generation x is the fattest of them all
Curiosity got the best of me, and I wanted to know which age group has the biggest problem putting down the fork. To no surprise, it's the age group I'm in...
...although you wouldn't know that by looking at me, as my BMI is currently 22.3. On my desk is usually a tall water bottle with a capacity of 700ml (about 24 fl oz) that gets refilled several times a day. Oh yes, I drink water and a lot of it. How much? I don't track it, but I'd guess 2 to 3 liters daily.
What water do I drink? Tap. All I add to it is ice. I drink this for three reasons. Fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to get water.
If I were buying water from the grocery store, I'd have to leave the house, go to the grocery store, get the water, wait in line, pay for the water, cart that out to the car, bring back to the house, drink all the water over a week or whatever, recycle the empty jugs, repeat once weekly...
...or just skip all that, go to the sink, fill my water bottle, add ice and drink. So that's what I do.
And since most bottled or jugged water comes from a local municipal water supply anyway, if I were concerned about the quality of the tap water, I would just get a home distiller to distill the water myself. I mean, sure, there are water filter pitchers and have been for a long time, but to truly get that "bottled water quality" or better, might as well get the distiller to really do it right.
Moving on..
How do I know Generation X is the fattest? I asked AI about it. It said the 40-59 age group is the fattest in America. Supporting articles AI provided were legitimate, so yes, the information was accurate as far as I could tell. Generation X at the time I write this is age 45 to 60. Technically, a little bit of the tail end of Generation Y is in there, but X still has the lion's share for being the fattest.
"Not possible"
There are those who sincerely believe it is extraordinarily difficult to not be fat after 40, and absolutely impossible to not be fat if you're over 50.
I'm over 50, and again, my BMI is 22.3. To put that in perspective, BMI 25 to 30 is fat and BMI over 30 is obese.
At one point in my life, I briefly tripped over into obesity and had a BMI of almost 31. Diet and exercise fixed that. But I didn't drink anywhere near as much water as I do now. My diet has also changed. I eat more greens, more yogurt, keep away from the sweets, and so on.
This doesn't mean I've not had stumbles. At the tail end of last year, I was piling away way too much chocolate, eating terribly, and had put on over 15 pounds. Not good. But now I'm just about back to where I want to be.
Before continuing, BMI 22.0 is as low as I go and no lower. That's a hard limit I set for myself, and it's a good one.
Skinny man problems
The two main problems I have as a skinny man these days are restaurants and "fat guy thinking".
The stomach isn't a muscle, but somewhat acts like one. Eat too much and get fat, and the stomach gets bigger. Eat less and get skinny, and the stomach shrinks.
This is a problem where restaurants are concerned, because all of them serve giant-sized portions for any meal. These meals are designed for big people. I'm not big. I literally cannot fit all that food in my stomach unless I want to eat myself sick, which I obviously don't want to do...
...and this leads to the second problem, fat guy thinking. I spent the majority of my adult life eating way too much, then lost weight and now eat much less food. My stomach is naturally smaller as a result. But to this day, my brain thinks I can still put away a giant plate of food. I see a towering pile of food on a plate and think, yeah, I can totally eat all that. Easy! Nope. Wrong. I can't eat all that, because if I do, I will get sick from overstuffing myself.
Speaking of which, "stuffed" is a feeling I don't like anymore. Being stuffed makes me feel lethargic, tired and slightly sick. In my fat years, I didn't know the difference between stuffed and full. All I knew for the longest time was stuffed. I know what full feels like now, and I can assure you there is a significant difference between stuffed and full.
What I have learned that's stuck with me is to think ahead, as in really consider what will happen after eating certain things.
For example, a doughnut. And not just any grocery store prepackaged crusty crap. A good doughnut that was made that day in a doughnut shop.
Forget the fact the doughnut is at least 300 Calories and completely wrecks staying within a certain Calorie limit for the day. (Depending on what limit you follow, 1 doughnut could be anywhere from 15% to 25% of your daily intake.)
That doughnut, at the mouth, is great. Tastes lovely, and the texture is nice.
After that, it goes down the throat and starts to digest.
