Posture And Privilege: On Six Months Of Personal Training

Working with a personal trainer for six months requires a whole lot of privilege: the spare cash to hire one. The surplus time to spend a couple of hours a week in the gym. Enough health to be able to get to the gym and work out effectively.

Yet that said, there’s plenty of people who have the levels of financial and physical privilege that I do who didn’t put in the work. So I take a lot of pride in what my wife and I have accomplished in the last six months, even as acknowledging the privilege that lets it happen.

One does not diminish the other.

And damn if it ain’t providing results.

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People keep asking me: “Do you feel healthier?” And the answer is, “I didn’t feel unhealthy to begin with.” I had enough energy to walk the dog about two miles a day and climb flights of stairs when I needed to – as far as I was concerned, I was healthy enough.

As far as my cardiologist was concerned, however, I needed more work.

Actually, I feel less healthy now that I’m working out. Before, I sat in a chair all day long and stared at screens in perfect bliss. Now, I ache about five days a week, the strain from having augmented my lower back or my biceps having become more-or-less a constant in my life. Gini and I have taken to hot baths in the evening because our muscles are both swole and swollen.

If you were to drop me, unexplained, into my pre-training body and my post-training body, I’d think the pre-training body was healthier because it didn’t twinge all the time.

That’s mostly a result of my sedentary lifestyle, but I find it amusing.

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My posture is a huge difference, though. I stand about two inches taller, which is ridiculously obvious in these before-and-after photos.

I always thought that “getting better posture” was just “remember to stand straighter, you klutz” – but as it turns out, the body is all connected. The reason I was slouching is because the muscles under my shoulderblades and my ass were weak, and not pulling me properly into position. My quadriceps had become freakishly oversized to compensate, but I stood like an ape.

You’d think that personal training would be a burly guy screaming at you to lift until you vomit, but that’s not this place. It’s a lot of fine correctives. They’ve been guiding my muscles into position until my shoulderblades pull me up into the proper stance, which is weird; now, when I slump, I feel that rubberband counterpresence tugging me back.

Posture isn’t what I thought it was. My body isn’t, either.

I wonder what’ll happen if I keep with this.

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The weight loss has been accelerated thanks to Gini’s discovering she’s allergic to wheat.

She really doesn’t want to be allergic to wheat, mind you. She keeps sneaking bread and then feeling her face get all blotchy. Which she thought was just “her skin” until she stopped eating wheat.

So we’ve been on a modified paleo diet for the last month – no sugar, minimal carbs, cauliflower rice and zucchini noodles for everyone. (Gini has done all the cooking in an attempt to learn paleo, which is another privilege – I’ve been desperately trying to do more of the housework to make up for her added load, and desperately failing even as she appreciates the effort.)

I don’t know how long we have to do this before (or if) it becomes an actual life change. I still crave sugar, desperately. I want bread. If we go out, I sneak little portions.

But still. I drove cross-country to see my sweetie in New Jersey, and since I was sleepy I went, “YES! I CAN EAT ALL THE SUGAR AND CARBS I WANT TO STAY AWAKE!” And I grabbed a bagful of Hostess, and…

I wanted one Hostess cake. And even that was pretty meh.

Weeks later, there’s still a bag of Hostess in my drawer. (They’ll keep forever.)

So maybe my tastes will change. Or maybe they’ll move away from bad processed sugar – I had a homemade cake and ice cream at a diner that was delicious, and I gobbled it down.

Or maybe I’ll slip back to processed sugar the minute I’m off this diet, like has happened every time before. Addiction’s a bitch, yo, and sugar is an addiction – one that’s hard to break, because unlike smoking or heroin you can’t just quit food. Food’s always around, you always have to have some, and it’s a constant temptation in ways that even alcoholics (who get a LOT of asshole “Why aren’t you drinking?”s) don’t face.

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I hope to have abs before I die. I’ve already got baby lats. I took these photos with my shirt off because I’ve still got flab, but there are muscles peeking up around the edges.

I thought I’d go to my grave without ever having had a six-pack. Now, I might.

It’s an exciting time.

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Still, I do feel weird about posting these pictures because I’ve seen this happen time and time again – people lose weight and everyone goes “WOW YOU LOOK TERRIFIC” because society has taught us that “thin == fit and good and lovely,” even if they’re losing weight because they’re too sick to keep anything down.

(I’ve seen comments of “You look soooooo sexy” when someone’s become emaciated enough to need a feeding tube. Our society’s the one that’s sick, man.)

So in a way, posting these photos contributes to a bit of fat hatred. My sweetie Fox has noted that they adored my body before and adore it now, even as it’s in a different shape. I’d like to think I was sexy before, even if I never feel it.

But now I feel sexier because society says I’m sexier. I’m trying not to buy too much into that. But I am excited by things in my body I’ve never had before, like lats and traps and all sorts of other things that sound like they belong in some AD&D map. My body is doing things it patently couldn’t before, because I see the exercises I did six months ago and they’re now trivial compared to the ones I do now.

