The contest was called The New You Challenge.
The goal: Change your physical appearance through 12 weeks of diet and exercise from June through August. If the evidence shows that your New You is newer and more improved than any of the other Yous in the competition, you win.
I'd heard about the contest from Mary Ellen Moore, my trainer at Xtreme Health & Fitness, a gym in South Tampa whose aggressive name belies its relatively relaxed ambience. She'd read Planet staff writer Max Linsky's unflattering descriptions of himself in his story on living free in St. Pete, and decided that he was a prime New You candidate; no 20-something guy should be ashamed to be seen naked in the locker room, she declared, as his story suggested he was. (Actually, the main reason he was ashamed was that he was scamming a free shower at USF.)
But just having Max take the Challenge wasn't all that interesting. Instead, we came up with the idea of Max and I both doing it.
There were dichtomies for days:
Editor vs. reporter. Age (53) vs. youth (24). Non-jock (me) vs. lapsed jock (him). Gay vs. straight. One with a trainer, one without.
We took the challenge.
One of us did very well.
The Old Guy
I grew up a skinny, non-athletic teenage boy in the late '60s and early '70s. Jocks were temporarily déclassé in that Vietnam-into-Watergate era; Abercrombie & Fitch was still a brand name associated with safari gear, not nubile male pinups. Yet even in that somewhat less pressured milieu, I was ashamed of my undefined, mushy, pale-male form. And though I ran high school track, finishing second a few times in junior varsity races, I mostly did it to make my extracurriculars look well-rounded enough to get me into the Ivy League. Bottom line, gyms terrified me. The idea of "working out" was fraught, foreign — a world where I didn't belong and wouldn't be admitted.
Which has always made that world all the more alluring. And in my 20s, when I came out into a gay culture that was beginning to place more and more emphasis on physical perfection, I knew that I was going to have to at least make a nod in the direction of getting in shape.
I don't remember much about the first gym I joined, a fitness club outside Philadelphia, except that it introduced me to a feeling I'd experience in every club to come: bewilderment. Standing in front of an exercise contraption and having no idea what to do with it, and worse yet, trying to pretend I did. And not asking for help, because the whole place was so damn intimidating that I feared revealing I was a know-nothing newbie.
Like I had to tell anyone. I'm sure my fumbling bravado was no disguise. And I know now that lots of people get puzzled by certain machines, and there's no shame — in fact, there's value — in asking for help. Why else would you need trainers?
Well, for lots of reasons, of course. Discipline, for one. Not so much "Drop and do 50!" as much as knowing that a) you paid this person so you'd better get your money's worth, and b) you made an appointment so you'd better be there.
And so, over the years, I've made plenty of appointments. (The names have been changed to protect the self-involved.) Susie the pretty blonde bodybuilder, who seemed bored most of the time but perked up when the conversation turned to her bodybuilder diet (boiled chicken breasts and white rice, all day, every day). Joe the middle-aged gay hunk, whose clientele consisted mostly of other middle-aged gay hunks and whose main training goal was for me to write about him in the newspaper. (When I didn't, it got harder and harder to get an appointment.) Aaron, the genial taskmaster, who ran a very effective weight-training course at the Y but disappeared halfway through the series of classes.
Mary Ellen was a refreshing change. A freelance writer as well as a trainer, she's warm, articulate, supportive — a mensch, not a slavedriver, and, at 50-something, a certifiable babe. Yet, despite her help, I was still making little progress in the body transformation department. With my waistline creeping from 34 to 35, my weight closing in on 170, I was having visions of drifting into a permanent state of schlump.
So a competition seemed like just the thing. No place to hide. No excuses. This would be the ultimate incentive.
Beginning with the fat caliper. And the fat photos.
It's hard to say which was worse. The fat caliper is a cross between gardening shears and a robot claw, which the trainer clamps onto your flesh in order to pull fat away from muscle and measure it. That feels just as pleasant as it sounds — and in my case yielded the happy news that I was carrying around 38.1 pounds of "fat mass." As for the photos — front, back and (ouch) side — they confirmed that yes, when seen in fluorescent light at the right angle wearing nothing but gym shorts, I can pass for 95.
But this was all in the realm of "before," right? It's good to know the worst — or, in some cases, accentuate the worst (get Max to show you his "before" shots sometime) — so there's nowhere to go but up.
I was all gung-ho at the beginning. Though I missed the big introductory nutrition meeting due to an unavoidable scheduling conflict (the first of many), I did check off food likes and dislikes from the list put together by Xtreme nutritionist Tom Ellis. That led to an epiphany: I like too many foods. Of 140-plus items on the list, I disliked oh, about 10 (and they were truly inedible things like soy milk and beets and 1 percent cottage cheese).
Ellis' menus featured much grilling and broiling and steaming — nothing wrong with that, though the idea of steamed cauliflower with no butter sounded about as appetizing as boiled foamcore. I perked up at the surprises — mixed nuts! — and snorted at the recommended number of meals per day: five.
But in those heady early days, I was ready to make the effort. I would hit that gym more often than my once-a-week with Mary Ellen, I'd eat multiple small meals — hell, I'd even keep a food diary.
Which I did — for exactly two and one-third days. At first there was something grimly fascinating about keeping a written record of every morsel eaten: "Breakfast 8:00: half glass OJ, bowl Total w. 2 % milk, 1 piece whole wheat toast w. peanut butter, 1 bottle water (pt.) / Lunch 12: 1 grilled chicken breast, water, 1 pear..." and so on. But if you don't have time to eat five meals a day, you certainly don't have time to document them.
That was the trouble. Life got in the way. My partner, Larry, and I moved from Tampa to St. Petersburg in late June, so no more walking around the corner to Xtreme. I went to a convention in San Diego — conventions and diets do not mix. I attended a business meeting in Atlanta and took a trip to NYC — Atlanta and NYC and diets do not mix.
I know, I know — exercise and food IS life, not something that gets in the way. And I've seen hard-bodied, hard-driving execs with busier lives than I have who manage somehow to fit it all in. But even with the threat of shame and defeat, I still wasn't buying into the deprivation thing.
And besides, I cheated in the shame department: Whereas Max told just about everyone what he was up to, I kept my efforts strictly on the down-low. A colleague asked me if that were merely a strategy, my pretending not to exercise while actually dieting on the sly and working out like a bandit at wee hours of the morning. Nope.
Or then again, yes. I at least became more conscious of what I was eating and aware of when I was slipping back into bad, old habits. And as for working out, life sometimes did the opposite of getting in the way: It presented exercise as the only alternative. Larry works in D.C., so I take him to the airport very early on Monday mornings. What do you do in Tampa at 6 a.m. on a Monday when you're not due at work till 8 or 9? You go to the gym! Which is what I started doing on Mondays, regularly, in addition to my meetings with Mary Ellen.
I know, twice a week, it's not much. But it's a healthier routine than any I've followed before. And part of the reason is that, once I'm there, I like it. I know my way around. For the first time in my life — thanks to Mary Ellen, thanks to, what, maturity? — I'm feeling pretty comfortable in a gym. That's not exactly a New Me — but it's something.
David lost a total of 7 pounds. He went from 22.7 to 18 percent body fat. His "after" pictures have not been taken, because it's clear they would look exactly like the ones that were taken "before."
The Kid
I could actually feel myself getting fatter as champion bodybuilder Corey Simpson went over the diet I was supposed to start the next day. He was giving me a nutrition primer — a one-time deal compliments of Xtreme designed to kick-start the New Me. Simpson, one of the gym's most popular personal trainers, had no idea that I'd polished off three slices of pizza minutes before I entered his office. And I wasn't about to tell him. So as the mozzarella congealed in my stomach, I let him talk all he wanted. To hear Simpson tell it, I was going to win this thing. Going to stick to a 1,500-calorie-a-day diet and work out five times a week. I was going to take his Rapid Reaction class — the hardest hour in Florida fitness, he called it — and I was going to come out looking like the well-toned 24-year-old I was supposed to be. It was a good speech. But I knew myself better than Corey did.
"I wanna win man, really I do," I told him as I stood up to leave. "But take it easy on me, OK?"
Corey, whose biceps are bigger than my thighs, looked up from his desk. He wasn't happy. "I don't lose."
My long and prolific career of laziness started, I believe, with my father's rampant and undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. For nine years, which happened to coincide with some of my most formative, my father jogged every day. Every day. He's a busy guy — his work forces him to fly around the county almost weekly — but he refused to let that stop his streak. He'd run in airport terminals, down hotel hallways and around hospital emergency rooms. And when he was home, he'd run early in the morning, timing his jog so he'd get back just in time to wake me up for school. The man is an incredible perspirer — one of the all-time greats — and his favorite wake-up method was to lean out over my bed, his face directly above mine, and let a steady drizzle of salty dad-sweat start my day.
Tell me you wouldn't swear off exercise for life.
I became as maniacal about being lazy as my father was about working out. Not even my high school football coach could get me to move any more than necessary. A 5-foot-tall ball of energy who'd played his way onto a college team simply by out-hustling everybody, Coach would almost burst into tears trying to get me to run harder during wind sprints. "Linsky! LINSKY!" he'd yell as he chased me up the field, the vein in his forehead as thick as his New York accent. "Get yer ass going!"
But, of course, my ass wasn't going anywhere.
It got even worse when I went to college. I'm sure I ran at some point during those four years — I know I must have — but I couldn't tell you where or when. My nickname freshman year, Sloth, was well-deserved. A month into school I'd already carved out a Homeresque imprint on our Salvation Army couch (that's the cartoon father, not the father of modern literature). The imprint became a groove and then a rut, and kept deepening right through graduation day. Oh, I got up to eat a lot. And I probably walked to a party or two. But the couch was home.
And the inner tube I wore around my gut, the one that had developed around the same time I started getting hair on my toes, was a part of me. I was never fat, not technically anyway, but I was always chubby. I found my pudge to be sorta endearing — a little extra Max to love — and it provided excellent writing fodder. (I hold the official Planet record for self-inflicted fat jokes with 38.)
I was good at being out of shape. Damn good. I had a wardrobe full of shirts that hid my belly. I'd found a gal who said that my love handles were actually worth holding onto. I ate whatever I wanted, drank as much as I liked and kept the scales as far away as possible. Life was grand.
Corey didn't know what he was up against. Or so I thought.
I was tying my shoes on the curb outside Xtreme in South Tampa when I heard the screaming. I was five minutes late to my first Rapid Reaction class with Corey — the one he'd promised would whip me into shape — but these screams, guttural and pained, made me think I might be in the wrong place.
I tightened my laces, took a deep breath and followed the cries into Xtreme's un-air-conditioned boxing gym.
"You'll puke, trust me," said the kid next to me as we ran laps around the ring. He was my age and my build, just 30 pounds lighter. I'd started running two minutes before, and already I was breathing heavily trying to keep up with him.
After the laps, we moved onto abs. The folks around me, all perfectly toned, seemed to enjoy contorting themselves into pretzels and crunching away. The two women on my right, clearly Rapid Reaction vets, were talking about the chicken they were going to make for dinner as they pumped furiously. Me? I was clutching my stomach, which suddenly felt like it had been attacked by a battalion of Exacto knives.
Stations were next — five-minute intervals of squats, push-ups, pull-ups and bench presses. Each one was equally horrible, my unused muscles feeling the proverbial burn after just a few reps. "How ya feeling?" the kid asked, laughing when I tried to cough out an answer. "Don't worry," he said. "Everybody pukes the first day."
He was right. After more sprints and a few wobbly push-ups, I dashed to the bathroom. I'd drunk a gallon or two of water since the class had started, but apparently my body was too tired to absorb any of it. I limped toward my car, legs searing, eyes stinging from the sweat pouring down my face. And I was surprised — it felt terrific.
I stopped going to Rapid Reaction after a few more classes — the hour is designed for people already in shape, not chubby guys who smoke half a pack a day. But that first night, leaving the gym a beaten man had felt too good to ignore. I carved out a routine for myself, heading to the gym after work, going light on the weights (which reminded me too much of high school football), but heavy on the cardiovascular machines. Xtreme has TVs set up in front of the treadmills, and I found that if I turned SportsCenter up high enough, the time would take care of itself. The miles multiplied as the weeks went on, and soon I was running three or four a day.
I created my own diet too, picking up tips from my healthy friends. When I started New You, I was sure this would be the toughest part — anything getting between me and my mayo didn't seem likely. But something happened early on, in the first few days after that Rapid Reaction class. I just started eating better. I cut out bread, cheese and fried combinations of the two. I started buying six-packs of Ultra instead of Bass.
Oh, I slipped up along the way. The Planet's marathon staff meetings were always brutal — free pizza is just too tempting to turn down after the first hour. And I had some rough nights, when I chose to ignore the fact that a half-rack of Ultra is still an ass-load of calories. But I had an advantage over my esteemed editor in our battle to become New Us's, a fallback plan for those inevitable lapses in diet concentration. No matter how badly I'd beaten up my body, the thing is still only 24 years old. And after a long night, or a long meeting, I knew my body would snap back if I pushed it. Sooner or later, it would start acting its age.
I've got another dieting theory, a self-serving one for all you gluttons. I think my decade of eating pure crap — onion ring omelets and chicken philly's, sausage and egg biscuits washed down with gallon upon gallon of Coke — was actually a good thing. All those trans fats had been stockpiled — I had a war chest of junk lying around for my body to munch on, so it didn't mind that I kept feeding it gerbil food. And once the greasy reserves had been depleted, I'd already broken my rhythms, which is the real key to getting in shape.
I didn't talk to Corey for the last two months of New You. He was always with a client when I showed up at Xtreme, and I was happy with the results I was getting from my haphazard regimen. The pounds had been steadily coming off, and I'd seen the underside of my belly for the first time in years.
I showed up early for my final weigh-in, and had 15 minutes to kill before I'd figure out exactly how well I'd done. Corey was across the gym, and seemed startled to see me.
"Max! How's it going? You look all right buddy," he said. I asked him if he had any last-minute tips. "Don't tell anyone I told you this," he said, "but go jog in the sauna."
Twelve weeks after I'd asked the guy to take it easy on me, I was running in the sauna's desert heat. The sweat came quickly, my shorts soaked through. I could feel the weight flowing out. Heavy, salty drops rained down on the wooden floor — drops my father would've been proud of.
Max won the New You Challenge in his age group by losing a grand total of 17 pounds. He went from 15.8 to 9.6 percent body fat and shrunk his beloved gut by 5.75 inches. Best of all, he kicked his editor's ass.