This Is Boot Camp And We Are Serious

by Kevin Burton

   I think this thing is going to come down to water.

   My wife Jeannette has declared a boot camp.  It started Monday. I signed up right away when I heard about it.

   This is despite the fact that I don’t know the terms and conditions or how long it will last. I think we’re making this thing up as we go, but we are going nevertheless.

   It’s about being healthier, losing weight, eating better, exercising more.

   “You don’t have to do it,’ Jeannette said Sunday, even though I am the only one who really needs boot camp, besides our younger cat Ronnie.  Jeannette thinks she does. Having been to the Husband 101 class, I knew better than to sit there on the sidelines, chips in one hand, the remote in the other.

   So we’ll go through this together. 

   The junk food that we have, we will consume. The leftover cake from our delayed anniversary dinner, the little bit of Graeters mint chip ice cream, we will not waste them but also will not replace them.  

   In fact we’re not really using the d-word to describe what we are doing.  We probably will eat less, but mostly we’ll eat better.

   OK, I need to eat a lot less.

  And then there is the water.  I asked Jeannette what the rules for the boot camp are and she started talking H2O.

  The things she said were confirmed by author and weight loss coach Amanda Jordan on the Mighty Great Fitness blog on WordPress. 

   “Drinking water is one of the best things you can do for your body, as it needs hydration. Most people do not drink enough water and they have no idea how crucial this is to their health.” Jordan writes.

   “According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, general water intake (from all beverages and foods) that meet most people’s needs are:

about 15.5 cups of water (125 ounces) each day for men and about 11.5 cups (91 ounces) daily for women.” Jordan writes.

   “People get about 20 percent of their daily water intake from food. The rest is dependent on drinking water and water-based beverages,” Jordan writes. “So, ideally, men would consume about 100 ounces (3.0 liters) of water from beverages, and women about 73 ounces (2.12 liters).

   This is good information as we tend to forget that we get some water from food. Not sure what the water content is in a 14-ounce bag of Chili Cheese Fritos, but these are the things I need to become familiar with as I start this new journey. 

   Ha ha ha, juuuust kidding kids!  I’ll probably switch to the plain Fritos. 

   Jeannette also mentioned increased exercise as part of the boot camp. Of course this would be so. The exercise is the boot    camp part. She refers to this as “steps.”

   I have great confidence in my ability to drink more water and continue the increased intake. If my weight loss relies on exercising I may be in some trouble.

   But this “steps” concept is good.  It means my taking the trash out and checking the mail counts for at least a little bit. 

   As a child I ran everywhere. It was faster and it was fun.  I had a long beep baseball career that kept me in shape. These days I have less time and less natural inclination for true workouts.

   There is a treadmill that sits silently in my office maybe three feet away from where I write these blogs.  The cats get on it more than I do. They’re getting their steps in I suppose.

   So Monday I thought one of the cats was under the chair in my office. Instead of a cat my hand found a sticker on the bottom of the chair.  It was about to fall off so I peeled it off.

    The sticker contains manufacturer’s warnings about the product, written in red. It was obviously written by a non-native English speaker.

   “Please always use this product in a secured and safe indoor environment. Using this chair in an unsecured area may cause DANGER and INJURY like on the deck of a balcony for example,” reads the sticker.

   “Don’t coast, slide, slip, glide, skid or roll while sitting on this chair.”

   It has some other howlers, highly entertaining.

   Then I read “The weight limit for this chair is….” and I stop laughing.

   The company lists a figure that is 3.6 pounds less than my current weight. That probably puts me about six pounds over the limit since I am wearing clothes.

   Am I in imminent danger, not of coasting sliding, slipping or gliding, but crashing?

   So as you see, the boot camp has some short-term goals tied to it, blogger chair security being the first.

   OK then, game on!