How I Met The Dom

So, as you may know Dom is my best friend from college. We met our freshmen year about 7 years ago.

Starting college I was a very very much different person than I am now. I wasn't quite all put together and had a stress induced facial tick. I was starting college and had a Freshman Seminar class called "Romantic Visions." This particular lecture was about "Big R Romanticism" which is about flowers trees and the sort of beauty and wonder of nature.

The class seating arrangement was a circle so from the get-go you knew that it would be pretty big on discussions and sharing. I was a huge fan of those sorts of classes because I could kind of BS my way through anything.

I was one of two commuters in the class. The other commuter ended up dropping the class so it was just me. The very very first day of class I was pretty nervous. My facial tick was out in force because of it and I was concentrating like hell on trying to stop it. I was failing but I did my best. Now across the room there was a cute girl and she was making highly intentional faces at me. So naturally this turned into a huge huge back and forth of one-ups-manship. Eventually the whole thing ended with Dom reaching behind her head, and making a "piggy nose" and Professor Venturo noticed which caused a sheepish grin on her part.

At this point I needed to hatch a plan to solidify the whole "remember me" thing so that even after class she'd have a reason to keep me in her mind. I used to be quite the evil genius when it came to flirting. So I tare out a piece of paper from my notebook and draw a woefully abysmal stick figure making a grotesque face. I then added the words "I win" at the bottom. I fold it up quickly and hatch the rest of my plan.

The class had been watching us the whole time and most of them were wondering how we had met and how long we had known each other. Dom naturally handled that with "We haven't been formally introduced."

I then introduce myself and press that square of paper into her hand and slipped away. I kind of figured that she'd be far too sheepish to open it up right then. I was right and I knew she'd open it up later. She did :) and we're still friends to this day.

Today we had dinner at the Indian place we had in Princeton called Tandoori Bite which we found and is really quite good. Lo and behold seated about 10 feet to our left was Professor Venturo. So before we left we went over and said hi.

He remembered us.
Me:"Hi we just had to stop over and say hello, we met in your Romantic Visions class 7 years ago."
Prof V:"Oh yes... Bryce right? And Dominique, you two were making faces at each other and I....:
Dom: "Was kind enough not to kick us out of class? Yes that's us!"

Some bad bad dieting and p90x explained

So I've been a bad bad Primal Blueprint follower.

Things I've been doing wrong:

1. Lots and lots of ice cream.
No really when I say lots of ice cream I mean I've been managing to kill about 3-4.5 quarts of ice cream a week. This is horrible. I can only imagine how out of round my insulin levels and blood sugar has been. I'm sure that I've been throwing myself in and out of ketosis but on the bright side I've been able to keep up with the workouts.

2. Falling into generally worse eating habits.
I've been sneaking more carb heavy foods recently. Today was some absolutely fantastic bssmati rice with some Chicken Tikka Masala. And my cheat days have started working up their ways from the single meals that I was down to and back up to one heck of a day. And especially considering that I've been cheating during the week with the ice cream....

3.Eating less Veggies
I've either been pretty tired at the end of a work day, especially if I did P90x in the morning, or I end up doing p90x when I get home from work. So I'm way way short on frozen veggies and I haven't made kale (super nutrient rich) in far too long. I really need to suck it up and eat more veggies, and a bigger variety like I did back when this was all new and I was trying new recipes every week and Dom was cooking up super yummy treats every now and again.

So what is P90x
A 90 day work out plan that involves very very intense hour-ish long work out videos that push you to your physical max. There are lots of different exercises, some basic, some not so basic that involve not just weights and reps, but body weight and ensuring that you work your muscles with a weight that challenges them to an appropriate level of reps (8-10) and when not using weight that you push yourself to exhaustion.

P90x is a series of workout videos that are intense.... very intense, on a level of intensity that if you're not at the very least in decent shape will leave you gasping and panting, and most likely be unable to keep up with the whole workout. I've been going at it with having to make some seriously heavy modifications in some places. I work myself so hard during the chest and back exercises that I end up needing to do push-ups on my knees for some parts, and even then I can barely manage to do those stupid diamond push-ups.

Ideally after I finish up these 3 months I won't need to do this again. A quick google of "p90x before and after" give a great smattering of the sort of changes one can achieve when working themselves like that. After I reach that level I'd like to be able to ease into a Primal Blueprint fitness approved exercise plan and maintain the majority of my gains. We'll have to see how it goes.

What the... P90x

So I've decided that I was feeling good enough and healthy enough to do something very high intensity and hard on my body. Then seeing as I've had the P90x videos and documents for years I am finally in a place that I can use them.

This is currently the very beginning of the 3rd week for me. I have however realized that I wasn't doing the correct Day 3 exercises.... So seeing as I've been feeling like a million bucks for the past 2 full weeks of this insane regimen I've decided that I'll just re-start from week 1 and make sure I do the proper stinking days this time. I think I'll actually make sure that I fill out the worksheets this time as well. Even though I can see some serious difference in muscle definition already I really think that re-starting it will be great for me. I'm a slow learner when it comes to the proper movements so it's nice to get a "second chance" and to top it off I've gotten to use these past couple weeks as good old pre-training for stamina.

