From June 1 until June 28th, I’m going to be trying something radical.  I’m going to try to go without:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine
• Dairy

Dum Dum DUUUUMMM!!!!

I will allow for butter, of course, but no cheese or my beloved half-and-half.  And as far as caffeine is concerned, that’s no coffee, tea, or wonderful wonderful chocolate.  No alcohol means no manhattans. *sigh*

I’m just going to do it until we celebrate my bestie’s birthday.  And the point of this exercise is to just get back on the whole health and fitness kick because I was so bad at it last year.  I’ve been pretty good this year and all that, but that was just laying the groundwork and now it’s time to start trying to work a bit harder and with a bit more earnestness.  So, that’s the deal.

In the last two months, several people have called me fat.  Herein, I would like to call these people to task.

1. My Doctor
2. My friend, Matt
3. My mother
4. This pair of pants in my wardrobe

My doctor didn’t actually use the words, “In clinical terms, you’re what we doctors call ‘gay fat’ and it’s a real health problem for gays such as yourself who are over the age of 30. One of the symptoms of gay fat is that no one loves you and the merest sight of you tempts children into throwing stones. You’re still single, am I right?”  But I could hear it in the little rising inflection he used when he noted that I’d gained 10 lbs in the year since he saw me last and I could see it in the eyebrow he fought not to raise.

I saw my friend, Matt, out at a party the other night and he and I were wearing similar outfits.  He was wearing a white shirt, a dark vest, a dark tie, jeans, and chucks.  I was wearing a dark shirt, a dark vest, a red tie, jeans, and chucks.  And we were laughing about the similarities in our attire and he actually had the gall to say to me, “I’m like a little version of you.”  While this clearly means, “Oh, please do stand nearby when we’re in the bar because I’ll look like Princess Leia to your Jabba the Hutt,” in geek gay, it can also mean, “I am young and skinny while you are old, fat, and nearly dead. The contrast will help me pick up dudes,” in regular gay parlance. I do have to tip my hat to him for calling me both old AND fat in a single sentence without using those actual words, though.  He’s my friend because he has mad skills like that.

Just last night I was on the phone with my mother and I said, “Yeah, I’m starting to run again.” And she said, “Good. I’m glad. [pregnant pause] I mean, you got a lot of your build from my side of the family, but no one on my side has that height. [Another pregnant pause] I mean, well, uh, there was your great grandfather who was tall. He must have been 5′10″ or 5′11″ and his wife was taller…” Fortunately for us all, my mother has never made attempt to run for public office.  In case you don’t already know, I am 6′2″-ish and my father’s family is just filthy with great, big fat people. I trust I don’t have to read the subtext aloud for you here.

Worst of all, though, I bought this pair of pants over the summer in my usual size and they just don’t fit. You’d think my wardrobe would have the basic courtesy to grant me a smidgen of flattery when it comes to my waist measurement, but you buy one pair of tuxedo pants out of some abominable material that has no give in it whatsoever and then every time you pass by your closet you have to listen to the snickering and whispering and sing-song, “Fatty fatty two-by-four…”

I don’t know what has happened to manners in America, but commenting on someone’s “ballooning weight situation” is something you’re supposed to do behind someone’s back safely out of earshot.  You don’t just go and remark on it to their face. Common decency clearly relegates this issue to the arena of “vicious gossip” and “the sort of thing you say to me only about other people during some sort of religious ceremony or whilst at the hair salon.” Everyone knows about this!  If you DON’T know about this, perhaps due to poor home training, you should watch Steel Magnolias immediately.

Anyway, I’ve been exercising again.  I hope you miserable excuses for gossips are happy now.

The Blue Owl tipped me off to this article on Fox News this afternoon.

Fox News: Kerry Calls on FDA to Lift Longstanding Ban on Gay Men Donating Blood

Sen. John Kerry called on the government Thursday to abolish a “discriminatory” law that bars homosexual men in the U.S. from donating blood, saying “not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban.”

In a letter sent to the Food and Drug Administration, Kerry, D-Mass., along with a host of other Democrats, urged Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to change existing law that bars gay men from giving blood.

Kerry also called on the FDA to review its donor screening questionnaire to ensure a healthy blood supply.

“A law that was once considered medically justified is today simply outdated and needs to end, just as last year we ended the travel ban against those with HIV,” Kerry said in a statement on Thursday.

Before I became sexually active, I used to donate blood regularly.  I always thought it was cool, interesting, and a nice thing to do.  When I recognized the fact of my homosexuality, I was more than a little miffed by the ban on gay blood, but I have to acknowledge that I do believe the ban on gay blood was at one time justified.  You see, men who have sex with other men are statistically more likely to carry certain blood-borne pathogens.

What makes this restriction appear nonsensical today is the simple fact that all donated blood is tested for those pathogens.

Statistics are only really useful for making actionable decisions about things you can’t test directly. For example, if you would like to know whether or not you should pack an umbrella for your trip tomorrow, you check the weather forecast and it tells you that given the current conditions there is an 80% chance of rain tomorrow for your destination.  So, you pack an umbrella.

