If A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words…
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I should probably show you the picture.
Unfortunately, I’d be embarrassed to show it to you, so I hope you don’t mind the 1,000 words (actually, it works out to 920 words, according to my WordPress control panel counter thingy… My apologies for selling you short by 80 words!).
As I mentioned a while back, we spent a week at the ocean in Dziwnowek, Poland back in July. And of course, when you go to the ocean, you spend time at the water’s edge in a swimsuit (at least if the weather cooperates, which it tried to do on occasion for us).
And since it’s a vacation, you take a camera, and you use that camera to take pictures so that you’ll remember the vacation. And since my wife is the “official” owner of the camera and just about everything else we possess (as she put it to me, “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine, and what’s ours is mine”), she took a lot of pictures.
Most of those pictures were of the children, but I did occasionally hold a child, at which point Mom took a picture of Dad holding a Child. And on one such occasion, being a day suitable for swimwear on the beach, she took a picture of me wearing nothing but a smile swimsuit (no, it wasn’t THAT kind of beach; besides, we were attending a church-oriented conference at the time!).
And today I finally got around to actually taking the pictures off the camera and looking at them (hence the banana picture in the previous post).
Thankfully, I can truthfully say that I didn’t look fat in the picture; at least I looked normal from that perspective. But from every other perspective, I look OLD. I don’t look trim and fit; I just look like a coat rack that’s made out of bones — and somebody just happened to hang their skin on those bones.
Pa-tooey! Motivation for Phase 2, anybody? Yes, Tom, I see that hand!
Friday, September 12 is the day. Since I didn’t work on Labor Day, I get a day off when I’m normally supposed to work, and next Monday — September 8 — is that day. We’re going to try to take a quick trip this weekend to take advantage of the time shifted holiday — and then it’s time to get serious about Phase 2.
For starters, though, I’m going to take a Project page in my planner (which surprisingly looks a lot like a piece of paper with lines on it; I’m going “simple” in my planning and organizational capabilities. I may write more about that some day, but probably on another blog — but you can check out my other blogs because most of them are in my blogroll) and simply write down the various resources I’ve found and purchased over the past few months (and I’ll include a list of them here). Once that is done, I’m going to study them and come up with my own exercise program.
I also mentioned recently about wondering if my full nutritional needs are being met on an 80/10/10 raw food diet. I’m going to study more on this. Don’t get me wrong; I’m 100% confident that I’m getting better nutrition now than I was six months ago! — it’s just that I’m really wondering if I’m anywhere near what I would call “optimal nutrition”, for lack of a better word.
Another factor that complicates this issue is that I don’t really trust the guidelines that are out there. We’re most familiar with the RDA (Recommended Daily Amount) or PDV (Percent Daily Values) that you see on all of those food labels in the U.S. — but I see problems with them. First, do we really need all of that sodium, for example? I think that, in some cases, those PDVs are actually the maximum we can eat and still marginally function, if that. I consider them to be heavily influenced by campaign contributions and congressional favors, hence I take them with a grain of salt (and just one…).
Next, I don’t think they go into enough detail and don’t get into the weeds enough. How much potassium do I need every day? How much zinc? How much Vitamin B-12? These labels don’t say much.
Now I will do some more research (and the U.S. government sites will be a part of that research), but I want to find some alternative nutritional recommendations that I can put my confidence in. And then I want to see just how close I get to those ideals and if I can make some adjustments to what and how I eat to better meet those ideals.
So Phase 2 is going to involve trying to get my body to look about 20 years younger while optimizing my nutritional intake (I think “improving” isn’t the right word to use here since it’s already vastly improved over how it was). And I suspect that paying better attention to my nutritional needs will help me in my quest to make my body look better.
For now, I’m going to print out that picture and put it in my personal photo album. It will serve as motivation. Proper eating alone isn’t enough, at least not for me. I have to take it ever further. The whole point is to optimize my body so that it is functioning at its absolute best, and putting premium food in a rust bucket of a body isn’t good enough for me.
We’ll see what happens.
Smacznego,
Tom