Galaxies, pinecones and sugar?

The holidays have passed in full, and now comes the rather more serious business of trying to figure out what to do about any excess poundage or softening flab I have picked up in the last few weeks.

Luckily, I did not succumb to a full-level bacchanalia of hard eating, drinking, and snacking, as in years past, so that right there is something to feel a touch grateful for, and maybe even lend some buoyancy to the work to come.

Work to come? Did I say that? Well, yes. The thing about attaining Physical Fitness is that it requires work to attain it, and ongoing work to maintain yet, once achieved. I do not mean work in the Ur-Calvinist sense of the term, wherein you have to struggle all the time and feel badly about smiling at something. I mean work in the real, practical sense: using effort and discipline to achieve and maintain a goal.

And a goal is what I’m working on here, so let’s define what physical fitness will be to yours truly.

As of this writing I weigh a substantial 220 lbs. This has been my approximate weight, give or take five pounds, for about the past seven years. My stated and hoped-for goal is to weigh 200 lbs. or less (and be healthy doing it) by my birthday in June, so I need to lose about 20 lbs between here and there to meet that goal. That’s about 3.5 lbs./month. Very doable.

My current resting heart rate is 68 beats-per-minute. Data for what this figure means varies depending on the source, but broadly speaking I fall into the “normal-to-good” range for a male my age. The better your overall physical condition, the more efficiently your heart works, and the lower the overall rate. Elite athletes (think a Michael Phelps, Venus Williams, or LeBron James) can have resting heart rates as low as 47. That’s a mighty fit heart.

I am working on getting into better shape, and I have no immediate plans to run a marathon or scale K2 wearing stilts or some such, so for my purposes I would like to have my resting heart rate drop to 60 or fewer per minute. Again, being healthy doing so.

I made mention of focusing on my eating habits more closely, but I traveled out of state for a wedding recently and ate a tremendous quantity of tremendously delicious food. So for the moment I am begging off describing a “typical” day of meals, as I don’t eat duck-fat-cooked French fries or lobster rolls on a regular basis (though I would certainly like to).

My next entry, oh diary, will describe my food habits in a typical day, along with some further look-ins on my current health picture.

Oh, and I had asked what a galaxy, a pinecone, and sugar have in common.

All three contain large amounts of carbon, and indeed require carbon in order to maintain themselves. Imbalances or disproportions of carbon will result in the destruction of our three friends, and over the course of my fitness journey I will take a closer look at the role that carbon (and other elements) plays in my own body, and life, and what lessons/modeling can be drawn from our sweet and woody celestial trio.

Until next time, think good thoughts.

Stay Up
A.C.