How Watching Jonah Play Basketball Made Me Lose Weight

One thing I swore I'd never do was count calories.  I always thought that it was no way to live to limit yourself on food.  Besides, I thought, it doesn't matter how much I eat, I just need to exercise enough to maintain a healthy weight.  When I said this, I probably weighed about 215 lbs, which is not terribly pudgy for someone of my size.  Fast forward to 2012, and I'm hovering around the 250 mark.  That is terribly pudgy. 

Jonah's started playing basketball at the Boys and Girls Club.  It's just a skills camp of sorts, but I can already tell that I'm going to annoy the hell out of him with my suggestions and comments.  It's like a constant struggle with me not to jump onto the court and start giving him extra instruction.  I can already tell we're going to have more than a few shouting matches which end with him saying "I got it Dad!" and storming off.  The other issue with this is that basketball is probably the sport I know the most about, and at times I feel like I know more than his coaches.  Not surprising, given that his coaches are a bunch of college kids that are probably doing this for credits or something.  I wasn't that interested in passing my knowledge onto the next generation at that point either.  This led me to an obvious conclusion:  At some point, I'm going to start coaching my son's teams. 

I'm going to have to, because I'm going to want to make sure he learns to play the way I think he should.  If I let someone else coach him, what if they waste too much practice time scrimmaging instead of teaching, or don't teach the kids how to read a defender on a screen?  If that happens, then I'm going to want to take Jonah to the park or something later on and practice with him some more, and then he's going to get burnt out on basketball, blame me, and start hanging out with skateboarders who wear skinny jeans and huff paint from aerosol cans.  Better to just coach him.  It's more efficient. 

While going down this thought path, I had a terrible vision of myself trying to teach a team about a fast break, but having to stop halfway down the court to catch my breath because I was so pudgy and out of shape.  It was this vision that made me decide to count calories for the first time in my life.  I realized that I just didn't have the time to exercise as much or as often as I'd like to.  There's no point in my day where I can justify playing basketball for two hours.  If Jocelyn isn't up at 5:30 when my alarm clock goes off, there's no way I'm going to hop on the elliptical and risk waking her up.  Plus, even if she didn't wake up, I'd still have to workout, shower, make lunch, get both the kids up, change a diaper, get them dressed, make Jonah the chocolate milk he can't start his day without, load up the car and get them to daycare by 7:30 in order to make it to work on time.  It's just not really feasible to me to work out in the mornings.  Evenings are out too.  Pick the kids up after work, play with them, Rachel gets home at 7:15, eat dinner, get the kids to bed and now it's 8:30 or 9 pm.  Then I get to spend about half an hour with my wife before she goes to sleep and I'm not going to start working out then.  And I'm not sure how other people with young children do it, but I don't particularly feel good about saying "I'm going to the gym for a few hours to play ball honey, have fun with the kids!"  I need to save my "bye honey, have fun with the kids" times for the really big things, like a weekend trip to a Beaver football game in Seattle.  Also, weekends are virtually the only time that all four of us get to spend any extended time together, and I don't want to mess with that any more than I have to. 

Which leads me to my dilemma.  Spending time with my family is the most important thing to me right now.  However, if I don't start taking better care of my body, does that decrease the quality of our time together, or perhaps cut short the time I get to spend with my grandchildren 30 years down the road because I'm dead?  It sounds a little ridiculous I know, but there's only one thing that really, truly scares me, and that's dying before I'm ready to go, and I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about it.

All of this was a long way of getting around to saying "I've started counting calories."  I've been doing it for two weeks now, and I'm down 5.3 lbs, so it works.  The last time I seriously tried to lose weight, it took me 40 days to get down 5 lbs, which tells you how "serious" I was about losing it.  I downloaded the MyFitnessPal app for my iPod, which is great in that it gives you a calorie goal for the day, then keeps track of how many you take in and how many you burn through exercise.  The hardest part about this is that I spend most of every day in some level of hunger, but I'm managing.  I'm learning to treat my body like my gas tank - I don't have to top it off every time it's not completely full.  My stomach isn't used to this way of thinking yet, but it's learning.  I've always been an instant gratification kind of guy:  I'm hungry now, therefore I will eat a maple bar and deal with the consequences later.  Conversely, weight loss is a slow, difficult process that you're not going to see a payoff on for months or years.  It's not really how I'm wired.  But, having a daily calorie goal is something that I can sort of relate to.  I don't need to weigh myself every day and watch tenths of a pound drop off.  Instead, I can say "I want to eat pizza tonight, and I want to eat a lot of it.  In order to make my calorie goal, I need to burn X amount of calories working out today.  Now I've got a tangible thing that I can achieve right now.  Someone asked my wife the other day why she exercises so much.  She said "because I like to eat."  I couldn't agree more.  So far, the results have been promising. It goes to show you that you really shouldn't knock anything until you've tried it at least once.

If anyone else has used the MyFitnessPal app, I'd be interested to hear what your experience was like with it.