It's knowing what happens then that keeps me away from doughnuts.
Eating a doughnut means consuming a baked pile of dough that is effectively a small cake. That dough is going to hit the stomach and stay there for a while. In that dough is a bunch of dough conditioners, sugar, and who knows what else. I know it will not digest well.
The sugar high hits the brain before digestion even begins. Initially, the hit feels good, but not long after that will be a crash. The all too familiar lazy do-nothing feeling sets in and all I want to do is sit somewhere and recover.
All this from one doughnut. But it's not like I'm having just the doughnut. Gotta have the coffee with it because that matches up perfectly with doughnuts. Yeah, let's just eat a cake full of conditioners and sugar and chase that with caffeine. What could possibly go wrong?
I know what goes wrong. A gut full of junk, a momentary sugar high followed by a crash, chased with caffeine so I feel both alert and tired at the same time.
That is a feeling of sick. Being I don't want to feel sick, I don't eat doughnuts.
And that's just one of several "foods" I outright avoid. Don't even get me started on milkshakes.
But this does get me thinking about a question..
Is this natural body rejection or just awareness?
Natural rejection means you could eat certain things when younger, but when older, the body says "don't eat that".
Awareness is what I just talked about a moment ago. Thinking ahead to what will happen after eating things you shouldn't eat.
I think the answer is awareness due to life experience.
In my younger years, sure, I'd pile away all the sodas, pizzas, fast food, cakes, pies, whatever. But when I really think about it, I always felt discomfort after eating any of that. Being I was young, I didn't know any better. If I got indigestion, trapped air or anything like that after eating trash, my thought was I guess this is normal and just left it at that.
No, not normal, and never was.
Later on as I got older, I learned to stop and think first. If I think about eating trash now, my thought is different. If I eat X, Y will happen. If Y is something I know will make me sick, nope, I don't eat it.
What I battle more than anything else is fat guy thinking as I said earlier, even as a skinny man. I know to stay away from the trash foods, but if presented with something not trash that I really like, it's sometimes difficult to back off.
For example, I have a thing for macaroni salad. Loved it ever since I was a kid and still do. If I don't watch myself, I can pile through an entire 16oz container of that in one sitting. Yes, a pound of macaroni salad. And I know that chowing down on that much pasta in one go is a bad idea. A small amount is fine, but a whole pound of it? Yeah, that will make me sick for a few hours.
Or lets take something else, a 6oz box of raspberries. Just like the macaroni salad, if I get a box of those, I'll eat the whole thing quick if I don't watch myself. Will that make me sick? Yes it will. Eating a few raspberries is fine, but downing half-a-pound of them will make my stomach acids go crazy trying to digest all that.
This also counts for other fruits. Seedless red grapes? I'll eat fistfuls of those if I don't watch myself. Oranges? I'll eat one and just one or my gut reacts the same way as if I downed a box of raspberries.
And again, I had these same issues when I was young and they were there the whole time. The difference now is that I've gained knowledge, recognize what will happen when I pile in too much food and know to back off...
...most of the time. I don't always succeed, especially with the fruits.
The 6oz box of raspberries is a really good example of that. Looks so small, but it is literally half a pound of food.
To put that in perspective, normal sized people at their absolute limit can fit 2 to 3 pounds of food in them. I'm on the lower end, so 6oz of food is almost 19% of my stomach capacity.
Remember how I said the stomach isn't a muscle, but acts like one? For an obese person, their stomach has been stretched out so much from piling in so much food for so long that they could probably consume up to 8 pounds in a single sitting.
As gross as this sounds, yes that does mean a 30+ BMI person could literally drop anywhere from 4 to 7 pounds just by "doing a number two" in the bathroom.
Oh, and I still have another problem from fat guy thinking. Chugging.
To this day, I chug drinks, even when it's water. The proper way to drink anything is to sip. Chugging slams a bunch of liquid into the gut, and the gut doesn't like that.
At a restaurant, I thankfully don't chug just out of politeness. But in my living space, yes I sometimes still do it. This is especially annoying with water because I'll get waterlogged, my gut complains, and all I can do is wait it out until my gut stops complaining. Thankfully, this doesn't take all that long, but still, if I just didn't chug, there would be no problem. This is something I'm still learning.
