Cinemorphosis

Tag: fitness

  • Groats, Greens, and the Gospel of Self-Control

    Groats, Greens, and the Gospel of Self-Control

    I’m a man prone to obsessions. Not in a cute, quirky, Wes Anderson way, but in the full-blown, white-knuckled grip of irrational fixations that orbit around some grand illusion of self-improvement. These fixations rarely tether themselves to anything as vulgar as reality, which means I have to approach them like a man handling live wires—gingerly, skeptically, with rubber gloves and a fire extinguisher nearby. My latest obsession? A brutally austere, monastic eating plan masquerading as discipline but smelling faintly of madness.

    The rules are simple, almost religious in tone: three meals a day. No snacks. Breakfast is a steaming bowl of steel-cut oats doped with vanilla protein powder and berries. Lunch: buckwheat groats, same protein powder, same berries, different bowl. Dinner: a joyless, crunchy salad of cucumber and bell pepper crowned with sauteed tofu and doused in a dressing so puritanical it could double as penance—balsamic vinegar, Greek yogurt, nutritional yeast, and a blizzard of righteous herbs. To add some zing, I’ll dump a tablespoon of Trader Joe’s Italian Hot Bomba Sauce to give me a lifeline to joy and pleasure. 

    But here’s the rub: the long, harrowing stretch between lunch and dinner. That’s when the madness starts to whisper. Could green tea keep me afloat? Coffee? A heretical diet soda or two? These are the thoughts of a man trying to barter with his own obsession, bargaining with the jailer who’s taken his afternoon hostage. I pretend it’s hunger, but what I’m really feeling is the hollow buzz of addiction to a narrative: that if I follow this sacred routine, I will unlock a better, lighter, more transcendent version of myself.

    Of course, it’s likely just another chimera—one more shimmering lie I chase like a half-crazed mystic in a Whole Foods aisle. I suspect I don’t actually change. I just trade compulsions. Some people devour cheesecake. I devour grand narratives of control, discipline, and spiritual rebirth through groats and greens. My real diet isn’t food—it’s fantasy. And I am a glutton.

  • Charlie the Frog at the Temple of Gains

    Charlie the Frog at the Temple of Gains

    By the time you hit fourteen, your sacred sanctuary wasn’t some air-conditioned suburban rec center with eucalyptus towels and Wi-Fi. No, your Mecca was Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California—a rusting cathedral of iron that began life as a chicken coop in the 1950s and never quite shook the poultry vibe. This was not a gym—it was a festering biome of bacteria and dreams, a living organism teeming with unclassified fungi, incurable athlete’s foot, and possibly several sentient strains of black mold. Members spoke of a frog named Charlie who allegedly roosted in the shower stalls—a fat, warty mascot celebrated by the resident pro wrestlers. You never saw Charlie, but you believed. In a place like this, hallucinations could be considered part of the membership plan.

    The locker room? It doubled as a noir film set. Every day, you’d see some bankrupt divorcé in a velour tracksuit and a ship-anchor gold chain, chained to the payphone like it was his last lifeline, ranting to his lawyer about alimony, DUIs, or some tragic time-share dispute in Reno. You listened in. How could you not?

    Out back was a pool—or what used to be a pool. Now it was a soup of moss, dead rats, and unspeakable broth. Walt himself, the gym’s proprietor and part-time pest undertaker, would emerge every so often with a pool skimmer, fish out some bloated rodent corpse, and hold it aloft like it was Simba on Pride Rock. The regulars would cheer. Walt would bow. Then he’d fling the cadaver into the dumpster like he was doing Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.

    Inside, the circus only expanded. You had Wally—an ancient gym relic who claimed to be the anatomical model for some early caveman medical scroll. He’d been there since Eisenhower, possibly since the Carboniferous Period. Wally was a fixture. He corrected your form whether you asked or not. He’d bench the bar, monologue about arthritis, and tell sweeping tales of deadbeat cousins, glamorous ex-lovers, and Eisenhower’s America. His workouts lasted longer than most wars. And when he was done, he’d vanish into the sauna, then reemerge drenched in talcum powder like a ghost summoned by a seance in a health spa. You often thought a foghorn would erupt every time he crossed your field of vision.

