There’s a little less of me to love

I do not measure up.

To be precise, I have become less of a man.

Is that great news, or what? I made this discovery Thursday morning when I climbed back on the high-tech scale at GoodLife Fitness’s Kenaston Boulevard branch.

We are talking a state-of-the-art scale — it’s called a Body Composition Analyzer — that spits out everything you do not want to know about your body.

The first time I hopped on this thing four weeks ago it said I weighed 288.4 pounds, meaning I have roughly the same gravitational pull as Pluto, by which I mean the former planet as opposed to the dog in the Disney cartoons.

But when I climbed back on it this week, roughly midway into our fitness challenge, I had lost weight. To be precise, I had lost 0.4 of a pound. Hurray! OK, I’m not kidding here. Yes, I’d hoped, after four weeks of pumping iron and pounding the treadmill at the gym, I would have lost more, but it’s not a bad thing.

Jacqueline Vincent, an elite trainer at GoodLife, where I now have a three-month free membership as part of our Spring Training campaign, warned me I’d probably put on a bit of weight as lean muscle mass replaced the fat on my body.

I’ve been letting Jacqueline, better known as "The Queen of Pain," torture me three times a week for the past couple of weeks. After some of the workouts, even my hair and teeth hurt, but in a good way, if you know what I mean.

On Thursday morning, The Queen pointed out I was pretty dehydrated, which can cause the fancy scale to give inaccurate measurements because your body doesn’t have enough water in it to conduct the electrical current. So there’s that.

After I climbed off the scale, this incredibly fit woman showed me rubber models of a pound of muscle compared with a pound of fat. To be honest, they both looked pretty gross to me, so I’m not sure I absorbed the medical point she was making.

But I was definitely paying attention when she pulled out the tape measure and began checking out how my body shape has changed since we teamed up two weeks ago. Unlike fancy scales, tape measures do not lie.

Here, in brutal detail is the tale of the tape, beginning with ...

1) My chest — 47.5 inches. Wow! That’s down from 50 inches four weeks ago. "That’s good," The Queen of Pain beamed, "We’re getting rid of your Moobs."

"Moobs?" I asked, frowning in a manly way.

"Yes, your man boobs," she replied as I turned an interesting shade of crimson. "The improvement is from the chest presses that you hate so much."

2) My belly — 50 inches. "You dropped an inch and a half!" Jacqueline squealed. This was apparently a swell result because she quickly added: "Oooooooh, I’m good! That’s why they call me the Queen of Pain.

"That’s from the treadmill, better food choices 50 per cent of the time, the Dead Doug exercise (which involves doing terrible things on your back with a huge rubber ball) and the crunches and the overhead barbell lunges."

OK, from there, she moved on and measured my hips, my thighs, my calves and, if I remember correctly, the size of my swollen ego.
Then she punched everything into a calculator and, after a moment, flashed a smile that had nothing to do with the joy of forcing an overweight newspaper columnist to push heavy iron bars in the air while lying flat on his back.

"Overall your total inches lost in four weeks is five inches!" she declared. "I think that’s an awesome improvement. If you’ve lost five inches in four weeks, what do you think you can do in eight weeks?"

So I was feeling pretty darn good. But it didn’t last. Because then she made me do a workout, which concluded with me spending 20 minutes on a treadmill that, to force my heart rate to a target level, increased its level of incline to the point where I felt like Spider-Man trying to climb a vertical wall using only his feet.

As I puffed away and began projectile sweating, The Queen of Pain smiled at me again. But it was a different kind of smile. It was the secret smile of a professional trainer.

"Your cardio really sucks!" she told me with obvious delight.

It stings, but I know it’s going to get better. Because I’m going to the gym. The Queen of Pain has taught me what all those machines are for. Outside the gym, I’m trying to eat better. Eat less, too. And I’m seriously considering taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
Eventually, it will make me less of a man, but I think I can live with that.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca