It turns out its easier to get chubby then to get un-chubby – A Shaun Odyssey

Yes, a revelation for you all too I’m sure. Since Law School ended I’ve been on working towards a couple of goals, all of which have to do with erasing the side effects that I experienced in Law School. #1 is to pass the bar, which I’m pretty sure my 3^rd year of law school made more unlikely. #2 was to win the deathmarch, nailed it. And #3 was to get un-chubby. #3 is tougher than I remember it last time I got un-chubby, way back in junior high. I’m not sure exactly when I got chubby, but it may have had something to do with the lack of physical activity and living 2 blocks away from Chipotle for two years.

In my quest to get un-chubby I’ve pretty much abandoned eating out, drinking, except when Brady forces me to at World Cup Soccer Parties (USA USA USA), and Chipotle/Hawaiian BBQ, which I consider to comprise an essential food group on their own. To resist temptations, I’ve taken to preparing a ton of food in advance and sealing it in those little Ziploc® entre sized plastic containers. When I get hungry I take out exactly one container and eat it. This has worked pretty well but it means that I eat almost exclusively spaghetti with turkey meatballs about 5 days a week. I’m considering strategic options to expand my meal selection so that I can rotate fajitas with turkey meatball spaghetti. I also eat a lot of snacks to avoid eating all the Ziploc® containers within two days of preparing them. For instance, today I was eating a banana when I made a pretty great discovery. Sidenote: if you’ve never seen me eat a banana I promise you its about impressive as a person eating a banana can be. Anyway, so I was eating a banana when I spied a dish of sugar and cinnamon mixture that my roommate had been using to make snicker doodles. I looked at the mixture, and I looked back at the banana and it clicked. I dipped the banana into the mixture and took a bite. I don’t want to say I invented the next great food craze, but sugar and cinnamon on a banana really take it to the next level. I’d encourage all of you to try it ASAP.  Anyway on the diet side I figure I’ve taken my calorie intake from 4,000-ish to <3,000. 

Exhibit a. find dish of sugar and cinnamon lying around, procure banana. This banana happens to be pretty huge. If you can't eat that much for a snack, you should buy smaller bananas.

Exhibit b. Dip Banana in mixture and eat.

On the exercise front I’ve been hitting the gym on the regular, but unfortunately I’m not the only one with a little extra time during the summer. The gym is packed with Frat-Stars and exchange students, so much so that you can hardly find equipment to use unless you go very late at night. The exchange students tend to just sit on equipment and text, and the Frat-Stars take a zillion different weights off the racks and then proceed to not really lift them. For privileged white kids they are really embracing the occupy movement #OccupyWeightRoom so Shaun can’t do his work-out the way he wants to. Anyway, I find myself getting pretty pissed off at all these characters, like I used to, but the difference is that now I don’t have the same weight room street cred that I imagine I once had, but on the flipside I’m also a giant so I should have that intimidation factor going for me. Altogether it probably evens out I guess. The singularly most annoying thing however, is that one of the two 50lb dumbbells on the rack that I use has been missing for the past week and a half. This is a major problem for me right now and I’m going to assume that a frat star or exchange student did something dumb with it until I’m shown otherwise.

Too bad they can't be this organized in the weight room. 

I don't know what the exchange students and frat stars do in the weight room, I try not to watch them as I go about my business, but I imagine its probably a lot of this.