    The soundtrack of this chaos? The gym’s radio had a three-song memory: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town,” and Norman Connors’ “You Are My Starship.” These songs looped like some cosmic punishment for crimes you hadn’t yet committed. Yet somehow, they became the anthem of your adolescence.

    And you were the perfect age—old enough to build biceps, too young to pay taxes. You didn’t know what a mortgage was, but you knew how to crank out supersets. While grown men wept about tuition and liver spots, you were curling barbells and escaping into bliss. The gym wasn’t just a place—it was your church, your escape hatch, your sweaty Shangri-La.

    As Arnold wrote in The Education of a Bodybuilder, the gym was where it all clicked. You felt it too—that moment of transcendence, when iron became religion and sweat became baptism. For you, that epiphany happened in the rot-ridden, bacteria-flecked walls of Walt’s Gym, 1976 edition. A paradise of tetanus and testosterone. A perfect hellhole. The best place on Earth.

  • The Gospel According to Arnold

    The Gospel According to Arnold

    At thirteen, you weren’t just growing—you were bulking. You launched yourself headfirst into the gladiatorial quest for muscle supremacy, wolfing down 200 grams of protein a day in four frenzied “feedings,” as if you were a ravenous prehistoric beast on a cutting-edge strength cycle. While other kids were figuring out how to talk to girls without combusting from nerves, you were busy calculating amino acid ratios and chasing the elusive state of protein-muscle synthesis like it was the Holy Grail.

    Your kitchen became a makeshift laboratory of gains. You blended protein shakes with powders hawked by the beefy prophets in Strength and Health magazine—chalky concoctions that tasted like regret mixed with drywall. You drank them anyway. Satiety was sacred.

    After a year of racking up Junior Olympic Weightlifting trophies—hoisting iron like a Cold War super-soldier on state-sponsored hormones—your well-meaning mother tried to support your calling. On your fourteenth birthday, she handed you what you assumed would be a Soviet-tier weightlifting manual. Instead, it was Pumping Iron—a glossy coffee-table tome filled with baby-oiled men in banana hammocks. Bodybuilders. Flexing. Posing. Pouting.

    You had to sit her down.

    “Mom,” you said, as diplomatically as a hormonal adolescent can, “weightlifters move heavy things. Bodybuilders pose in sequined underwear and shave their armpits.”

    To you, weightlifters were Spartans. Bodybuilders were Vegas lounge acts with glutes.

    Still, curiosity got the better of you. You flipped through Pumping Iron with a mixture of revulsion and wonder. The men on those pages didn’t look human. They looked like sculptures that got bored and decided to bench press.

    You imagined them living in their parents’ houses, drinking protein sludge while their heat-addled mothers babbled to parakeets and dabbed their foreheads with cold washcloths. They were carnival beasts. You, however, were a noble practitioner of Olympic Weightlifting—a sport so pure it belonged in the actual Olympics, unlike the oiled-up beauty pageants you now held in low regard.

    Your hero was Vasily Alekseyev, the 350-pound Russian colossus who looked like he ate livestock for brunch. You watched him waddle onto the platform, glare at a loaded barbell like it owed him money, and launch it overhead like a man tossing furniture in a domestic dispute. When that barbell hit the floor, it echoed through your ribcage. That, you told yourself, was true strength.

    But then… Arnold happened.

    You’d seen him before, sure. But when you saw Pumping Iron—saw him—something shifted. It wasn’t just admiration. It was conversion. Arnold wasn’t a man. He was a solar flare with biceps. A deity with an accent.

    Soon, you were hanging around Walt’s Gym, where the walls smelled like testosterone and chalk dust, and where the guys wore cutoffs like they were Roman togas. One afternoon, you spotted a bodybuilder straight out of central casting: a tall, tanned fireman who had just placed in the Mr. California competition. Blond hair, thick broom-handle mustache, horn-rimmed glasses that screamed “Clark Kent just deadlifted a Buick.”

    He bench-pressed over 300 pounds, stood up, and stared into the mirror like Narcissus on creatine. “The first time I saw Arnold,” he said with reverence, “I felt I was in the presence of the Lord. I said to myself, ‘There stands the Messiah. There stands God Almighty, come to bring good cheer to this world.’”

