Beauty and the Beast

Hopefully, it's obvious from this picture which is which. Now, since my lovely daughter is covering up one of my love handles, and the other didn't make it into the frame, you're probably not getting the full effect. But you can clearly see that this is not the midsection I was sporting when I named this blog.

Now I don't want you to get the wrong idea about how I feel about my body based on the title of this post. I intentionally let my body fat drift up a bit in the fall and winter for two reasons:

1. It's difficult to be as strict with my eating habits as I am in the spring and summer (when I get down around 10% body fat), and

2. Especially since I shaved my head, I get cold too easily in the fall and winter when I'm that lean.

The reason I'm calling my belly a beast is not because I think it's hideous, or even particularly unattractive. It's more symbolic. So many of us have a fear/aversion about our bellies. We measure our bellies by ridiculously impractical standards, and give the idea of a belly of a certain size and shape way too much influence over our sense of security and self esteem.

As I've mentioned here before, fitness is about physical capacity and robustness (energy, strength, endurance, flexibility, core support, posture, coordination; stuff like that) than it is about having visibly discernible abdominal muscles. Really, who cares? What really matters is that you live better, longer.

But if you're one of those people, who like me, doesn't mind doing the extra work to have a particularly lean body (at least one season a year!), the same principles I've introduced in previous posts to lose excess body fat for those who are clearly overweight or obese work on those last five or ten pounds as well. But once you get to that point, you have to be very disciplined and consistent to get and stay at that very lean composition (between about 8 and 12% for men; between about 12 and 16% for women).

You can find all those posts in the fat loss tips section of the post index in the upper left hand corner of the blog.

For me, starting tomorrow, it's back to the "Red Zone". http://45yearold6pack.blogspot.com/2008/06/red-zone.html

The spring will be here before we know it. But for the time being, I'm just going to enjoy the extra warmth :-)