Manual Labour Weight Loss Program

It has been pointed out to me that one of the reasons I might be a tad trimmer than most of my fellow forty-somethings is because I work for a living, and of course, that's probably true.

Also, we can thank the DNA donors who made me possible (and the belief back in the 60's that abortion is the killing of unborn people and therefore illegal) who probably weren't the biggest people in the land.

But a big debt goes to me, brett mothershead, for not stuffing my face full of bad stuff. Sure it took until my mid thirties to realize this. Having been blessed with a zealous metabolism and living a rather active lifestyle (some called it hyper back in the day) I never really worried about what I ate, But when my metabolism stopped watching my back, and gut, I had to do something.

So what I did was easy. It's called the Atkins Diet. And before you poo poo it as unhealthy and dangerous, just "hear" me out.

Okay, it IS dangerous probably for the first two weeks. If you're like I was, sucking down sodas and white bread and white rice and french fries like I was back then, and then stop, you'll get shakier than Charlie Sheen in rehab. I mean, for two weeks, you stop all carb consumption and you live life like an Eskimo!

I'd have dreams about Cheerios and milk sludged up with table sugar! I'd be so weak that all I wanted to do was watch TV and eat sticks of butter and eggs... And yes, this part of the effort was the worst, and for some, can trigger metabolic changes that can be detrimental...but if your body can take the rigors, it works.

Drink your liquids, take your multi vitamin, and you start to shrink. Why? You're fooling your body into thinking it's winter, and the fields have browned up, and all you have to eat is the meat you dried in the summer, and the game you're going to kill tomorrow. Your machinery is forced to recall those stored up carbs that had been converted to fat just to make ends meet. It's exactly what we were designed to do.

To a dumbass carpenter like me, it makes perfect sense.

So you lose the excess weight, and while you're doing so, you add back carbohydrates. But you do so wisely. You add real food. You add food you already know is good for you because you've been told it was since you were a little kid. You eat spinach, and broccoli, and romaine lettuce, and squash and okra and any fruit used as a vegetable.

BUT! You avoid human engineered crap like seedless grapes, apples, oranges, and bananas, etc. And, sadly, you avoid the obvious: enriched wheat flour, corn meal, potatoes, polished rice, and sugar, and the ultimate crime against humanity: High Fructose Corn Syrup.

I call it The Whole Food Diet because folks seem to get that knee-jerk reaction against Atkins. I'd say read the book. I read just the one before he, Dr. Atkins, bonked his head and died, and haven't seen any updates since then. So I MAY not be an authority, but even I know the crap in boxes in the grocery store are going to make you fatter. And I don't care how "low fat" or "all natural" it is.

Now as far as manual labour goes, yes, I work my ass off, literally. As a man of action, I chose a path out of doors and made me a leader of men, and before the collapse of the western economy in august 2008, was making a damn good living at it. But I digress...

So what can you, the I.T. guy or gal that's stuck inside an office or cubicle do besides eat the right foods and drink the right drinks and create the illusion that you're working your ass off? The answer, which you already know, is get off your ass.

1. Walk. Park your car as far away as possible from the building. Hell, park at the next building and walk from there. Park across the street at the Texaco, get you a big (diet) orange and leave your car over there all day. When you get to the building, forget the elevator. By god, yes your knees'll hurt, but that's because you're fat and you haven't used your knees in a coon's age.

2.Raise your desk up 14 to 16 inches and work standing up all day. I mean it. Burn your chair or chunk it down the hall. Stay on your feet for four hours, then sit down for your egg-salad-wrapped-in-big-sheets-of-Romaine-lettuce lunch for thirty minutes, then get back on your feet! If you need to call someone two cubicles down, don't, walk down there and scare the shit out of them. Answer phones all day? Stand up!

3.Get a tool belt for all your most used desk/office items. Your three-hole hole puncher, your red stapler, and your cell phone will fit easily. Add some heavier stuff as needed. The weight of the tool belt will make you work harder! And it'll simulate how much weight you're gonna lose and how that will feel when you take it off at the end of the day.

Well, for the office bound, that's all I got that I haven't already heard on Oprah.

All I can add is, being hungry isn't lethal, nor dangerous. Just because you're hungry (or think you are) doesn't mean you have to eat something. Know what? If you wait an hour or so, the pangs'll fade. On the weekends, or when (thanks to the aforementioned economy) we ain't working, sometimes I only eat once a day.

Your body is a machine for replicating and spreading around DNA that knows how to store glucose, as fat, for a cold and rainy winter. That's the alimentary system's biggest job--that and getting the materials to repair the damage done to our bodies during the course of a normal day. You stuff it with quick and easy carbs/sugars and it thinks it's mardi gras! It doesn't know that after you're finished with this box of Nip-Chees, you're going to wash them down with a 20 oz. Mountain Dew, followed by a bowl of ice cream and tater tots! All it knows is, "Wow! I got it made here, better pack it away!"

Lastly of course is portion control, duh. Eat more and you'll weigh more. I won't say much about that because it's common sense.

In addition, if you stay on your feet all day, you might just see improvement in other areas of your fitness as well, like a good night's sleep. Most of time I just nod and smile empathetically when people tell me how they can't sleep at night because I know, and they know, that all day, they don't really DO anything to make themselves tired. And on top of that, they have two drinks when they get home or they had caffeine after lunch...when I was in college I used to have to get out of bed and pace the dorm in the middle of the night because I had what they call now, restless leg, arm, neck syndrome. I just wasn't tired because I sat on my ass all day and read books and wrote other peoples' papers and I'd have to climb them stairs to stop that weird itch to move!

All right, I'm done.