willpowerthru

Hi there!

I don’t know if you remember me or not, let’s see if I can find a pic real quick…oh…here you go:

Ok you got me, that’s not me.

Ok that’s more like it. I feel like in that picture I have a very phlegmy accent like, “HHHello Ameryca number one!”

How have you been? How are the kids? Really? Wow, are you sure it was BECAUSE his teacher is Jewish, or is that something he says all the time? Wow. Almost sorry I asked.

See, I find things like that very funny. Like I’m having a conversation with you, and your kid said something nasty to his teacher. In my head, that’s hilarious. I get that it might not be too funny to you, I don’t know, maybe I’ll never be as funny as Two and a Half Men. *le sigh*

Already off track and i’m only 150 words in. Shit.

ANYWAY.

Here’s the thing. I took about 2 months off everything resembling willpower. It was amazing. I partied like a pirate in south Florida, I got decently intimate with a penguin named Cliff, I got drunk and ate two mucho burritos and a chicken quesadilla from Mucho Mas (www.muchoeats.com) in the course of about one hour, I basically drank all the time and ate all the time and rarely worked out. Cut to tonight.

Actually, let’s not cut to tonight just yet. Let’s talk about my favorite subject for a second. Bacon. Boobs. Jack Daniels. Beer. Boobs again. ME.

Actually part two, if you would like to skip absolutely everything and get to what happened to me tonight….scroll down to my dream girl, Jessica Biel……..

ANYWAY AGAIN:

My history of gaining and losing weight is simply put…

Legen…

wait for it….

DARY.

Yes, Legendary. I’ve isolated my problem with gaining and losing weight.

It’s SO simple. When you weigh, like, A LOT, it’s very easy to lose 20 pounds. Then after 20 pounds, it’s like, well of course I deserve to eat whatever the f*ck I want tonight, didn’t you just hear me, I LOST 20 POUNDS.

But it’s not just tonight, is it fatty? It starts this ridiculous cycle of going back to the same shit that is horrible for you.

So what ends up happening is you get so sick of being a fat piece of shit, you go ahead and lose another 20 pounds.

Here are a few times in my life when I knew it was time to stop being quite so fat.

1. I sat in a plastic chair in college and the back legs snapped and I fell to the ground.
2. I got called Chris Farley for the first time (since then it has happened exactly 45,003 times, so it’s no longer a diet trigger).
3. I was told by a gay friend of mine that if I were gay, I would be a bear. If you don’t know what that is, Google is your friend.
4. I was eating ice cream and the top scoop fell off the cone onto my shirt, annnnnnd I put it back on the cone and finished the whole damn thing.
5. My college girlfriend flat out told me, ultimatum style, in her parents’ pool.
6. My OTHER college girlfriend said the following while drunk, “Babe, when I drink…you don’t look so fat, I’m like, really attracted to you.”

The problem is when you weigh 205, gain to 230, lose to 210, gain to 240, lose to 220, gain to 243, lose to 223, gain to 250….well, you see what’s happening here. I get fat over time. That’s been my life since high school. 13 years of up and down, up and down, up and down, and then just UP.

Couple that with the fact that, yes, while I currently weigh 275 pounds, I carry it decently well. I’ve definitely got a gut fuel tank for the awesome machine, BUT, it’s really not that terrible when I suck it in for hours on end. I’ve gotten into that conversation plenty of times with dudes and chicas, “speaking of weight, what do you think I weigh?” I usually would get answers 20-50 pounds lighter than I really am. I would say that just my legs weigh 125 pounds or so by themselves. This might explain why I can do exactly 3 pull-ups.

So when you carry it decently well, and know in your head it would take you exactly 2-3 weeks to drop 20 pounds, what’s the big deal? I can lose that weight whenever I want. I liken it the first time I quit chewing Skoal. I quit for like a year and something, then I was like…well shit, if I can quit it that easily, I might as well enjoy it again for a while, I’ll just quit again later.

That’s not how it works.

When I quit chewing December 31st, 2011, I knew I was never going to do it again. Well, never until i’m 65. I told myself that at 65, if I really want to start up again, I can, because I don’t think I’ll give two shits about losing my jaw to cancer 20 years later…but I digress…

I’ve made this point before…people (aka me) diet, they go on these short term solutions with cheat days or cheat meals or they allow shit food but only in tiny portions.

That’s sound logic, right? Give yourself a little taste of what you are missing and that will make you miss it less.

Here’s how that looks in other situations:

It’s been 30 days, better give the heroin addict that needle, it’s his cheat day.

Thank God it’s been six months since I stepped foot in a casino, I’m going to celebrate this achievement by taking 100 dollars to the boat.

Well, clearly I deserve to have 4 beers tonight, It’s been a week, and I used to drink 10 a day!

We can file all that under “Sonny Bono wasn’t even on such a slippery slope…”

Anyone over 30 got that joke…hopefully.

The main difference is with food, the line is soooooooo f’ing blurry. Everyone has an opinion about how healthy certain things are and are not for you. So maybe you think dark chocolate is good for you, two glasses of red wine are good for you, soy is good for you, fish is good for you, the paleo diet, the south beach diet, the Adkins diet, the Subway diet, the whatever diet…

Sure, most people understand that if you drink nothing but Coca-Cola and eat nothing but Pizza Hut daily, you aren’t being healthy. But there are some people that really think if you drink only 8 ounces of Coke per day, and eat 4 slices of veggie pizza per day from Pizza Hut, you’ll be just fine, because calories are calories, and that’s called portion control. But what about Bacon? What about meat in general? Lean chicken breast? I know just as many people that think chicken is sooooo good for you as people that say chicken is poison and you better just be eating organic kale and other horrible sounding food. So that’s that. There may be something we can agree on…

WAS AWESOME.

Besides that though, I think….

No sane person would say, hey heroin addict, cut it back to one 8 ball a week instead of 3 a day and that’s healthy.*

*I know nothing of heroin, but seeing as this is LaPorte, Indiana, I’m sure there are those of you out there that find my statement inaccurate. I’m ok with that. Get off the pipe, kid.

Point being, abstinence from your vices is how you get over your vices, right? If you are a boozer, don’t booze. You smoke crack? Don’t ever smoke crack. You gamble away everything you own? Don’t ever gamble on anything ever again.

You are a fatty fat fatty fat fatty? Only eat chocolate cake once a week? a month? a year? a decade? What’s acceptable?

That brings me to my next point. It’s impossible to eat healthy.

No, I’m not saying it’s impossible to eat better than I am eating currently. Of course that’s possible, if I broke my leg right now, ranch might spill out.

My point is that, what’s your definition of healthy? Yeah? You share that with a few people in the entire world. There are people that think you are wrong, LOT’S OF THEM. Lot’s of them with degrees in nutrition and such…so yeah, you don’t know as much as you think you do. But where does that leave me and other fatties? We think we know the basics, but Jesus, who do we listen to? The best selling author? The gym nut? The guy who drinks his own pee?

Ok, no one listen to the guy that drinks his own pee, trust me.

Bottom line, I’ve decided I’m going to try abstinence.

I’m basically going on a diet for as long as possible.  I really think that’s the only way to do it. Chocolate cake? Sounds awesome. Pass. Pizza Hut? Sounds awesome. Pass.

The problem with abstinence is….what exactly do you abstain from?

Bacon? meat in general? cheese? dairy? carbs?

nope.

I’m just going to go into every eating situation and say “WWJD”

What would John Do.

John is a good friend of mine who is really in shape and I respect tremendously. He’s got a power plant that just doesn’t stop, and he’s really, really healthy. So I’m just going to eat what I think he would eat, with one insanely large exception.

I love drinking. I really do.

I’m going to keep drinking.