It’s a form of change, and I love change, and it is healthier so I stick to it. I worry that some day we’ll stop the trainer due to budget or time or some other form of lost privilege, and then we’ll slide back into the unhealthy habits because man, it is so much easier to sit on the couch and not need hot baths in the evening because whoah did you see those squats?

But for now, like all things, this is transitory. And transitional. And if my body happens to converge with being traditionally, Hollywood-style sexy, then that too will be interesting. I haven’t been skinny since I was 22, when skinny was comparatively easy because my metabolism was a furnace that devoured all calories. Ever since then it’s been a slog and an accumulation.

What’ll happen if I’m genuinely muscular at 50? What’ll that be like? It’s an exciting goal to see what I can do, and maybe it won’t last but I wanna at least max this out like a videogame to see what happens.

Please, Lord, let me have abs just once so I can walk around a public space gratuitously shirtless and not have people give me the side-eye.

I feel that’s a worthy goal.

The First Amazon Order I Ever Placed Was The Death Knell Of My Job

There’s a meme going around Twitter, which I quite like: “Let’s play a game. Go to Amazon, to “Your Orders,” and with the year drop-down, find the earliest year listed… and then RT and tell us what the FIRST thing you ever bought on Amazon was. Bonus points for it being nearly 20 years ago. 🙂 #BabysFirstAmazon”

I didn’t need to look it up.  I vividly remembered my first order from Amazon, because it told me I was going to be out of a job soon.

See, at the time, I worked for Borders Books and Music – the #2 biggest book store in the nation, a rising competitor to Barnes and Noble, and damn proud of how we weren’t just more profitable than Barnes and Noble, we were better.  We were the first to put coffee shops in our stores, we had quizzes we gave our clerks to ensure they’d be educated, we had nicer wood shelves and hefty paper bags.  We were the luxury experience.

And we’d been hearing a lot about this Amazon.com thing.  Dot-coms were a big deal.  And Borders was thinking about getting into the online game – because that was optional then – so they tasked me, the local Internet addict, with placing an order from Amazon, just to report back to the bigwigs what the experience was like.

This was in early 1998.  If you’re paying close attention to timelines, that was already too late – Amazon had been open for four years already.  But we were arrogant, convinced there was nothing some upstart Borders couldn’t do that we couldn’t do better, so we slept on it.  And I should have known better personally, being an Internet nerd, but I was high on Borders’ supply.

I remember sneering as I logged in.  My password for Amazon was, and still is, a preening insult about how superior Borders is – a fact I consider three times a month when I log in to order from Amazon Prime.  And I ordered a CD I’d been thinking about getting – Repeater, from Splitsville.  It was nice to know that I’d be reimbursed for my $13.47.

They told me it’d take 5-7 days for delivery.  “Ha!” I spat.  “Who’d wait that long?”

I got it three days later.

And I remember that package waiting on my doorstep – because packages were kind of a new thing back then.  Most people did almost all of their shopping in real life, because mail-order catalogues were inconvenient and slow.  To have a package on your doorstep had kind of a mystical component to it, because whoah, here were goods delivered to you from afar.

I was thrilled to have something waiting for me.  It had been quick.  And convenient.  (And back then, they’d  always padded their delivery estimates by a day or two so you’d be thrilled when it arrived “early.”)

I remember picking it up, looking at the snazzy, sharp-printed logo on the package – and dammit, I was excited.  I’d been expecting a drab manila envelope, but this was a luxury delivery.  And when I zipped the package open, expecting to find just a CD, it was also stuffed with bright fliers – another surprise.

I don’t remember what those fliers were, but I remember reading them in excitement.

And I remember the shame when I recalled that this was the enemy, I shouldn’t be happy about this delivery – followed by that sinking sensation that if I was this happy, how would ordinary customers feel?

I remember bringing in the entire package in the next day to my bosses, saying, “We have to get into the online business now.  These guys are serious.”  And I remember the way my bosses sifted through the package like it was evidence from some crime scene, nodding sagely, not understanding what this meant.

I left the company in 2000.  They went out of business in 2011.  And I’ve written about the many reasons why Borders never managed to compete online – I gave some insider knowledge of the infighting that doomed Borders.com, and talk here about why generic physical bookstores have a hard time competing with online ones.  (Specialty stores have an advantage.)

But really, it all comes down to that first thrill of the package.  That sense that I’d ordered a CD and gotten an experience to rival Borders.

That first Amazon package told me that Borders was in big, big trouble.  And now, in 2018, Borders has been dead for seven years and Amazon is chugging on.

I’ve kept my Amazon password – the one that shits on Amazon and touts Borders.  I never save that password in my browser.  I make myself log in with that damned password.

It keeps me humble.