white noise

How many hours a day do you sit? 8? 10? All of them? I thought about this question a few weeks ago and I decided I was very close to the latter. It certainly wasn’t always the case. Back in college I walked, walked, walked. Sometimes rode a bike. And fairly often went for a run a few miles around campus. In the ten or so years to follow, I slowed down some, but as a teacher I still spent most of my work days on my feet, all day, pacing around the classroom, or rushing through airports. Over the past couple years I’ve moved into full-time web monkey, and I’m literally paid to sit on my rear…all day. I don’t even walk to conference rooms anymore, because all our meetings are handled online. I tend to work about 9 or 10 hours a day. That’s a lot of ass time. What’s worse is that now that the construction in the basement is finished, I can look forward to sitting even more at home. Watching TV, movies, playing games, working on web projects, etc. It just happens that most of my pastimes involve sitting, too.

I bring this up because usually this time of year I trim back on my diet, and drop some pounds before going into the holiday gorge-fest. This year I trimmed back as usual, and nothing was happening. Na da. And I realized that inactivity is killing me. My already limping metabolism, has now reached a point where it can only be measured on a geologic time scale, and no amount of caloric control is going to have a big effect.

I’ve never been a big fan of having an exercise schedule. I do actually enjoy some activities that don’t involve sitting, but once you schedule these things it has always seemed like a second (or third?) job instead of recreation. The other factor has always been just a matter of time. I may not make the best use of every minute, but there are never enough hours in the day for want I want to do. A constant reminder of this is the dusty music equipment I haven’t fired up in ages.

None the less, I decided it was time for action, literally. Starting, oh, I guess 5 or 6 weeks ago now, I began spending about an hour working out five nights a week. None of this ramping up from 10 minutes twice a week stuff. I had to quit being lazy cold turkey. Generally my hour consists of 45 minutes on the elliptical finished up with 15 minutes of free weights.

Forget the before and after pictures. I’ll be just watching the scale and the resultant change in BMI. I started this little forey with a BMI of 32.7, which is squarely in the “obese” classification. I’m not really trying to get into the “normal” range; the last time I got down that low was before college and D says I had a distinct bobblehead look to me. Shouldn’t dudes with big heads get a modified BMI chart?

Anyway, besides getting out of the dreaded “o”-zone I don’t have a specific BMI goal; it’s just a measure of improvement I can watch over time, and maybe post occasionally. Generally, I don’t like blog entries about weight loss and diet – they tend to come off all uninteresting and self-absorbed (as if a blog is anything but). But there also a certain kick in the pants you get once your actions are public.

Posted Monday, October 15th, 2007 9:55 AMYou can leave a response below.