    And you believed him.

    Because Arnold wasn’t just jacked—he was divine. He was the Pied Piper of Pecs, leading you out of your ordinary life and into a new religion: Bodybuilding Fever. There was no vaccine. No mercy. Just the cure: protein shakes, gym mirrors, and relentless flexing.

    You no longer lifted just to be strong. You lifted to be seen. To be admired. To become an icon. You drank from the sacred chalice of the dumbbell and chased the gleam of your own reflection. You weren’t just lifting—you were becoming.

  • Micky Dolenz, Dave Draper, and the Death of a Boy’s Dreams

    Micky Dolenz, Dave Draper, and the Death of a Boy’s Dreams

    By the time you hit kindergarten, you were already a zealous convert to the gospel of hard work, marinated in a diet of children’s books and those absurdly persuasive Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads found in comic books. Your tiny brain was hardwired to believe that with enough elbow grease and grit, you could bend the universe to your will. You marched through life armed with Captain Kangaroo’s treacly aphorisms and the motivational war cries of The Little Engine That Could. “I think I can” became your toddler mantra, your creed, your caffeinated Kool-Aid.

    Then came October 16, 1967. The day optimism died.

    You were just twelve days shy of your sixth birthday, nestled into your evening ritual of watching The Monkees, when the episode “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling” detonated your reality. There on the screen was your scrappy hero Micky Dolenz, getting demolished on the beach by a slab of muscle named Bulk—played by none other than Mr. Universe Dave Draper. Bulk, a bleach-blonde Hercules with pecs that looked weaponized, snatched away Brenda, the beach goddess, without breaking a sweat.

    Crushed but hopeful, Micky sought salvation through Weaklings Anonymous. His training montage was nothing short of existential punishment: lifting weights the size of Volkswagens, chugging fermented goat milk curd (which may as well have been bottled regret), and pawning off his drum set—essentially amputating his soul—to finance this fever dream of redemption.

    And then came the final betrayal.

    After all that sweat, sacrifice, and putrid curd, Brenda dumped Bulk and hooked up with some Proust-reading dandy who probably thought cardio was a character in Les Misérables. Your six-year-old heart imploded. You sat there slack-jawed, betrayed by TV, by Micky, by Brenda, and most of all, by the myth that hard work would win the day. Goat curd couldn’t save you. Pop-Tarts couldn’t save you. Even a twin-pack of Ding Dongs barely numbed the existential sting.

    You wandered the next few years like a ghost of your former self, disillusioned, cynical, nursing your wounds in sugary snacks and quiet rage. Not until Arnold Schwarzenegger stormed into your life via Sports Illustrated and Pumping Iron did your faith in the bodybuilding gospel return. But by then, the damage was done. You knew the truth: sometimes, life crowns the guy reading Proust—and leaves the guy drinking protein shakes in the dust.

  • The Gospel of Iron: How Weightlifting Became My Religion

    The Gospel of Iron: How Weightlifting Became My Religion

    In 1974, at the age of thirteen, I began weightlifting under the guidance of Lou Kruk, my junior high P.E. teacher and Junior Olympic weightlifting coach. Lou wasn’t just teaching kids to hoist iron—he was shaping futures. He handed me a barbell and lit the fuse. Soon, I was consuming protein powders and flipping through Strength & Health and Muscle Builder, the gospel according to Bob Hoffman and Joe Weider.

    From garage gyms to commercial ones, from clunky bench presses to rusted barbells, I trained. I flirted briefly with gimmicks—a Bullworker here, a Power Yoga phase there—but nothing kept me grounded like the iron. Eventually, I found kettlebells: odd, compact, brutally effective. And fifty-one years later, I’m still at it. The protein, the lifting—they’re no longer habits; they’re rituals.

    I don’t work out to chase aesthetics or to stave off decay. I train because not training feels like suffocating. My routine gives shape to my days, the way grammar gives shape to language. Without it, life would collapse into chaos. I marvel at those who drift through their hours without structure, snacking at whim, binge-watching shows, darting between texts and chores like pinballs. A life without scaffolding feels not just unsatisfying—it feels dangerous.

