So what is my deal? Meh; I don’t know. I’ve been busy doing other things lately, and my blog has been pushed into a dusty corner. I’ve been busy with language learning, where my list of target languages has grown rather large – perhaps unbearably large. As of right now, I’m actively studying German, Russian, French, and Spanish. Oh, and I have materials on the way for Dutch, as it seems like a pretty easy target knowing English and German.

I’ve been gardening a bit (gardening, great gods), and quite enjoying it. Not only is it relaxing, the fruits of it shall be wonderful on homemade club sandwiches (we’re growing tomatoes, among other things). The one thing I’m not so fond of: the bits of dirt that I can’t get out from my hands. Scrub as I might, I can’t get it out.

I’m still chugging along with No-S and shovelglove. I had to climb back onto the No-S wagon after falling off of it during holidays, but I’m back on now and holding on for dear life. Shovelglove never fell off my radar, and I’m actually considering upgrading my sledgehammer to a slightly heavier version. While I still break a sweat, my arms are no longer burning by the time I’m done; I daresay swinging the hammer around has become routine. That’s a Good Thing (TM), but I think I need to kick it up a notch (two T.V. star phrases in one sentence, that must be worth a gold star or something).

While shovelgloving, I generally watch a bit of a Stargate SG-1 episode; sometimes only 15 minutes, but sometimes I go ahead and finish the episode when I’m done exercising. With such a steady rate, I’m now up to episode 4 of Season 6. Just over halfway to the end; when I’m done with it, I’m going to be rather sad. Shovelgloving and SG-1 are like peanut butter and jelly for me at this point…

I guess all of that was a roundabout way of saying: I have plenty to blog about, I’m just not doing it. I’ve been too busy doing the whole, um, life thing to blog about it. But I do miss doing so. I may try a post schedule, say 3 posts a week, or something like that. Cas went for a daily post, Monday through Friday, but I know I wouldn’t stick to such a thing, so I won’t even bother attempting it. Maybe I’ll even take a look at some memes; I used to do Friday’s Feast (which is either dead or just not working right now).

Quick, someone motivate me!

Not My Knee

I’m tremendously happy that it’s feeling better. For a while, I was quite worried that I’d really messed something up, and that I’d be moaning about my aching knee for the rest of my life. I’m sure I’ll reach that point at some point in my life, when everything is creaking and popping, but I certainly didn’t want to start at 24. Give me at least until 30, yeah?

Relatedly, it’s great to be back to shovelgloving. I started doing it at the beginning of August, and had more or less not missed any days at all. At this point, it feels quite weird for it to be a weekday and for me to not shovelglove. I guess that’s a pretty indicator that it’s been ingrained as a habit… I’m still doing No S as well, and it is becoming increasingly difficult – there are so many temptations sitting around, what with my mom cooking up a storm around the holidays. Chocolate, cookies, pies, cakes… It’s easy to not eat sweets when all that’s in the house is a crappy factory made treat, but homemade stuff? Much more difficult to resist.

And, speaking of holidays – I hope they’re happy for all of you!

(One last aside – “on the mend.” What’s up with that? We don’t say “my knee is on the pain,” it’s just “my knee is hurting.” Idioms; gotta’ love ‘em.)

I am, however, off of shovelglove for a few days. I’ve done something stupid, and gone and hurt myself. You would think that doing an exercise program that involves swinging a sledgehammer around, I would have injured myself with the hammer; but that’s not the case. I actually injured myself by doing the one exercise in my program that doesn’t really use the hammer at all: squats. I think I did them a bit… over zealously.

I don’t remember any sharp pains or anything while exercising last week, but by the weekend, I was in quite a bit of pain. I stubbornly put off going to the urgent care center until Thursday, thinking that it would just get better on its own (it wasn’t). The urgent care center did an x-ray to make sure I hadn’t broken anything, gave me crutches, and some wonderful pain medicine – the documentation on it says it’s akin to morphine.

The crutches seem to be helping tremendously, as I can already note less pain. I’ve also been icing it regularly, as ordered. I’ve got a follow-up appointment with my doctor on Monday, to see if she thinks I need to get an MRI to check for any soft tissue damage, or if I should just continue babying the knee. Let us all hope and pray and do knee dances (just do the rain dance moves and think about my knee) for the latter course of action. You all do the dancing, please; I’m not in any shape to jump around, even with crutches.

As an aside – crutches! I’m not sure if they’re supposed to help me or torture me. I’ve never had to use crutches before, and I must say – they’re a lot harder to use than I ever would have imagined. I’ve had some very close calls, thinking that not only would I need to get my knee checked out again, but also my head. In mid-swing, your balance has a tendency to get a little screwy.

