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by noduerme 265 days ago
I love this DIY method! Sometimes you just know what's best for yourself.

I've done something very similar for about 8 years now. Push-ups and crunches (and sometimes burpees). I spent most of my life thin, just because of my lucky metabolism. In high school, people thought I was anorexic even though I ate junk food all the time. I'm someone who hates to break a sweat unless absolutely necessary, who would never go to a gym, and who also works a very sedentary programming job... and everything was just fine until alcohol and age caught up with me in my late 30s.

So, I remembered the stupid stuff they had us do in high school gym class. There were actual educational lessons there, right? Push-ups and crunches.

I use a Moka Pot to make my coffee in the morning, it takes exactly 9 minutes to boil on my stove. I started off with 30 push-ups and 30 crunches a day, before the pot boiled, before I got out of my underwear. I kept adding a few a day until I was at 100 + 100 (Initially I would take breaks in the push-ups at 25, 50, and 75 - but eventually I could just do 100 without stopping). The results of it were surprisingly good, for something that takes less than 9 minutes of your day.

Just a side note about McDonald's -- I've only ever gotten one rancid McDonald's meal in my life, and it was REALLY bad. I almost never eat fast food anymore either, except in a very particular case.

The author says:

>>When was the last time you heard somebody (including yourself) say they feel better after eating fast food?

Me. I have some level of IBS - not debilitating, but enough that I don't want to leave the house sometimes. I also have lived in a lot of countries with questionable food sanitation, although now I'm just in America and eat a lot of Indian and Thai food. Anyway, for whatever reason, if I need to catch a flight in the morning, the sure shot 100% bulletproof way to know that I will not need a bathroom is to eat a Big Mac, nuggets and fries the night before. That meal can somehow completely stop a multi-day IBS episode in its tracks. I don't do it unless I need to, but somehow it completely calms my gut and binds up whatever's in there. I literally do it almost every time before I fly. My home cooking is much more likely to leave me stuck in a bathroom somewhere.

Make of it what you will.

One other thing - walking. This is what really caused me to lose a lot of weight and get back to within my optimal zone. I am (as reads the bio) an alcoholic. When I get done working at home, I go to a bar. I track my calories, and about 50% of them are alcohol. To motivate myself to walk, I started picking bars that were further away. And then much further away. So if I'm going out for 3 beers, I'll often walk 1.5 miles to the first bar, then have another beer each half-mile on the way back. This makes an astounding difference. You're actually hungry when you get home, still have a light buzz, listened to some interesting podcasts, and you sleep a lot better.

All of this is advice from a 45-year-old whose habits are very, very bad - I am not some paragon of health. I smoke like a chimney. I'll probably die young. A little bit of extra struggle goes a long way, though.

1 comments

Love this. I am also 45 and been a beer loving “alcoholic” since me mid 20s. I was rail thin until maybe 22-23 and then gained around 40 pounds over the next several years. I’ve lost maybe 20 of those pounds once and looked and felt great but couldn’t keep it off. I’ve currently lost 15ish pounds in the last 2 months and am determined to get to my high school weight. I now only drink on weekends. I eat ok but not great (but certainly not horribly). My biggest new thing is running 5 days a week. I start my morning every day with a 4-6 mile run and don’t let myself make excuses for why I can’t run. If I have an early meeting, then I run in the evening. This has helped me so much.
Wow. Good for you. A 4 mile run would almost certainly kill me. I think I'd drop dead after about a mile. Cardio is the one thing I'm really not good on, and I have a minor arrhythmia. About 20 burpees and I feel close to blacking out. I want to improve on it, but very carefully. But it's still been possible to lose a good amount of weight without putting a lot of strain on my heart. Still not at my high school weight, though! I was 130. I've come down from a high of 175 to 155, and have a hard time getting below that.