I'm still not really sure how good an idea the whole p90x thing is over all. I've been eating more than usual (no shock or surprise there) but I've been going through carbs, and the current carb of choice is ice cream. I'm also currently trying out ursolic acid in the form of holy basil extract to prevent muscle catabolism. I have no idea how I'll know if it works, especially because I'm not taking nearly the amount (on a mg/lb) ratio that the mice did but even if it works a little bit.

I really should do the full on before and after pictures that are suggested, I have one of those douchey mirror ab shots from a monthish ago and compared to one I took from a couple days ago there's a noticeable difference, small... but noticeable.

I know this isn't a terribly coherent entry, but I haven't blogged in forever and I need to just get some stupid thing out there so that I'll hopefully get into a rhythm or get more consistent, or something.

Where oh where have I been?!

I've been around :) I'll give a basic fleshing out of what I've been up to but I'll really need to take the time and give a proper update on some certain things.

 So from June 13th to 25th was 1 week of preparing for Boys' State and one week of actually being there. This year was a super super busy and I took on a whole lot more responsibility than I have previously and I feel like I really really helped to make a difference. After 8 years of volunteering for the organization I was eligible to become a trustee in the New Jersey Boys State Foundation a 501(c)(3) charitable not-for-profit organization working in partnership with the American Legion Department of New Jersey to maintain American Legion Jersey Boys State tuition-free to its delegates by helping off-set the escalating costs of running the program. I've been working with the foundation since my first year on staff and I managed to be voted in as a trustee in my first year of eligibility. This is a huge deal to me and really encourages me to work harder for both organizations than I have before.
The week was pretty standard over all. However this year in particular the food was worse than I've ever seen, and especially given my new no-grains policy it made it nearly impossible to eat anything other than salad and deli "meat"! So naturally I ended up cheating.... but not with grains! My go-to meal was a huge plate of broccoli, some balsamic.... and ICE CREAM. I probably had a pint and a half of ice cream a day.  Despite all this and the cheating that I ended up doing (I was in no way perfect and still had a cheat day friday) 2 days after the session I was right back to 223.6 and only just .6 lbs above where I started.

It's taken me a good bit of time to get my wits back about myself, trying to catch up on the food shopping I missed and all of the cleaning that needed to be done. I did manage to complete two outstanding projects in this time away as well. I now have a water filter on the whole darn cold water line to my kitchen sink, so all of the nice cool water coming out is filtered of all the nasty nasty yuck yuck that it used to have!
In addition to the cold water filter I also put in a bath fan which ended up being a bit more of a project than I planned where I found out that my soffit vents are fake and just covering up shitty wood that should have been yanked to give my attic worlds better air flow.
I'll add a short post with pictures of these two projects at a later date.

Today however, was a lawn day. I have been terribly remiss in mowing and it had become nearly un-manageable. I usually like to just leave the clippings where they lay but I would have had to mow at least 3 or 4 times to have that work out so I decided that I would just bag, overall it worked out pretty well but took about twice as long and I still had to go quite slow. While I was just finishing up the back yard Dom came home and was playing around with her new camera (sadly ended up being defective).  She grabbed some shots of me trying to jump and reach a toy of Herbie's a got stuck in some branches. Naturally that turned into me being a quick model and I've attached two other shots that I think came out well below. I'm amazed at how much weight I've lost.... looking back at pictures of myself from January it's super hard to believe!

Clearly still a decent bit that I'd like to use, but I'm impressed as hell with the progress!
Before Photos for comparison.

I'll be trying to catch up on reading blogs tomorrow and I'll try and get some comments in as well.

Animal Abusers should burn & Shadow the Lucky Puppy

Sort of....

Click below for a little bit more info and some pictures.

More adorable Herbie

This is the only way that I've found to be able to tire Herbie out when she doesn't get to go run around the farm with Dom. Usually this would go on for between half an hour and an hour.

(You)Tube Thursday

I didn't get the chance to finish the blog entry that I wanted to so I figured that I'd post up a super cute video of Herbie after I exhausted her outside with a game of "chase-tug-tag" which really consists of me running around with her rope letting her catch it then playing tug of war, then chasing her when she manages to get it. I also work in some give/sit/stay drills so she isn't just a wild beast.

Healthy Living: How setting proper goals got me where I am.

I find myself constantly writing these "healthy" posts and getting mired in the first two sentences. Constantly re-writing them because they're not cited or as well researched as I'd like. In an effort to stop that and re-affirm that I'm presenting "The World as I see it" I'd like to start with a basic but incredibly important subject.

Goals.

Feel free to read all of it below or skip to the very best bottom for some useful rules to follow for setting proper goals!

Silent Sunday

Movie Review and a cheat Day!

So yesterday was yet another beautiful but warm day after nearly a week of overcast, wet but not endearingly so days. Seeing as we had to cancel game night yet again this week Dom and I decided to have a couple people down and and go to the movies.
We wanted to see the new Pirates movie and so off we went. The most convenient showing was a 3d showing. I was a little leery of seeing it in 3d because it just didn't seem like a 3d movie.

Click below to continue reading about the movie and my cheat day.