The uphill struggle

I figured out that I really don't spend a lot of leisure time in bars--when I'm in one, I'm either playing with my band or slinging drinks. Unfortunately, both of these endeavors facilitate getting more than one or two beers into my mouth. If I had to lay blame on a single contributing factor to ten or twelve years of steady weight gain, it's beer.

There is an obvious solution.

It is actively ludicrous.

It's not impossible for me to quit drinking beer; I did it in 2007 for almost a month, and I also did it for a few weeks in January. During those periods, I also did a lot of jogging, and I lost a noticeable amount of weight. Darth Vato goes on tour in a few days for two weeks; making a healthy routine during that is not a reasonable expectation, but I'm committing to seriously pursuing one when we've returned to the real world.

What a boring post! I hope that if anyone reading this is trying to lose weight, you focus on the regimen and discipline, and also, change your metric. I suggest ignoring the scale and using a measuring tape around your gut or butt or wherever (chins? Can you measure chins? You can certainly count them!) as a bar. While the results are not as immediately dramatic and rewarding as seeing the scale's needle dip a pound or two every few days, losing inches is much more demonstrative of your progress. It helped me last year, and I know it will help me again when I hit it hard in a few weeks.

Steve