BUTT.

I’m going to stop eating shit food when I have been drinking. AND THAT MY FRIENDS IS THE BIGGEST F*CKING WILLPOWER CHALLENGE I’VE EVER LAID OUT.

Eat like John, drink, workout here and there, repeat forever.

That’s how I’m going to win at life.

The takeaway for you is, if you want to change yourself, why don’t you just take someone you think has their shit together, model yourself after them as much as possible? And then keep drinking.

OK, so here’s the latest “you are fat and need to go on a life changing diet that will change your life and also be so great you don’t have to worry about repeating yourself when talking about how life changing it was.”

If you don’t know why there is a picture of the perfect woman above that sentence, scroll up, ass.

SO…

There are two recent indicators of my fatness that tell me I need to lose weight….

Here’s number one:

I would like to point out how everyone’s faces look normal in this picture, and my face looks like I was stung by space bees.

I played exactly 1:45 minutes in the championship game this year. The last 1:45 minutes of the game, aka, garbage time. It was nice to be on the team, but I’m at the point that if I’m checking in, the other team is like, “whew at least Konowitz is in”. I swear, there was a point in my life when people thought I was good. I SWEAR. It was called 8th grade, when I wasn’t fat.

and SECONDLY…this amazing story that no one with any dignity would ever share with you:

I went up to the YMCA tonight with my two friends, we will call them friend one and friend two.

We played one on one on one.

It goes like this. Friend one plays friend two for one point. If friend one scores, friend two leaves the court, and I play against friend one. However, if friend one misses and friend two gets the rebound, friend two is now on offense, friend one leaves, and I try to defend friend two.

So now friend two is on offense, I’m on defense, and he scores on me….I leave and friend one comes back on and defends against friend two. If friend two misses, friend one comes back on, and I’m on offense. The only thing you need to really know is that if anyone scores, they stay on offense, and keep scoring until they miss. Game goes to 11.

Get it?

If you don’t, don’t worry, it doesn’t change the outcome of this story, I still suck.

SO! Besides us, there are multiple people in the gym of all ages….4 years to 40 years…but we get lucky enough to control one basket out of four in the gym.

Friend one and Friend two and I are playing this “one on one on one” game, at 8pm on a Friday night because why not.

So I get the ball first and I actually take friend one and friend two for 5 points in a ROW, like a badass.

Here’s where the whole, “oh my goodness I’m terribly out of shape and fat” comes into play.

After that, no. I was so tired that I literally shut down and had no cardio to do anything having to do with basketball. I maintained my 5 points the whole game and lost 11 to 7 to 5. I was bent over in exhaustion.

To add insult to injury, literally, I started having lower back pain, which hasn’t happened in YEARS.

I told both of my friends that I was feeling some shitty lower back pain, and one of my friends suggested that I lay down and tuck one knee to my chest, then the other, then both.

I did that.

It felt great.

Here’s where it gets “rock bottomy”.

Imagine laying on your back and looking up at the gym ceiling. Your back finally feeling loosened up, you think you are about to get up and go do some more decently athletic things…

NOPE.

Instead, JUST as soon as you feel like you could stand back up, two small hispanic looking children are standing above you. And don’t even get mad about “hispanic looking children”.

They looked like they were hispanic! Stop being racist.

ANYWAY, So here’s exactly what happened. Literally….and I mean…LITERALLY:

*Ben laying on his back tucking his knees to his chest*

Kid one: “Are you hurt?” (really concerned)

Me: “Ohh, no, I’m just stretching…” (thinking he was actually concerned)

Kid two: “YOU play basketball!!?” (in complete disbelief because I’m REALLY fat)

Me: “Well, umm, yeah, but I’m not that good”

Kid one and two: “Ohhhhhhh” (in total belief)

Kid one (walking away): Everyone can get better!!!

ANNNNNNND that’s why I’m going to try to not be fat for a while.

These are things that actually happened!