But you would not use the weather forecast to tell you if you should pick up an umbrella for running out and checking the mail right now.  For that, you’d look out the front door and see if it’s raining.

Because every batch of donated blood is tested, it appears that the FDA’s use of statistics is foolish and unreasoned.  After all, there is no reason to use statistics to predict whether or not a given batch has a given disease when you’re going to check the blood for that given disease anyway.  That’s just foolish.

The challenge to this argument in favor of lifting the prohibition comes from the fact that the tests for said diseases are not 100% correct.  They are correct within a certain margin of error. I’ve read that HIV tests, for example, are about 99% accurate.  I don’t know if this means that they tend toward false positives or false negatives, but for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that it means there’s a 1% chance of a false negative.  This means that 1% of the time a batch of HIV+ blood will get into the blood supply.  Out of 1MM donations, that’s 10,000 batches of tainted blood being pumped into sick babies and injured firefighters and whatnot.

Given that we don’t have a way to reduce the risk of diseases slipping into the blood supply to absolutely nothing, we have to decide what level of risk is acceptable to us.

Whatever is decided, the risk of diseases slipping into the blood supply would be reduced by restricting high-risk groups from donating blood.  Those groups include “men who have sex with men.”  I’d hasten to point out that just because prohibition is applied to intravenous drug users and prostitutes as well as men who have sex with men does not mean that the risks associated with each group are equal.  All it means is that the risks are above whatever threshold of comfort was used in establishing these prohibitions in the first place.

The real outrage here is why the government is dictating to us whose blood we are allowed to accept or not.  That is a decision that could be easily and well managed by free markets.

What if you had the option to choose between screened blood and not-screened blood?  Not-screened blood would be much cheaper but would carry higher risks.

What if you could choose blood that was screened and was guaranteed to not come from any risk groups?  The more risk groups you choose to apply to blood you accept, the more expensive it would be, because the blood you accept would be harder to find.

What if you had a disease like HIV and you were willing to accept HIV+ blood, but only if it contained viruses with matching genetic qualities to your own?  You’d likely get some kind of bargain on blood for which there is very little demand.  Or what if you have malaria or some other disease that lives in the blood? You could accept similarly infected blood and get a deal if you’re in the hospital.

In all cases, you’d just have to specify your preference with your primary care physician or in documents given to the people who drag your unconscious body to the hospital when necessary.

The blood you choose to accept is a personal health decision and not one that should be dictated to Americans by the nanny-state.  Once again we have the FDA interfering with the health and livelihood of Americans everywhere.

Update 9:04am ET 3/5/2010: Corrected an instance of hyphen abuse.

My doctor did some kind of ninja voicemail thing on me today.  I don’t know how he did it, but he left me a voicemail without actually calling my phone.  It never rang.  I was sitting there and suddenly it dinged saying I had a voicemail.

Anyway, he told me that all of my tests came back fine.  I don’t have HIV or any other of the STDs he tested for. YAY! No cooties!

My liver, kidney, and heart are all functioning fine.  AND my cholesterol was fine. (I think he said it was 165 this time.)

You probably don’t recall from my last physical that while my cholesterol was fine he said my “good” cholesterol was a bit low and he recommended that I exercise more. At the time, I was working out 4 – 5 times a week.  I had also been doing to caveman diet for a while.

THIS time, my LDL and my HDL were both fine!!

I’m starting to think this cholesterol thing is voodoo.

I had my annual checkup today.  By and large, I am in excellent health.  He’ll give me a call in a few days with my blood test results and that should give me a much better sense of how I’m doing.  A few facts seemed to give him cause to raise an eyebrow this time:

• I’ve been drinking more in the past year.
• I have not been exercising since I quit the gym a year ago.
• I presently weigh more than I’ve ever weighed in my adult life.  Well, about that anyway.

I’m a smidge over 6′1″ and I weigh 195 pounds.  That isn’t particularly heavy, but it’s ten pounds heavier than I weighed at my last physical. Combined with my lack of exercise one can only conclude that this is not healthy fat.

As much as I loathe the idea of spending money on a gym again, I have not made any effort to work out at home and the results seem to be pretty clear.

I don’t know. I think I need to either join a gym or find a really rigorous sport that I can go to at least three times a week. As things stand right now, I’m going no where, and I really do need to do SOMETHING. Here’s what I’ve thought of so far:

• Martial Arts
  • Pro: rigorous, new, exotic, exciting
  • Con: somewhat expensive, pretty steep arc for getting good at it
• Swimming
  • Pro: fun, low-impact, rigorous, full-body cardio workout that works well with my body type
  • Con: mild expense, but pretty inconvenient to where I live
• Running
  • Pro: fun (yes, I enjoy running)
  • Con: not really all that healthy for you, very time-consuming, somewhat seasonal unless I invest in rather expensive equipment

So, right now, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I need to do something.  Other suggestions welcome!

