I haven't been doing Karate. I'm never sure how long I'll be staying here, so I don't want to make any commitment, and when I don't have a form of income, I don't want to be draining my savings. I've been doing some light exercises on a daily basis. Nothing much, just 30 pushups, 30 situps, 30 leg raises. I don't always remember, but I have to say I do it at least every other day. I didn't think it would make a substantial difference, but to my surprise, the exercises have become less difficult for me. If I was really going for fit, I'd increase the difficulty, but honestly, right now I'm just playing maintenance.
Eating healthier, too. Don't know why it's easier for me now. Maybe it's because I'm sick of starchy foods after putting down so much rice and toh, so now appreciate fruit and vegetables more. I also don't have too much to think about, other than my health.
I've got a pair of dress pants which were two sizes too small before I started Katimavik, but which I could wear afterwards, but not when I started CWY, but I could after that program as well. My goal is to stay capable of wearing those pants.
I think it's mostly dietary. I mean, I exercised a lot before I left for CWY, but I was plump. I'm pretty confident I was exercising substantially more then, than I am now, actually. Put on muscle, but didn't do so much to remove fat. I was a big, fat, muscular manly-man. Now I'm a bit slimmer, and I think the difference is more my dietary habits than my exercise ones. After all, I subtracted my level of activity, but increased my good nutritional habits. I'm going to say that between those two changes, decreasing my level of activity isn't the one that made me lose weight. That leaves eating habits.
I gain/lose weight so fast in comparison to other people. I inflate and deflate like a balloon. So far as I can tell from watching other people trying to lose/gain weight, it usually doesn't happen very fast, but here I am, toggling between a 30 pound range. I don't know what's up with that.
Yo yo yo, I found a hair in my beard that isn't the same colour as the rest of my beard! Funfact: oftentimes, people will have singular strands of hair in their beards that are different colour to the rest of their hair. I know a guy with natural red highlights in his beard, and I have both blonde and red ones in mine. Thing is, this hair I found... WAS WHITE!
I'm telling myself that it's platinum blonde. If I turn out to be greying and balding at the same time when I'm 22... I'm gonna shave my face and head. Seriously, what's going on? I'm ageing badly or something. I still feel fit and full of energy... I don't feel any less vital... I'd arguably say I'm sort of at my physical pique right now. But it looks like I'm ageing at an accelerated rate. If this keeps going, I'll be dead from old age in ten years.
My brother's taking Karate now. He started it in his school, which struck a deal with one of the local dojos to do a class that can net them a physical education credit, like gym. Now he's got the credit, and a few stripes on his belt.
But the dojo took it in their fancy to offer Karate scholarships to the most talented students at this school. Well, guess who's getting free classes? Yeah, my brother's like a Karate genius or something.
By the time I'm out of college, this guy could be ahead of me! If he stays dedicated, he could be a belt above me in two years.
I don't know why they don't offer martial arts as an equivalent of physical education in high school more often. I know a lot of people who aren't into traditional gym classes, but who are interested in the martial arts. Right now, you can skirt the physical education credit prerequisite by putting off taking any gym classes until Grade 11, and then doing some kind of healthy active living course that's held in-class.
I kind of appreciate making that an option, for those who really hate Phys Ed, but I feel like it's a last resort. That's why I also like that they make it a little bit inconvenient. You aren't going to just drop gym because you're indifferent, you've got to actually have some resentment as motivation if you want to dodge it. But I think that teaching people about the relevance of physical activity, and getting people actively involved in it, is ideal.
I didn't dodge gym class, but I certainly never appreciated the merits of physical activity until I started doing Karate, which was after high school. I don't think gym is taught very well in high school, which is too bad...
Anyway, martial arts is easily just as physically stimulating as more traditional sports and activities, and I would have definitely shown interest had that option been available back in the day.
Here's more photos. I've run down my family, and now I'm doing randoms.
Isn't this photo absolutely radiant? I never learned her name, but she was one of the more savvy kids. She realized that my camera sucked, and so when she asked me to take a photo of her, instead of demanding that I find it for her, she'd say "Don't worry about it. Thanks for taking my picture!" and she'd skip off. It kind of wounded me that she never got to see how well this one came out.
This kid's name was something like "Dih-dih". He was the one who bestowed on me the nickname "Ali the Giant". At first, people tended to favour calling me "Elephant", but over time, the general populace settled more on Giant. I still had my niche that never called me anything but Elephant, but in the end, Didih's nickname was the most prevalent.
This is Mody. I used to tease him by pretending I didn't know his name properly, and called him "Mobily", which means "car" in Bambara. After a while, the other kids started calling him Mobily, and he would introduce with that title. This guy was a little bit on the rough side, but he helped out with the younger children a lot.
A Canadian girl from my group, Alex, with two of the children from her host family. Her children were some of the first to ask what my Canadian name was. They mistook my last name, "Sibbald" for "Sei bonne" which means "is good". They all thought it was hilarious and would call me "Gryphon Sei Bonne" all the time. I've had worse nicknames than "Gryphon is Good".
Girl on the right is Soongura, the one in the middle I don't know, and the one on the left I don't know. The middle and right ones used to come hang out with my family regularly, and I'd interact with them. I feel bad that I never found out what Star Earring Girl's name was, considering how much I talked to her, but that's an awkward question to just throw down after you've interacted for a certain length of time. None of the Canadians in my village area knew her name, either.
The thing that tends to depress a lot of adults is what you've discovered: losing weight basically means controlling what you eat. I can't even tell you the number of people I know who thought they could just work out and get the figure they wanted. Uh-uh. You can train your body to do amazing things and still carry a ton of weight.
ReplyDeleteIt's physics ... well, all most people need to know about it is the math part. (If you get into units of heat, most people zone out and wait until you give them numbers.) 3500 calories = 1 pound. Want to lose a pound? You have to burn 3500 calories more than you consume.
Now, a lot of people don't even need 3500 calories in a day (you might be an exception: taller guys, especially ones who are moderately active, do need more calories), so they can't cut 3500 calories in a day. Fine, they say, I'll work it off. So they start exercising, and maybe there's a bit of a change at first, but it eventually levels off, and they're like what happened? Then they look up how little you actually burn when you exercise, and they begin to understand. I mean, I've done some long rides on my bike, and I still only burn 600 calories per hour at most ... and that's working hard. (And of course you have to balance weight loss and strength training, plus you have to consider the length of the ride. If I'm doing a four-hour ride, I have to consume at least enough calories to make it through the ride - that might be 120-160 calories per hour.)
So yeah, you stumbled onto that part of the equation, which is good. It's always easier to change that stuff while other things are changing. Falling into a routine is easy when it happens and hard to break out of.
I would guess that your weight probably varies more than other people's because you're taller and so will require more calories in general. When you're eating more, that makes more of a difference; when you're carefully, you can cut out more calories than, say, I could at about 174 cm. (I should be consuming about 2000 calories a day. Of course I'm a lot older, so all other things being equal, I'd need fewer calories anyway.)