So I haven’t gone to the gym in what is quickly becoming a week. It isn’t that I don’t want to go, but since quitting my job, I just haven’t had the time.

Sound weird? Well, that’s because I am doing a lot of freelance work for people in hopes of making some money but it is taking up huge blocks of time and concentration right now. Soon, I will be starting a new full time job which will hopefully help get me back into a stable routine.

I do have another small excuse though as the gym I go to isn’t twenty-four hours a day during the week from now until September. I can’t wait until they are open pretty much all of the time again so I can go whenever the mood and energy hits me, be that at two in the afternoon or two in the morning.

So, I just wanted to come back on here and let you all know that like all of my weight loss attempts, I fell out of doing what was right for me and my body. I started focusing so much on work, that health and fitness were pushed aside.

I am back up to 255 pounds, and feeling really depressed about the whole thing. I thought having a slow, long term goal, a gym membership and this blog to hold me accountable would be enough to keep my weight loss on track. I even had some very supportive friends (I am looking at you specifically Tom), but I wasn’t able to keep on course.

I have started feeling the fitness bug again, and have been going to the gym every other day for the last two weeks. It is slowly starting to become habit and I feel weird when something comes up and I can’t go.

Some ways that I have made going to the gym more fun is bringing my laptop to watch movies, bringing the iPod for music, grabbing an FM receiver so I can listen to the televisions at the gym, and working on reading some novels, all while I am on the bikes or the treadmill.

I have found that I can quickly lose track of time, and also how fast I am going. Recently, one of the owners of the gym came over and let me know that I had to slow down, as I was pushing my heart rate way too high. I think she was afraid I was going to stroke out, but I was listening to some fast paced alternative music and was really feeling the energy.

My goal is still the same. I want to get down to just under 200 pounds, but I have decided to revise my goal to not have such a firm date. I am going to start a food log (something I absolutely hate doing) as well as keeping track of exactly what I do at the gym, so I can work on improving slowly, but consistently. I am also going to buy some dumbbells for home, so that when the mood strikes me to get in another small bit of exercise, there isn’t anything in my way with regards to doing so.

Lastly, Sabine and I have been carrying on with our evening strolls. We have tripled the length of them, some of which now last an hour or two, rather than the thirty minutes or so that they used to be. Surely, this should mean some extra calorie burning.

The biggest issue I am having right now is dietary. I love junk food, and as I increase my exercise, my cravings for it also go up, and with my personal willpower feeling pretty low, I am having the fight of my life to make sure that I eat healthier.

For me, being sad or depressed can have one of two effects on my eating. I either binge eat with no end in sight or stave off food until I am absolutely starving and make bad choices.

Recently, I have been going through a rough time emotionally, and have gained back some of the weight I had been losing which only feeds the negative emotions. Thankfully, I am lucky enough to have an amazing group of friends and family help me through all of this, but it is still frustrating to have gained back weight that you had hoped to shed forever.

How do I work at stopping my emotions from controlling my eating? It is something I will definitely have to research.

One of my favourite sources for news is Canoe.ca. I jump over to that site two or three times a day to see what they’ve put up and today, I almost removed them from my daily feed due to an article they decided to highlight heavily in their main featured stories block regarding being fat.

Entitled Why’d You Let Yourself Get So Fat?, here is a short bit from the article:

I just don’t get it.

Why do people let themselves get fat?

There’s no possible excuse for not knowing how bad it is to be overweight.

Diabetes, heart disease, on and on. Just a great big drain on the health system.

Nobody admires a fat person. Nobody sees a fat person as attractive.

A fat person walks in the room, everybody looks and thinks, “my, he or she is fat.”

All kinds of assumptions are made. And you know what? Most of those assumptions are probably right.

The fat person lacks discipline, lacks self-control.

I couldn’t believe that Canoe would allow their site to be the host of such ridiculous, idiotic writing. While the comments have been a buzz with people both criticizing the writer and defending him, I feel like the tone of the article leans towards mean, and lacks the empathy that is needed with regards to situations such as this.

I have struggled with obesity, and I don’t need anyone to rub such things in my face. His post belittles the effort I am putting into my weight loss and just makes me angry. Maybe that was his intention, but I don’t believe that Canoe should support such small minded people on their platform.

At a few different points in my life, I thought about joining the Canadian Armed Forces. Once as a summer job to earn money for college, and twice as a viable means of using what I had learned in College to make some money, but I have been overweight longer than I can remember, and the skinniest points in my life have been while training to get into the Military, and even then I was overweight.

I ran across an interesting article on Slate, which talks about the US Army’s stance on overweight recruits.

Because of increasing obesity rates in the United States, the Army’s standards now disqualify a large percentage of the population. A study conducted by Army researchers found that 27.1 percent of the 18-year-olds who applied to join the military in 2006 were overweight—up from 22.8 percent in 1993. Weight is by far the most common medical reason why potential recruits are rejected from serving. And while prospective enlistees can try to make weight before their official screening—often with the support of eager recruiters—the pool of eligible young adults remains smaller than the Army would like.

In the end, it looks like the Army is allowing overweight recruits in based on their ability to do important jobs, but then sometimes filter them out based on their inability to get to the ideal weight.

It is an interesting issue, and one that will become more pressing as the fighting age men and women of the highly developed countries get fatter and fatter.

Sometimes, I do wish I had taken on the military lifestyle in part because it might have helped me kick my weight issue, but I don’t think I was ready at that time to be a soldier or to be skinny, and one thing that people don’t realize is that weight loss is definitely a mindset. You can’t be rushed into wanting to lose weight, nor will you be consistently successful if you aren’t in the right frame of mind.