I can only wonder how many other Gen X'ers out there have the same problems
I was heavy but am now thin, but due to fat guy thinking I'm still retraining my brain how to eat and drink.
Diligence and vigilance are the keys to know, I suppose. Stay the course, stay alert. Keep the calories down, listen to what your gut tells you, don't eat giant piles of food, don't chug.
i finally gave up the box fan for a sleep machine
This was something I needed to do and am glad I did it.
While I do champion the twin window fan where one fan brings air in and the other out, that's not the fan I'm talking about here. Rather, it's the bog standard 20 inch box fan. Not the pedestal type. Box type. As in the kind you just put on the floor and let it run.
Up until very recently, I always ran a box fan in the room 24 hours a day. At first I did it because I liked the breeze, but then I got very accustomed to the noise the fan makes. A "brown noise", if you will. I was so used to it that if I was in the room with the fan off, that bothered me and I had to turn it back on.
I finally stopped using that fan and replaced it with a sleep machine because I have to have that brown noise in the room. But I had to do it in a very specific way. More on that in a moment.
The two problems with running a box fan in the room 24 hours a day is dust and dry air.
There's always dust in a room and there's no way around that. It can come from the central air system, a standalone air conditioner, your shoes, your clothes, the window when it's open, and so on. Dust happens. That box fan, even on its lowest setting, will never let dust settle even on its lowest setting. And that means two things. Dust gets everywhere, more of it happens, and during sleep it lands on your face where you breathe it in right up your nose.
Dryness of the air happens because it's moving, even if only a little bit. I don't have a dry mouth problem, but whenever I'd wake from sleep, I'd immediately have to get something to drink because my mouth was so dry.
In addition to the sleep machine (sometimes known as a noise machine), I've also added a smaller humidifier to the room that I keep on my nightstand running at the lowest setting.
With the sleep machine making the noise I like, I can go to sleep easily, and running the humidifier puts just enough moisture in the air so I don't wake up with a dry mouth.
Problem solved? It almost wasn't.
I could not get comfortable with the sound of the sleep machine when on the nightstand, so then I had a thought. What if I put the sleep machine where the box fan is? That worked.
As stupid as this is, I have the sleep machine on the floor near the foot of my bed. In that location, having the noise coming from there is something I can agree with. But if it's on the nightstand, no way.
It would appear that not only does the noise matter to me, but it also matter where it comes from spatially. I always had the fan in a specific spot in the room, and since my brain likes that fan sound a.k.a. brown noise coming from that spot, the sleep machine has to go there.
Yes, weird. But it works.
there may be a classical guitar in my future
I was at a guitar store recently to buy a pack of strings. While there, I did something I ordinarily never do. I headed into the acoustic room.
One of the first guitars I picked up (I played a few) was a very low priced classical guitar, as in the nylon string type. Seriously, one of these things is so cheap to buy.
You know how even on the most basic electric, there's a bunch of setup involved? Truss rod, string saddle height adjustment, bridge adjustment, and so on?
Want to know how much setup is required on a classical? ZERO. Okay, almost zero. You do have to install the strings. But that's it. There's nothing else to it.
Nylon guitar string is very easy (if not the easiest?) on the fingers and requires only the lightest grip to hold down notes and chords.
I got some genuine joy fingering some notes and chords on the classical. It just felt good.
It is rare, and I mean oh so rare, when I can just pick up a guitar in a store, start playing and it feels right at home. I got that out of the classical.
There are two reasons I've never seriously considered a classical guitar. The first is that over the years I've started to play a lot more with fingers on the picking hand. The second is that steel string acoustics really soured me on them. It's the latter I have to explain more in detail.
It's not that I can't play steel string acoustic. I just don't like to. I can make things feel somewhat better with silk and steel acoustic strings. For some players, switching to that acoustic string type fixes everything. But it's not enough for me. So much to the point where I was just turned off by acoustics entirely.
After all this time, I finally just picked up a classical and went for it. My thought was okay, this will probably suck, but I've never really sat down with one of these and really played it, so let's do this. I did, and I liked it.