Found over at URLesque where there are a bunch of other such videos.

Just one question: So, he just has rock climbing handholds installed all over his house?

If you know me in real life, you know I love saying the word “poop” and talking about poop in very general terms.  But I do not like talking about poop in specific, practical terms.  I’m going to aim for the 2009 understatement of the year and say this: poop is gross.  I do not like pooping or really much of anything associated with it.

But to my own and the mortification of pretty much anyone who knows me, I do just want to talk about my pooping habits for a second.

Last year, I adopted a paleo-ish/primal-ish diet.  I’m not super strict about it, but in general I forgo sugary treats and anything that might have a grain in it — especially if that grain is wheat or corn.  Meat is better, red meat is best.  That’s how I think about my food.  The only places where I pretty consistently break the rules are alcohol and sushi, and alcohol is the only one of the two that I consume regularly.  It should noted, though, that I’ve moved away from drinking my old standby,  Jack & Coke, to drinking manhattans or just whiskey, because those, although not the best option from a diet perspective, are better in comparison due to the lower balance of refined sugars.

And some people ask me why I do this.  Well, in general, I feel better physically.  I have more energy and life is good.  But as I’ve grown accustomed to eating by my roughly primal plan, the number one reason I’ve always come back to my paleo-ish diet after a binge of pizza, cookies, or whatever is poop.

Prior to getting on the primal diet, I had highly irregular digestive issues.  Sometimes I would be constipated and sometimes I would have wild, explosive diarrhea and awful gas. Given the fact that I dislike poop and pooping so much, my loathing for the activity was compounded by the sheer physical discomfort of all things associated with it.

I spoke with my doctor about it and I figured I had an intolerance to some food or another.  I had assumed it was peppers but the symptoms were not consistent with me eating peppers.  I thought it was a number of other foods, but could not figure out what it was.

As soon as I cut out all the refined sugar and wheat in my diet, my tummy worked itself out and now everything functions the way I imagine “normal” people function in that regard.  You cannot imagine my joy here.  (Or maybe you can, in which case I don’t want to hear about it, so if you feel the need to share, please go put it on your own blog.)

Of course, a mild deviation from my primal doesn’t do much harm, but if I stay off of it for two or three days, it usually takes a week for things to get back in order.  SUPER obnoxious.

What’s more, I ran into another dude at a Christmas party this weekend who has the same problem!  (Please do not concern yourself with trying to figure out how I end up talking about pooping at parties.)  I suspect a lot of people who spend money on Activia yogurt could be helped by simply not eating so much sugar and wheat!

Now. Let us never speak of this again.

For the past two days I’ve been suffering INTENSE pain in my back between my left shoulder and my neck.  It hurts to try to do anything that puts even the slightest bit of stress on the muscles which hold my head upright.

This means that it is very, very difficult for me to get out of bed in the morning because I need those muscles to turn my head upright in the first place.  It also means that it’s painful to lie down.  Which means I can’t lie down on the sofa to watch some television.

Without being able to lounge about my living room, this means I’m up and about tottering around my apartment.

So, the bright side to this intense pain is that I’m getting a lot of my chores done because it helps me avoid as much pain as possible until it’s time for bed.

This is disgusting, but it was such a dramatic part of my morning routine that I’m going to share it anyway.

I was in the shower flossing my teeth as I do every single day.  (I brush and floss in the shower. I also shave in there.)  But I was flossing between my rearmost molar and the one next to it when the floss caught on something. I pulled against it and there was a small pop and my mouth filled with blood.

Gross, right?

Keep in mind that I floss my teeth sometimes three or four times a day.  I’m not a maniac about it or anything, but I have dental floss in my desk at work and I figure if I think something is caught in my teeth, I should use it.

So, I have no idea what this was that was between my teeth. It was white and soft.  When it came out, my teeth felt a lot better. My shower, of course, looked like they films Psycho in there, but still.  I have to think removing it was a good thing.  But criminy!  What drama.

This week, I’ve been trying to shift my sleep schedule so that I can wake up naturally around 5am instead of 6:30.  The reason is so that I can have some time to exercise and do some chores in the morning before work because after work I feel lazy and tired.  So, I’ve been trying to go to bed early and wake up early.

Well, this has been an epic failure.

On Monday, I set my alarm and I got up, turned off my alarm, and went back to be.  Then, instead of getting up at 6:30, I slept until 7:45.

On Tuesday, I set my alarm and did a lot of the same as Monday.

On Wednesday, I set my alarm and I woke up early.  I woke up at 11pm, 12:45am, 2am, 4am, 5am.  And then I got up, watched a little internet television, and went to sleep.  I then woke up at 8.

The result of all three days is that I’ve been REALLY tired this entire week.

So, tonight, I’m going to go to bed and wake up per my body’s dictates.  Screw getting up at 5!  I’ll wake up when I’m ready.  At least when I was sleeping without my alarm, I would wake up rested.