Call it a loss

I’m not sure why, exactly, but for the first time in as long as I can remember, I actually slept more than 8 hours on a non-work night. Usually the absolute most I can shoot for is 7 hours, but last night I went to bed at around 1 and I didn’t get up until nearly 10.
After talking to my mother I went over to the weight room to work out.
At some point during the workout I aggravated the tennis elbow in my left arm (No, I’ve never played tennis; when I was in college my work-study job was being a custodian. In that profession I engaged in repetitive motions more frequently than the words “Anna Kournikova” are entered in the Google Image Search. Of course, those search results often yield another kind of “repetitive motion” themselves…).
My workout was thus cut short, since my left arm had become a useless lump of flesh, with electric jolts of pain cascading down from my elbow and ending in five extended points of searing agony where my fingers used to be.
I came back home and took a shower. I had been planning to head to the store to pick up a few things. I didn’t need much other than some fruit and some additional ingredients for a meal I was going to try cooking.
Once I got there, though, the pain in my arm just kept building, so after picking up some fruit and grabbing an elbow brace and some Thermacare Heatwraps, I decided to just go home, go back to bed, skip the cooking, and just call the day a total loss.
(As an aside, let me just say that Thermacare Heatwraps ROCK!)
I managed to sleep for another 4 hours, despite the fact that I’d slept for more than 8 hours and had only been awake for about 3.
When I got up most of the pain had gone (Again, Thermacare Heatwraps ROCK!), and I decided that I would, in fact, try cooking.
I walked over to Safeway to pick up what I needed. While I was there the song “It’s Raining Men” was playing in my mind, as the place was just lousy with them. Everywhere I looked it was wall to wall men.
After leaving that sausage factory, I came home and got to work on a meal that took a fair amount of time and effort and wasn’t really worth it. It tasted okay, but wasn’t really anything special.
And that was pretty much my day.
When my elbow blew out on me while I was working out, it led me to wonder “Why am I even bothering?”
Since I began really watching my diet and getting exercise back in May, I’ve lost about 20 pounds and gained about 25.
Granted, given that my waist size has reduced from 34 inches to about 30 inches, and has stayed that way throughout the weight gain process, most of the weight I’ve regained has actually been muscle, but not all of it has.
During the week I carefully watch what I eat. Weekends, not so much, simply because it’s difficult to sit there at work for twelve and a half hours and not snack like crazy. I try (and mostly fail) to make the snacks healthy, but even so, I end up eating more than I’d like.
Despite my failings on weekends, though, between what is, overall, a healthy diet, and a regular regime of exercise, it seems like I should be in better shape than I currently am.
From a subjective viewpoint, despite a few lines of definition that I don’t recall existing before, I don’t think that I look appreciably better.
I’m not that much firmer, either. At best, the one thing I can say is that when I push against the flab, my finger doesn’t sink in quite so far before it hits something solid.
As for feeling better or healthier, for the most part I feel healthier primarily because I quit smoking, and most days I tend to feel sore from working out.
It just seems like I should be seeing a little bit more in the way of results.
After all, there’s no disputing the fact that I have put on a significant amount of muscle, and supposedly that muscle should be working to make me even leaner as it feeds on the remaining fat.
However, it seems that inside of my body the muscle and the fat have achieved some sort of detente; neither is gaining ground, and neither is losing ground.
So, coupling that with the fact that, for the most part, exercising serves only to remind me that I’m not getting any younger, which was driven home especially well by today’s experience, I can’t help but wonder why I’m bothering at all.
In a larger sense, though, it leads me to wonder why I’ve bothered making any effort towards improving myelf: getting sober, quitting smoking, getting contact lenses, spending money to get my teeth fixed…hell, even working to save money for my “future.”
Is any of it worth the effort? I can’t eat whatever I want, I have to get up even earlier on weekend mornings before work, I can’t light up a cigarette when I feel stressed, go to a bar and enjoy a nice pint of Guinness, or just randomly buying whatever I feel like buying, and despite what I've done to improve it, my credit rating still sucks.
So what is all of this for? What am I really gaining from my restraint and discipline?
I honestly don’t know.
Well, I learned that Thermacare Heatwraps ROCK, so I guess that’s something, anyway…