AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Exercise program:

I bought one of those generic exercise machines from Wal-Mart. I failed to consider how much space it would take when assembled, so it’s still in it’s box. I also failed to consider how many of the modes would be impractical due to my knee and back problems.

After further consideration, I bought a speed bag. I think working that will help with my upper body in general, specifically the crunchy shoulder and elbow joints. And if I’m going to work up a sweat, beating the hell out of something has its attractions.

I’m also doing some stretching exercises that are derived from tai chi, that are done while seated. “Sitting on a stool and waving your arms like an idiot” doesn’t sound particularly stressful, but my shoulders and back sure complain enough afterward. That’s strictly range-of-motion work, but even the limited repertoire I’m doing have helped.

Does this sound close to your experience with beef? This is the only source (tick) of red meat allergy I’ve come across before.

Alpha-gal syndrome - Symptoms and causes - Mayo Clinic

The trouble with chicken, pork and turkey is that they are monogastric rather than ruminent, so you have to be super careful with your sourcing or you end up with all the vegetable oils they were fed. Farmed fish has similar problems. I don’t know enough about shellfish to have an opinion.

I don’t think you can go far wrong listening to Taubes, he has most things right, imo.

Have you considered body-weight excerises? One advantage is no equipment.

Best as I can tell, no. I’m not allergic to pork, and I’m mildly to seriously allergic to most vegetables.

The wife just got off the phone with the allergist, they’ve bumped the appointment out a couple of weeks.

Stay dedicated. Remember it took you a time to accumulate that size and it will take some time to get it off . Clean up your diet, reduce your calorie intake to match your activity level. Good luck. Don’t give up.

Have you come across the Croissant diet ?

[googles] Looks like most of them would be impossible due to the knee problems, and most of the rest due to the hernia.

There’s a lot of stuff I can do *after* surgery. It’s getting to that point that is the problem.

Not getting a warm fuzzy from that web site. Closed the tab after a giant pop-up obscured the text.

What about walking? Can you walk a reasonable distance or is that hard?

I didn’t get a popup but I rarely do because pihole + ublock origin.

It links a podcast describing it (which I haven’t watched/listened to)

Brad Marshall’s The Croissant Diet Experiment Findings

and a youtube video (which is the same podcast, I think)

I can make it about a hundred yards with the cane, slowly and with occasional rest stops. The left knee will be swollen and painful the rest of the day. The right knee isn’t as bad yet. The left joint is *gone*, it’s just bone ends grinding against each other.

On a bad day, which is becoming more common, I have to use the crutches, and I can’t go nearly as far. Making it to the bathroom in a timely manner is not a guaranteed thing.

The knee degeneration has slowly progressed since 2005-ish, when it first became a problem. I owned my own business, which involved a lot of time on my feet. My “work day” kept getting shorter and shorter, spread across weekends, and eventually splitting into two or three work blocks per day. Productive-hours-per-week kept dropping until I was just treading water after overhead. I was in the process of shutting the business down when I got sick in 2018. And after that… the long illness and recovery meant I seldom left the house, so I didn’t realize that things had gotten *much* worse until recently.

This shit sucks when you’re 19 years old. Well, the meatware insists it’s 63, but who asked its opinion?

My Pi Hole didn’t catch it. Probably time for an update. Unfortunately uBlock doesn’t support my preferred browser.

I suppose, luckily, exercise isn’t required to lose weight.

If you think about keto though, it’s mostly energy - in the form of fat - and you don’t need that (you’re carrying it, through probably lots of unsaturated fats if you’ve been eating those, which aren’t ideal).

Have you considered a protein sparing modified fast? Chicken breast mostly would be the food of choice. It’s low in nutrients, so you can only do it for so long but your could supplement your way to a bit longer.

If you did that you’d effectively be doing keto but using your own fat in place of ingested fat.

ublock (origin) works on Firefox and Chrome (and it’s variants) but isn’t needed on Brave and Vivaldi. Epiphany has it’s own thing which isn’t as good. I don’t know with Safari.

My desktop workflow is built around Konqueror, even though KDE has been slowly removing its file management components. It’s so much faster than Chrome or Firefox that I put up with its occasional inability to render some other-browser-specific page. When I have to fire up a lesser browser for some particularly annoying site, it’s like the old days on dial-up.

Mrs. Andy has the grocery budget. After going over the diet several times, she bought the next two weeks’ groceries. The usual TV dinners, plus several kinds of ice cream, and a box of Ding Dongs. Basically, everthing except what I specified.

I more or less expected that. It’s an ongoing marital issue.

Looks like the marriage will get stress-tested. I’ll be moving to the Project House soon.

Well Konquerer is the basis for all these other browsers (except firefox currently). It has adblocking built in right? So you can just add a filter list, like Easylist.

Hard to change your diet when you don’t control the food.

All the following is with full respect AndyJ. The following is intended to help motivate you a bit.

I’ve had 5 knee operations in the last 5 years - one of them being a partial knee replacement - so I know a little about how painful and debilitating it can be as I could barely walk, but the bottom line is that you have to decide you want to do something then find a way to do it without letting anything get in your way. I found a way to get back to competitive soccer even after ten surgeons told me I’d never run again. I can still run a sub 5 second 40. You can do anything you want to do, you just have to not accept any excuse or reason why it can’t happen - that’s the hardest part right there.

For exercise, you can do a lot without knees and I suspect that if you can get your weight down, your knees will feel a lot better. You could get a set of 3lb dumbbells, or whatever weight, and do lateral raises, overhead presses, curls, tricep kickbacks… the list is endless. You can do low intensity abs work in a variety of different ways. You can still work legs without knees working well - side steps with bands, standup and sit down 50 times a day, use a lot of ice. Search up some YouTube knee rehab exercises - there are plenty of ones that I suspect you can handle - then do them lightly - like PE, this is going to be a long process.

Just get your heart rate up a bit each day and burn a few extra cals. It also has the addictive side effect of releasing endorphins which will make you feel better all the way around. You’ll sleep better too. I use Fitocracy to track all my workouts - it’s a buggy PoS, but it has a social aspect and it helps to motivate me.

You mentioned earlier that you tried a dietician, but it didn’t work. Why? Did they put you on an unrealistically restrictive diet for example? It all comes down to burning more calories than you take in - which I fully understand can be extremely painful. When I’m dieting (like now) and on a heavy restriction of some sort, I rely on water to make me feel fuller - not the same as ice cream or ding dongs, but it gets me by. I used MyFitnessPal to track everything I eat - there are plenty of good ones, but it really helps to see where your macro counts (Protein, Carbs, Fat).

The one point I’d like to stress above all is not to give up - you will fail - keep trying and eventually you will get there.

Well guy it seems you have only 2 choices; either you get your knees fixed and go out and live and lose weight or stay heavy until the weight kills you. At your age unless you eat like a bird for a year or two you won’t take off enough weight without exercise to make a difference.

Konqueror’s adblock function broke more than a year ago, and the developers don’t seem interested in fixing it. I t think Konqueror is on the death list. Most current distributions don’t even some with Konqueror nowadays, which is a sad thing for what was the first and main part of KDE.

I rely on the Pi Hole for the ad blocking grunt work; I used KDE’s built-in blocker to get rid of emoticons, animated .gifs, and other annoyances as-needed.