No S

Switching from my former eating habits to No S led to their being many changes for me. Previously, I ate snacks (a lot); I ate sweets (far too many); and I often had seconds. Which would, of course, probably have a lot to do with why I’m currently fat (but shrinking, thank the lords of Kobol!) Cutting out all of those all at once was a bit of a ride the first few days, but after that, things smoothed out drastically.

On the first couple of days on the system, I considered chewing on my arm between lunch and dinner; when dinner time came around, I felt rather ravenous, ready to eat the proverbial horse. After those first few days though, the extreme hunger between lunch and dinner started to subside. Now, when dinner arrives, I’m hungry (as I should be), but not ready to leap into the bowl of mashed potatoes or steal the entire pan of baked chicken, retreating to my room like some overgrown (but hopefully still more attractive) gremlin.

Removing snacks from my weekday eating habits entirely has proven to be quite revealing; now that I’m not snacking all the time, I can see just how much I was snacking. As Reinhard (the creator of the system) points out on one of his websites, “No S makes excess seem excessive.” It’s also proven interesting to see what I want to snack on during S days, when I’m allowed to. Most of the crap I nibbled on all the time before – crackers, bits of cheese, rice cakes – just doesn’t seem appealing. It would seem that throwing such things down the hatch all the time was just a habit; now that the habit’s gone, I don’t really care about the foods. This goes for many of the sweets that I “loved” before; when I can eat them on S days now, I generally don’t want to. I prefer my treats on S days to be real treats, not some yucky little white powdered donut.

It’s also interesting how sticking to a rigid but simple plan has altered how I think. When someone offers me something to eat when it’s not a mealtime, my brain immediately throws out: well, duh, of course not – it’s not a mealtime! The same goes for when there’s dessert available after dinner. I don’t have to make any choices about it, because my habit has already done so for me: if it’s a weekday, the answer is no, good sir; move along from that cake. On to…

Shovelglove

Well, I think the fact that I stuck with this every weekday for three weeks says a lot on its own, but to elaborate:

Shovelglove is fast, it’s fun, and, believe it or not, effective. Having struggled with my weight for years now, I’ve messed around with a lot of different exercise programs, and the vast majority of them were boring and unenjoyable. For a lot of them, I’d even go so far as to say that they sucked. They were things that would have made me lose weight, certainly, but they were things that I wouldn’t do consistently. Something can be 100% effective, but if you don’t do it, it’s 0% effective.

I’ve stuck with shovelglove because it’s extremely enjoyable, oddly so; because it’s helping me lose weight (along with No S); and because in comparison to what I’ve tried before – lifting weights for nearly an hour per session – it takes up practically none of my time. That, and as I mentioned before, shovelglove caresses my inner geek. It’s exercise and roleplaying; I get to pretend I’m a farmer, or a chain-gang worker, or a guy on a steamship stoking the oven, or an elf (a very hefty one!), smiting an orc. I know, that sounds absurd. It is absurd. But I challenge you: get a sledgehammer and a sweater, and do shovelglove for a week. If you go the whole week without imagining you’re doing something like the above, well… I can’t help you. Are you human?

Results

Of course, doing these two systems would be pointless if they weren’t helping me in some way, but they are, as I mentioned above. So, how much weight have I lost? It’s hard to say, honestly. The scales at first went down a bit, and then they went up. At that point, I decided that obsessively checking the scales would be pointless. Doing shovelglove, I know for a fact that I’m packing on muscle; my arms are more muscular than they’ve ever been, even compared to when I was doing a lot of heavy weight lifting. Muscle weighing pretty much the same as fat, but being much denser, it’s hard for me to say how much weight I’ve “lost.”

So let’s talk slightly more practical results. Doing a simple “how snug are these” test with my pants, I’ve lost at least an inch, perhaps two, from my waist. One pair of shorts I wore a few days ago kept slipping down, practically falling off of me. I was able to slide them off without unfastening anything. For me, this was a bit like finding a hidden 6th toe on my foot – I don’t recall the last time I had trouble with my pants slipping. My arms are more muscular and much more toned, as are my legs (I’ve been doing Hindu squats as part of my shovelglove routine). All in all, I feel better all around, and I’m less, well, round. I’ve still got lots of roundness to me, trust me, but some of it’s gone. For a mere 3 weeks, these are results I can’t really argue with.

As a final note, I’ve chuckled a bit at the responses I’ve gotten from family members when I tell them what I’m doing for exercise. “You’re doing.. what? With a sledgehammer?” They smile and nod, as if saying: well, isn’t that nice, you’ve gone completely insane, and such an exercise routine will never work.

Except it is working. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, or in my arms, I suppose. The proof, not the pudding; it’s a Monday, and so I obviously can’t have pudding today!

Shovelglove

I discovered shovelgloving a few weeks ago, but only glanced at the site; it seemed rather weird, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Yesterday, however, I rediscovered it via my daily consumption of feeds, and decided to read the whole page (something I don’t do much these days on the internet, I admit). If you’d rather not do that, in a nutshell: shovelgloving is wrapping an old sweater around the head of a sledgehammer, and then doing basic movements with your new “shovelglove” – shoveling, chopping wood, churning butter, smiting the orc (I’m serious). See, I said it was weird, and I meant it. But its weirdness gives it an awful lot of charm. How could anyone not pay some attention to an exercise program that has an exercise called “smiting the orc”?

Despite its weirdness, Reinhard, the quirky librarian in charge of the site, convinced me to give it a go. I like that shovelgloving makes exercise such a simple thing, rather than charting it all out – this exercise for that muscle, that exercise for this muscle. Sure, there’s a table of movements, but they’re all pretty logical, with the names (mostly) describing the action very well. I understand “tuck bales” and “drive fence posts” far better than I understand “lat extension to the rear” and “triceps kickback”… what do those things mean?

In regards to how often and how much you’re supposed to shovelglove, it’s dead simple: Monday through Friday, 14 minutes a day – no more, no less. You rest on the weekend. Reinhard has an interesting psychological explanation as to why he chose 14 minutes – it’s not a typical time block, so it doesn’t really register with a lot of people. 14 minutes? Sure, I can spare that, that’s nothing. But half an hour? That’s half an hour. I could watch a TV show during that!

I put in my first 14 minutes of shovelgloving yesterday evening, and it was a surprisingly hard workout. But it was also a hell of a lot of fun – in a quite weird way. I just hope the neighbors didn’t see me.

No S Diet

The No S diet is perhaps even simpler than shovelgloving. Here’s the diet:

• No Snacks
• No Sweets
• No Seconds

Except (sometimes) on days that start with “S”.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No calorie counting, no “you can’t eat that!”; just 3 meals a day, without constantly visiting the kitchen for snacks all day. And while I suppose things could change in the future, I’d say that at least during my lifetime, there will always be 2 days in the week which begin with “S”, so when I want some cookies or cake or whatever, I’ll know right when I can have them.

When I read about this diet, which I discovered via the shovelglove.com site, I thought: this is it. This is the best diet idea I’ve ever seen (and I’ve looked at my fair share of them, lemme’ tell ya’.) Why? Because it’s doable. I could see myself doing this for the rest of my life, because it’s simple, and it’s not going to feel like I’m trying to become an ascetic. I’ve tried counting calories before, and I discovered that it – ahem, sucks. Sure, I did it for a few weeks. And then I started to hate that little red book. Hate it. It made every meal a math assignment, and I think I’ve mentioned it in the past: I hate math! I’ve also tried diets that simply cut off certain foods, and that sucks even more than calorie counting. I like cookies, thank you very much.

I also think it’s going to be a great fit for me, because I know I’m awful about snacking; it’s probably the #1 reason why I’m fat (with a close #2 being that during most of my life, when it comes to physical exercise, I’ve been a lazy bastard – hey, I’m going for honesty here). Bored? Hit the kitchen. In the kitchen for a glass of water? Hey, grab a snack – it’s just one or two bites of food, right? Right, but those bites add up, chum. Read the nosdiet.com page for more about this, because Reinhard’s got some really good info about snacking and why we all should probably quit doing it so damn much. And for the record, no, I’m not being paid to write this. I’ve not even spoken to the guy.

I realize I’ve only done shovelgloving and No S dieting one day, but I must say – that one day felt fine. It didn’t feel like a chore that I had to make myself do, even the exercise – which I can’t say about many other exercises I’ve done. (I still love punching bag workouts, though!) I’m going to continue to give both a go, and if in a few weeks I’m still feeling fine with both, they may just become life habits.

(Sidenote: I read that apparently, many people respond to the No S diet and shovelgloving as I have – very enthusiastically. And then they discover that it’s not ultra easy all of the time, and they start to despair a bit. So I’m keeping that in mind – the diet in particular is a big change for me, and I’m going to have to be diligent. Here’s my daily calendar for shovegloving and nosdiet; if you see a red square, feel free to say “get back on track!” via the comments here.)