing is that regardless of the dramatic reduction in physical activity, my weight has remained constant (after a brief increase that then reversed itself). I'm the same weight that I've been for a year now, through times of training once a day, twice a day, sitting on my arse all day; the one thing activity doesn't affect is overall body weight. This is what I expected, and supports my earlier suspicion that (in the absense of any major eating disorder or "kryptonite" foods in your diet, etc) the body's regulatory system aims for a specific total weight, rathe rthan a specific fat mass (as people commonly think).
You, of course, can influence how much of this weight is muscle and fat. So if your body insists you're going to weigh 220 lb at a height of 6 foot, you might not be able to stop becoming 220lb *in the end*, but you can be a damn super lean and metabolically HEALTHY 200lb, or you can be a fat slob of 220lb. Your body will regard both cases as "equilibrium".
To cut a long story short, like all too many people I've been hit by the current economic situation. I'm now making some changes in my business that will give me a chance to keep my house, livelihood and marriage. This requires a lot of time and effort, and my general routine is as follows:
Work at computer for 60 to 62 hours, with breaks to use the bathroom or get food and drink.
Sleep every 3rd night, for 8 to 10 hours.
Sometimes (maybe one day in every week or two), part of the work hours involves travelling to locations to do my photo and video shoots, and on those occasions usually I'm standing up for much of the shoot, which is the nearest thing at the moment to not being totally sedentary.
The larger part of my diet (calories-wise) is cheese and nuts. When I can, I eat meat as well (especially my colleague's superb home-made Biltong), and usually manage to get salmon at least once a week. I also eat a little fruit, mainly clementines (which are like miniature seedless oranges) and occasionally apples.
Once in a while I eat eggs: there is a restaurant near me where, by experiment, I've discovered they charge the same for an omelette no matter how many eggs are in it (presumably because the person taking the payment has never thought of the possibility that an omelette contained multiple eggs). They also use real butter, which suits me well. I ordered some protein powder (= the cheapest protein source in the world, per gram of protein), but there is a delay with my order and I've been without that for a while now.
During this time, training is impossible. Apart from a lunchtime visit from my parents last week, writing this message is my first structured period outside of work, sleep, eating and (occasional) bathing for quite a while. But sharing my experiences always helps.
Not surprisingly, this situation has not done wonders for my physical condition. I won't go into details about muscle loss, as I don't want to dwell pointlessly on things that can't be helped. I miss the way my body was when I was training. But in my perspective this is only a reminder to myself about how happy I'll be when I've fixed my problems and can train again.
One interesting thing is that regardless of the dramatic reduction in physical activity, my weight has remained constant (after a brief increase that then reversed itself). I'm the same weight that I've been for a year now, through times of training once a day, twice a day, sitting on my arse all day; the one thing activity doesn't affect is overall body weight. This is what I expected, and supports my earlier suspicion that (in the absense of any major eating disorder or "kryptonite" foods in your diet, etc) the body's regulatory system aims for a specific total weight, rathe rthan a specific fat mass (as people commonly think).
You, of course, can influence how much of this weight is muscle and fat. So if your body insists you're going to weigh 220 lb at a height of 6 foot, you might not be able to stop becoming 220lb *in the end*, but you can be a damn super lean and metabolically HEALTHY 200lb, or you can be a fat slob of 220lb. Your body will regard both cases as "equilibrium".