{"id":48455,"date":"2022-02-19T23:05:24","date_gmt":"2022-02-20T04:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=48455"},"modified":"2022-02-19T23:05:24","modified_gmt":"2022-02-20T04:05:24","slug":"time-to-combat-the-dad-bod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=48455","title":{"rendered":"Time to combat the dad bod"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Among the challenges that have emerged during the journey of raising a second child is that I\u2019ve basically had to give up running.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t run since October, and it\u2019s been way longer than that since I\u2019d last had a formal workout in a gym.\u00a0 Raising kids has a tendency to make stuff like exercise expendable in a day\u2019s agenda, and it was bad enough I had to forfeit gyms due to pandemic, but throwing a second kid into the mix has taken running off the table for me as well over the last few months.<\/span><\/p>\n

Needless to say, I\u2019ve watched my weight do some rollercoaster-ing since the original lockdown occurred, and now it\u2019s not headed in the right direction.\u00a0 At first, my weight started to drop because I wasn\u2019t eating well, often not eating enough, and with the gym off the table, muscle mass began deteriorating, so the weight from muscle mass presumably started coming off.\u00a0 Eventually, running became my only real exercise, and doing cardio with no weight training meant that I could really only lose more weight, and I actually got my weight down to almost my peak high school weight, in the 170\u2019s area, and I actually felt like I was looking pretty decent, in spite of the loss of all my gains.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually #2 showed up and life went into hard(er) mode with two kids in tow.\u00a0 With my job also ruining my life at this point and the challenges of raising two kids simultaneously, the running eventually ceased, and mythical wife and I more or less went into survival mode as far as our eating habits went.\u00a0 We never had the time and\/or energy to cook not-trash food for ourselves, and with the little time we did have, we have been eating a whole lot of garbage over the last few months.\u00a0 My weight has been creeping up in this time, and it\u2019s been especially noticeable when I\u2019d be doing virtual job interviews and putting on dress shirts, and feeling the bulge and tightening in all the wrong places.<\/span><\/p>\n

I normally don\u2019t like to put too much stock into weight numbers, since when I worked weights I always spouted the whole muscle weighs more than fat<\/em> thing, but with no weights in play, I knew that each and every pound that I\u2019d gain was solely based on my own poor choices.\u00a0 At the time of starting this post, I\u2019d crept up to 192.4 lbs., and with the reality that I haven\u2019t exercised in months, that means I\u2019m 192.4 lbs. of fat fucking American embodiment of failure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, my intention is to stop the bleeding, and to try and get back on the horse.\u00a0 Due to the fact that #2 has been sleeping at night fairly well as of late, I had the confidence to get back on the treadmill and go for a run, the first one I\u2019ve done since October 7th<\/sup>, 2021 (thanks Garmin fitness tracker).<\/span><\/p>\n

It was the worst run I\u2019ve had in probably 16 years, since I\u2019m basically starting from scratch.\u00a0 I was running at a pace that I had to keep slowing down .1 at a time because I was blowing out and getting gassed, and it took me nearly 40 minutes to traverse three miles.\u00a0 Now I say traverse, because I definitely didn\u2019t run the whole time, like I used to do my old workouts of non-stop running.\u00a0 My pace was probably around 12 minutes a mile, a far cry from my old 9:50 pace, and I feel like I have a long way to go before I can competently get back to those kinds of splits.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it was also the best run I\u2019ve had in a very long time, because I actually got to do it.\u00a0 And one thing I\u2019ve always stated is that at no point ever, does running ever feel like a waste of time, and that\u2019s absolutely one thing that I love, because I abhor feeling like I\u2019m wasting time.<\/span><\/p>\n

If all goes well, I\u2019ll get back to a general routine of running every other day, which is good because running is also when I can try to catch up with watching things, since I can watch things on my iPad.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, at the new gig, I\u2019ve done some recon and my access to the fitness center has been activated, so I now officially have a place where I can hit some weights again, which I\u2019m super excited to get started with.\u00a0 I\u2019m not really looking forward to the fact that I\u2019ll be starting from scratch there, which means the inevitable soreness from doing, everything, is going to be pretty prevalent, but once it dissipates, I\u2019m hoping to try and build back some of the muscle that I\u2019ve clearly lost over the last two years.<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s not the best stocked fitness center there is, but it doesn\u2019t cost anything and has some free weights, so I can at least not feel entirely like a geriatric living on machines.\u00a0 I intend to make the best of it, and declare war on the flab that I\u2019ve amassed over the last few months, because how far I\u2019ve fallen off the wagon is not okay, and there\u2019s little I want more than to change that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Changing the eating habits is probably going to be a bigger hurdle to clear, but at least if I have some exercise back into the rotation, that should help suppress some of the physical decay I\u2019ve been allowing to happen to me.\u00a0 I\u2019d prefer to have the dad bod that actually looks like I work out occasionally versus the dad bod of the guy that\u2019s let go of everything and will have to start buying bigger clothing because of it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among the challenges that have emerged during the journey of raising a second child is that I\u2019ve basically had to give up running.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t run since October, and it\u2019s been way longer than that since I\u2019d last had a formal workout in a gym.\u00a0 Raising kids has a tendency to make stuff like exercise … Continue reading Time to combat the dad bod<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[194,71,120,109,37,192,32],"class_list":["post-48455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-coronavirus","tag-famiry","tag-fat-people","tag-gym","tag-job","tag-kids","tag-running"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48456,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48455\/revisions\/48456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}