No, I haven't bought a classical yet, but it's definitely on my to-do list now. I need one in my life.
the modern gen x diet
"Hey man, when you're over 50, you're gonna eat kale, spinach, and yogurt, and you're going to like it."
"No way."
Way.
Every Generation X person is middle aged and has been for a while now since the youngest X is 45 years old at the time I write this.
There have been a few times recently where I ate trash like I did in my 20s, and it did not go well. And by that I mean I would get sick soon after eating whatever garbage I did.
When I say sick, that doesn't mean I threw up. Rather, my stomach would complain and I'd have indigestion of some kind. It would either be not-the-funny-kind gas or other rumblings that didn't feel right. This would happen within minutes after eating the trash. Indigestion would happen for a few minutes, then subside, then I realized yeah, I really shouldn't be eating that stuff anymore.
These days, I am giving much more attention to what my body is telling me. If my body complains after eating certain stuff, it's off the menu. I don't try to find alternatives or eat less of the same trash. If my body says, "that's trash and I don't like that", I just stop eating it.
What is trash food? You already know. It's all the fast food, all the hi-carb stuff, all the sugary drinks, all the "put cheese on everything" stuff, all the prepackaged candies, cakes, and so on.
It would not surprise me at all if Gen X survivors become hardcore vegans
"Gen X survivor" means any X who loses the weight and cleans up their diet, such as I did. The rest will all be overweight, be sick all the time and live out miserable lives.
Millions of X's grew up on nothing but fast food, macaroni and cheese, soda, and pizza. I ate ungodly amounts of that stuff in my younger years. I've already come to the point where my body is warning me, "Don't eat that, because if you do, I will complain." This makes me wonder how many other X's have encountered the same.
On the (safe) assumption millions of other X's have encountered the same, it's almost a certainty that many will become hardcore vegans just to stop feeling sick. All the meat, out. All the soda, out. All the sugary stuff, out. All the processed foods, out.
From experience, I can say yes, that does stop one from feeling sick all the time. But I'll also say I don't think I could ever go full hardcore vegan (I do like eggs). However, I do believe other X's will fully commit to a vegan diet and stay there just to feel well again.
Don't worry, I'm not saying "go vegan" as that's not for everybody. But I am saying that if you're an X that's sick of feeling sick, fix your diet. And don't feel bad if you can't eat the trash you used to since it was never good for you anyway.
hot topic proves the rock machine is dead
Yesterday I went to the mall with friends, of which two of them were in their 20s. We're walking around, and one of them wants to go into a Hot Topic store. I had never been in one of these in my life. Instead of waiting outside, I said screw it, I'll go in here and see what this not-for-middle-age-dudes-whatsoever store is all about.
Hot Topic is the kind of store that supposedly sells "edgy" stuff.
Imagine my surprise when I look up at the wall that shows all the t-shirt designs for sale, and the overwhelming majority of what I see is bands from 30 to 40 years ago, with some even older.
It was like I stepped back in time to when I was a teen at the mall. Not that I went to the mall that often, but if there was a store selling a bunch of rock band t-shirts, yep, this is EXACTLY what it looked like. Except back when I was a teen, this stuff was CURRENT.
Then I thought hang on, let's try searching band t-shirt to see what comes up...
...and oh my God it's the same thing. Bands from 30 to 40 years ago.
I think I know what happened
New bands these days, rock or not, aren't promoted at all. Where there is no promo there is no brand establishment and no recognition.
Bands from the '80s and '90s? Yeah, they promoted heavily. Over time, the band's artwork for their album covers effectively made them a brand. And you'd recognize that brand if somebody drew it on their notebook in high school, wore the band t-shirt, or wore it as a patch on a jacket or some such. I got surprised yet again to find yes, they still make those patches.
The rock machine (at least where promo is concerned) is totally dead, so "edgy" these days means flashing logos of bands from 30 to 40 years ago. Those are the established rock band brands, and since nothing truly new ever came around to replace them, yep, just keep selling the old stuff.
Do kids who shop at Hot Topic have any idea who these bands are? I doubt it.