    Sometimes I wonder: what if I’d never met Lou Kruk? What if weightlifting had never entered my life? Would I have found some other sacred structure to cling to, or would I have been swallowed by drift? Yes, I play piano. Yes, I write. But I’m no professional writer unless you count me as a “professional navel-gazer.” These activities are merely sidelines—dilettante pursuits. It’s the iron that makes me whole.

    Maybe weightlifting saved my life. Maybe it still does. I could psychoanalyze this, wax poetic about addiction to ritual and the fear of entropy. Or I could walk into the garage, chalk my hands, and get lost in goblet squats and Turkish Get-Ups until the world makes sense again. I think you already know what I’m going to choose.

  • Training to Failure: A Love Letter to My Broken Sixty-Year-Old Body

    Training to Failure: A Love Letter to My Broken Sixty-Year-Old Body

    I just inhaled 80 grams of braised tofu on a bed of arugula—an herbivore’s banquet—because I didn’t want any leftovers skulking in the fridge while my family disappears for a weeklong trip. The trip also means six missed workouts, which my inner gym rat is already mourning with the solemnity of a funeral dirge.

    In my infinite wisdom—or perhaps masochistic delusion—I stacked seven consecutive kettlebell workouts into my week like some demented CrossFit monk chasing transcendence through joint pain. Predictably, I torched myself. Yesterday, I hit the wall. Even after a nap, I was cooked—bone tired, foggy, the kind of fatigue that whispers pre-flu doom into your ears while your muscles quietly plan a mutiny.

    Today was my supposed “last hurrah” before vacation. I skipped the kettlebells and mounted the Schwinn Airdyne, knowing full well I was running on fumes. Usually, I scorch 700–800 calories in an hour. Today I limped to 600. Eighty percent effort. That’s what the data says. My pride says otherwise.

    This might be my new reality: controlled, measured workouts instead of cinematic Rocky montages. The problem? I came of age in the 1970s golden era of bodybuilding, when Arnold preached the Gospel of Training to Failure and warned us about becoming “paper tigers.” I took that to heart. Too much heart. The kind that skips beats when your prefrontal cortex is begging you to lie down and your inner bro yells, “One more set!”

    But now, every time I push too hard—whether it’s with kettlebells or a fevered sprint on the Airdyne—I spiral into what I’ve dubbed RAA: Rundown Anxiety Affliction. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s a curse. You feel like you’re on the verge of the flu, haunted by a twitchy dread that your immune system has thrown in the towel. And for what? To impress the ghost of Mike Mentzer?

    I’m not exercising and eating tofu like a reformed monk to become a sickly, anxious husk of a man. That’s not fitness. That’s martyrdom.

    Today I danced at the edge of RAA. I throttled back. Took my 600 calories, thanked the fitness gods for the mercy, and called it. I’ll nap. I’ll pack. I’ll go on this trip, eat as decently as possible, and try not to treat my return like a penitential Ironman.

    Because no one needs to come back from vacation needing a vacation from their vacation—especially if it starts with RAA and ends with a doctor saying, “You need to calm the hell down.”

  • Cling to Your Lead and You’ll Lose: A Midlife Playbook

    Cling to Your Lead and You’ll Lose: A Midlife Playbook

    I don’t take the Life Force lightly. It’s the mysterious voltage that animates us, that flicks the switch from sloth to spark. One minute you’re groggy and half-dreaming, the next you’re lacing up your sneakers, firing up the espresso machine, and attacking your kettlebell workout like you’re in a Rocky montage scored by Miles Davis. The Life Force says: Get up. Get after it. Drink, eat, laugh, lift, love, live—before the curtain drops.

    Even when we’re slumped in a funk, sulking like a teenager who just discovered Camus, the Life Force doesn’t vanish. It simply retreats, muffled beneath layers of melancholy and cheap self-pity, waiting for the clouds to lift so it can slip back in with a jolt.

    I’ve been thinking about this lately as I inch toward sixty-four. The aging brain doesn’t hide its compromises. The body offers new aches like parting gifts from yesterday’s workout. And I keep reading about public figures—my age or younger—dropping dead from heart attacks and cancer, as if the universe is whispering, “You’re next.”

