Heavy

I found out I was 64kg today.

That made me feel very bad. I went downstairs and opened the fridge and took out a bar of Elvan chocolate and finished that, and then I opened the larder and took out a bag of sugared cookies and finished that, and then I went to the dining room and opened a packet of Mentos and sucked on that.

Then I was better so I watched the Olympics until I felt thinner, and then I went back upstairs to stare at my Physics textbooks for the next four hours.

Which is all a lie.

But here's the sad fact: my lie isn't too far from the truth. Over the past 2 months I had been doing all of the above, only over the space of weeks, not hours. I hadn't been to the gym, played Judo or ran in those 60 days, and I had a bad shock when I stepped on the scales in the afternoon.

Let me clarify. Weighing yourself isn't as easy as jumping on a scale and screaming your head off. I stripped down to my underwear and distributed my weight evenly on the metal surface, and then I stared as the meter swiveled up, up past the 60 kg mark and onwards to the half-point. I was in my parents' bathroom - a completely weird thing to do and probably even weirder had they barged in. Imagine finding your teenage son near naked and staring at an analog meter.

Totally freaky.

(Oh and by the way, if you ever get the opportunity to play at a national level Judo tournament be sure to bring nice underwear. The weighing-in ceremony takes place in a roomful of opponents, random coaches and fierce-looking officials - in your underwear - so it makes sense to leave your pink playboys at home. I find it really distracting to fight against a guy in a thong - don't you?)

So anyway I found out I was 64 kg. Which meant that I was 4 kg overweight. I figured that at least 2 kg of that was water (I sweated out as much the last major tournament), and since I had not being gaining muscle in the past 2 months .... the other 2 kg was fat.

Damn.

I started running. I knew what I was getting myself into, but I strapped on my shoes and plugged in my iPod and got my dog all excited at the prospect of a walk. She rushed out wag wag wag. Poor girl.

And everything came back to me quickly. The slap of rubber on cement, the steady thump of beats from my earbuds, the smell of sweat as it trickled down my chin. And the pain! Oh how welcomed the pain was! A burning sensation reached out from inside my chest and spread its fingers down, past my solar plexus, stabbing right into the stomach muscles. It hurt so badly! Breathe. Stabofpain. Breathe. Wobbly legs. I thought back to the afternoons being yelled at by Sensei and kept at it.

The idea behind running is to maintain a rapid pulse, and to keep at it for a good period of time. 1 kg, for instance, takes approximately half an hour of aerobic running to burn. And my metabolic rate had skyrocketed after training this year - while my training intensity had gone down my hunger hadn't. I can now eat two packets of rice and still forage for cookies. D'oh.

I came back and stripped down and weighed myself again. The analog meter swung right up, up, past the 60 kg mark, and it settled at ... 64.

Dammit I'm fat.