Half dozen extra slices of pizza

Today is an update on how Pierini Fitness is doing in the middle-aged man lean and mean department.  He’s shared before, relatively-recently, how he got dead serious last August and decided to reclaim his middle-aged man leanness.  His mission was accomplished on February 20^th and the good news is there’s been no relapse of the scale inching up with higher weight readings.

This is a problem for many middle-aged men who embark on a fitness or weight-loss project.  They work their behinds off, achieve their goal and then relax, essentially going back to the old behavior that got them out of shape and overweight. 

Pierini Fitness has got to be honest; he’s slipped a time or two in his middle-aged man time zone and got what he deserved:  less than peak conditioning and the appearance of being a middle-aged man fat boy.  Read my lips, “Never again!”

He’s promised himself the way he’s now is the way he’ll be when they carry him out feet first.  His pall bearers are going to love him because his casket will be lighter.

What he’s learned from hanging out at a popular fitness discussion forum having a decent following of those who have lost weight (known as maintainers or being in maintenance) is that, for many, being in maintenance is more challenging than being in the zone of working off weight.  While Pierini Fitness has not experienced this challenge, he sees how it could be true.  Drop your guard and you’re more likely to get sucker punched.

Part of lasting success comes from changing his relationship with food to that of fuel for his body and lifestyle activities engine.  Fuel plus full (as in being full) equals food is what he now constantly reminds himself.  It’s not a drug of choice to deal with middle-aged man boredom, sooth his soul or his fragile emotional self; it has never really been to the best of his belief, but more of a means by which to practice being a glutton. 

This new paradigm of food is fuel helps him make better decisions about what he’ll eat or whether to eat.

He eats more when exercising more such as, for example, the once a week when he takes a 60-minute run.  That run burns about 700 calories, so he’ll ramp up his eating by about the same number of calories. 

Having worked his tail off for over six months to reclaim his middle-aged man lean and mean fighting weight, he doesn’t want to do it again because it’s too much hard work.  Therefore, he’s constantly on guard to protect the discipline built during his current fitness, health and wellness journey, looking for any behavior indicative of relapse that if not kept in check would easily send him back to eating more than what’s needed to fuel his body and lifestyle activities.

He doesn’t want to be known as an over-nourished middle-aged man, even if cardiovascular-conditioned and fit, who carries his fat well.

Pierini Fitness likes being lean and mean at around 170 lbs. dripping wet it’s easier to run and crank out pull-ups and bar dips than when he weighed a tenth of a ton.  

He also likes the way his 64-year young middle-aged man body looks more than a half dozen extra slices of pizza.

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum