First off, I bought a Speedo.  Don’t judge.  I just put it on in the locker room, and prance out to the pool.  Nobody has time to see how I’ve inelegantly squished my junk into it.  This does, however, call for some serious manscaping.  And since I’ve started seeing results at the gym I’m not all embarrassed to be seen in the speedo.  The one area that really needs some of my attention tanning.  Why are gay men so superficial, btw? (There was a lot of TMI in that paragraph…sorry.)

Since my guest post on SixUntilMe.com, I’ve received a lot of really supportive emails, tweets, comments.  Thanks to everyone that read it and sent me support in any form.  Additionally, I should mention that I wrote the post soon after we hit splitsville and just posted recently – so I’ve done some serious healing since then.  And if you liked the post, you might also like the comments that people posted (at the time of this writing there are 31 comments).  The majority of them are supportive, but there’s also a few criticisms of my diabetes v.s. cancer comparison.

I’ve been pretty religious about the my gym routine.  Sure there is the obvious benefits…I use less insulin in a day after I’ve run a couple of miles, my energy level is higher, etc.  Those are all really great reasons, but the main reason I’ve gone six or seven times a week is to keep up the foursquare mayorship.  Since the last time I obsessively blogged about foursquare, I have earned a Photogenic badge for checking in at three locations that have photo booths (?!) and a Bravo Newbie badge when I ate dinner the other night at Fez…which, like Bravo, is clearly gay but straight people don’t always realize it.

My reading has slowed down a bit.  I blogged about the bizzaro couple of days where I was starting books and then deciding not to reading them.  If I’ve ever made fun of you for starting books and never finishing them, I take it all back.  It’s really not something that I do…and it has kind of ruined some of my momentum.  But then I found a James Patterson book (so?!) that gave me my mojo back, and I’ll be posting about the 22nd and 23rd book I’ve read this year pretty soon, I’m sure.

I’m listening to a lot of podcasts now.  A lot.  Like close to a dozen.  Since I’ve last updated y’all on my podcast listening, I’ve added The Big Gay News Podcast (daily gay-related news), Democracy Now! (daily political talk show that I used to listen to on Pacifica when I lived in LA), Johnjay and Rich (it’s a cut up version of their local radio show), Jordan, Jesse GO! (nerdy weekly podcast by two straight guys), NPR: Fresh Air (daily interview show), Pod Is My Copilot (weekly shoot-the-shit podcast), Stuff You Should Know (they pick one topic and break it down so even us stupids could understand it), The NerdistThe Q Cast Connection (which is Chris Hardwick’s podcast), (a bunch of homos from Florida sit around and talk).  My iPod has basically been turned into a podcast-listening device.  Music is for emotional people.

This happened this morning:

I stole this mayorship back from Fadi.  And for the record, I don’t appreciate all of you perverts salivating over his douchey picture that I posted here.

He is the enemy.  Don’t forget that.

From twitter:

I know that this is getting serious, because this morning on the drive to the gym I started thinking about how I could squeeze in a workout on Sunday so he wouldn’t get an extra check in like he did last week.

God, I need a life.

I’m at war.

Well, it’s a FourSquare war.

This douchey-looking guy named Fadi keeps stealing the mayorship of my gym.  When I started working out, he was the mayor of La Fitness.  But then I stole it from him last week.

The only problem was that Fadi worked out 7 days last week…and totally stole the mayorship back from me on Sunday, my day off.

Doesn’t he just look like a douche?  Seriously, who takes a picture like that?

We’ve never actually been at the gym at the same time.  But this stupid FourSquare war has chased away that little voice that says “you can take one day off…you’ve been doing so good.”  So take that, all you FourSquare haters.  I guess this could be a negative thing if the location wasn’t a gym.  Imagine, for example if I had a similar mayorship war over a Burger King or a donut shop.

In unrelated news, I’m taking photos all day, and my 12 of 12 will be posted tomorrow.

Not a suit suit.  I need a bathing suit.

The only pair of board shorts that I have right now are from when I was like 100 pounds heavier.  I would like to add some swimming to my cardio routine…or some jacuzzi time when my under-worked muscles are achy.

But what do I buy?

Here’s the dilemma…I know that board shorts are the most versatile.  And they are probably the most concealing.  The only catch is that I’m using these shorts for swimming, so I’m thinking that perhaps something like the Nike Swim Shorts (pictured) would be more appropriate.

My problem with the Nike Swim Shorts is that – I know this is hard to believe – but my legs are slightly less bulky than the creepy white mannequin pictured.

I’m not sure I’m tan enough to pull these shorts off.

And after all of that is said and done, perhaps a pair of shorts like this one will help me stay motivated.  You got to keep up the workouts, I might think, so your fat ass will look good in those shorts.

Or maybe I should just say “fuck everyone” and wear whatever the hell I want to wear.  Half the people at the gym are 75-year-old men with huge guts sitting in the sauna naked.  Who cares?

Wow.  Two badges in a week.  This just happened:

I woke up this morning with the best blood sugar reading that I’ve ever had since my diagnosis.  Seriously.

I did do 45 minutes of cardio after work yesterday…which made me dip to a 66, and then I just skipped my bolus insulin for my dinner (14g of carbohydrates, btw).

I’ve had quite a bit of stress in my life the past month, but for some reason my glucose levels aren’t reacting that way.  It’s really empowering to see my choices having immediate positive effects.

I’m a sucker for results.

This weekend I scored a free pedometer.  So I’m putting it to use tomorrow.  I’m not sure, however, how many steps a normal person takes.  I don’t actually have a goal number of steps…I’m doing this more as an experiment.

After some Googling, I found that 10,000 steps per day has become a common goal…but there doesn’t seem to be research to back up that number.  I’ve even found that something as low as 6,000 steps a day is shown to be connected to lower death rate in men according to a  Harvard Study.

So I decided to use the numbers published by Dr. Catrine Tudor-Locke in Sports Medicine magazine.  He’s been studying pedometer walking and these are the classifications he came up with:

Classification of pedometer-determined physical activity in healthy adults:

1. Under 5000 steps/day may be used as a “sedentary lifestyle index”
2. 5,000-7,499 steps/day is typical of daily activity excluding sports/exercise and might be considered “low active.”
3. 7,500-9,999 likely includes some exercise or walking (and/or a job that requires more walking) and might be considered “somewhat active.”
4. 10,000 steps/day indicates the point that should be used to classify individuals as “active”.
5. Individuals who take more than 12,500 steps/day are likely to be classified as “highly active”.

I’ll give you my number tomorrow.

This week on Sweet Talk, we talked about exercise, and I brought up the fact that I too often drop out of traditional exercise programs because they require you to be somewhere and to do something specific.  That just doesn’t fit into my lifestyle.

So I’ve made the comitment to do some sort of physical activity everyday.  And I’m being intentionally vague.  Some days it might be a little walk around the block with Olive.  Other days it might be an hour on the Wii Fit.  And some days I may go and take a class at the YMCA.  Whatever it is, I’m going to do something every day.

And during the podcast discussion we also discussed the benifits of positive public pressure.  And I was thinking that I can blog my daily physical activity (boring) or I could start Tweeting it.  We began using the tag #didmine at Twitter.  Every day after we’ve done our daily activity we will include the tag #didmine to signify that we did ours for that day.

The cool part is that you can search using Twitter and see who has #didmine for the day.

We aren’t focusing on losing weight – getting up off the couch and moving is about so much more than weight loss.  And this isn’t just about diabetes.  Anyone can Tweet #didmine and show up in the timeline.

So, have you done yours today?