Ugly Pictures

Ugly Pictures 

Sunday, July 31, 2011 

The title should be fair enough warning. If you can't handle ugly, don't look. 

My sister keeps a series of monthly pictures that show her progress. That's a cool idea. so today I set out to learn how to take a picture of myself. Turns out my relatively inexpensive digital camera can be set for a 10 second delay, and my daughter had given me a tripod for the camera. So, after a few shots to learn where the camera was pointing, I took a mug shot:

The striking thing about taking a picture of myself was that the roll of fat around my middle looks worse than it does when I look in the mirror. Hm, I wonder. Why is that? Is it all in my head, or do I suck in my belly unconsciously because I know I'm looking? 

So I tried a few shots of flexing muscles. They looked really hokey, and I don't really care about bicep size anyway. I settled on trying for a front and side view of the top position from a kettlebell snatch. The first attempts showed me with my arm bent a little and not as far up as it ought to be. 

Here's the shots with cleaning up that form after the first feedback: 

To my eye, those don't look as bad as the mug shot; but they're bad enough. There is no question about it, even stretched out with the tension of supporting a 35 lb. kettlebell, I show a lot of fat around the belly. 

Here's the part that I find interesting. I weighed in today at 192.4 pounds. That's a minor fluctuation up from yesterday's low. I remember being this weight when I was trying to become fit and just trust the weight to take care of itself without having to watch what I ate. I felt pretty good, I could deadlift 225 pounds for reps, and I wondered if I'd ever consistently be under 190 again. The BMI numbers said I should get down to 182 or 183 to be at the top of healthy BMI, and I wondered whether I had too much muscle for that to be practical. 

Well. I'm not feeling too shabby right now. I took most of a year off from fitness, but apparently it wasn't all the way off. I stilled played with my kettlebells a little, inconsistently went for walks and bike rides, and participated in my only road race of each year, the 3.5 mile Chase Corporate Challenge. Getting back into things after finding (read: being pushed at) SparkPeople, the fitness part is coming back pretty easily. The first test of deadlifts found me lifting 185 pounds for reps. Yeah, I've lost some strength; but not that much strength. Today's pics shouldn't be all that different from what I would have looked like when I was at my fittest around 190 pounds. 

It looks like my goal of 175 isn't all that unrealistic. It looks like I used to kid myself about how much muscle weight I had added from pumping iron. I look incredibly fat for how good I feel. 

 I wonder how bad I would have looked if I'd taken pictures when I weighed 221?