    The awareness of mortality, while useful in the Stoic-philosopher sense, has a dark gravitational pull. It makes you want to swaddle yourself in self-pity, curl up with grim hypotheticals, and mentally prewrite your own eulogy. I’m no sage, but I’ve noticed: the older you get, the easier it is to start thinking about death instead of living your life.

    And that’s where the football metaphor barges in—uninvited, but apt. Picture a team nursing a small lead. Instead of playing their usual game, they start playing not to lose. They abandon boldness, creativity, and flow. They tighten up. They stall. They cling. And then they lose.

    That’s what obsessing over death becomes: Playing Not to Lose Syndrome. You stop being you. You start tiptoeing through your own damn life, hands over your eyes, praying not to fall. But life’s not won through timid pacing. You win by doing what got you here in the first place—living like hell, moving the ball down the field, trusting your strength, and swinging the kettlebell with fury and joy.

    Yes, I’ll admit it: the fearful doppelgänger lives in me too. He bites his nails and speaks in doomsday whispers. But so does the joyful lifer, the one who’s still in love with breakfast, jazz, hard workouts, and writing rants like this one. Maybe being fully human means acknowledging both—the brave and the cowardly—and choosing, as often as possible, to side with the one who gets up and dances anyway.

    Life doesn’t reward those who cling. It rewards those who play to win—until the final whistle.

  • Mercury Rising, Tuna Retiring: A Fish Addict’s Tofu Detox

    Mercury Rising, Tuna Retiring: A Fish Addict’s Tofu Detox

    Howard Stern recently went public with the kind of health confession that makes nutrition nerds shiver with schadenfreude: years of eating fish like a ravenous sea lion left him with sky-high mercury levels—over 30, when 8 is considered the red alert line. His white blood cell count crashed, and his bloodstream began to resemble a periodic table. So now he’s easing into a mostly plant-based diet, still clinging to salmon and shrimp a few times a week like a man transitioning from whiskey to kombucha.

    Taking a page from Howard’s mercury memoir, I’m retiring my daily canned-fish salad lunch. No more tuna tins. No more mackerel mania. In their place? A half-block of Trader Joe’s High-Protein Tofu, sautéed in olive oil like a grown-up with arteries worth protecting. The whole package is 70 grams of protein. I’ll eat one half at lunch, the other half either for dinner or for the next day.

    Preparation, of course, requires a bit of tofu theater. I wrap the slab in a dish towel and stack a Dutch oven on top like I’m pressing it into a confession. From there, it crisps nicely in the pan—unlike my nerves, which are still adjusting to life without anchovies.

    The salad base: arugula, because I enjoy a green that fights back. The dressing: Greek yogurt whipped with nutritional yeast, herbs, and spices—a tangy, umami-rich blend that says “I’m trying” louder than balsamic ever could.

    If I need a protein boost, I’ll toss in some drained beans or egg whites, though I refuse to let the salad become a protein arms race. The goal isn’t to feel full for eight hours—it’s to avoid mercury poisoning while still pretending I’m eating for pleasure.

    We’ll see how satisfying it all is. At worst, I miss the old tuna days. At best, I keep my nervous system intact and live long enough to be skeptical of my next health phase.

  • Why I’m Eating Like My Life Depends on It (Because It Might)

    Why I’m Eating Like My Life Depends on It (Because It Might)

    In 2020, my mother passed away from kidney disease. She refused to go on a dialysis machine. I found out a few days ago that her sister, now 80, has stage-4 kidney disease. My aunt doesn’t drink or smoke, but her doctor told her that age can do its job on the kidneys and will give her medication and a diet to slow down the disease’s progression. 

    I assume I may have a genetic predisposition for tired kidneys, so at 63, I’m looking to make some preventative dietary changes. I’m going to watch my potassium, phosphates, and sodium. I’m going to cut down on dairy, nuts, nut butters, sweets, diet sodas, canned fish, meat and such. I’m going to keep my creatine at 3 grams a day. Being overweight, having high sugar levels, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure are all bad for the kidneys, so my diet has to keep those areas under control. I remember Doctor Peter Attia writing in his book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity that having advanced kidney disease presents a shorter lifespan diagnosis than stage-4 cancer, so I feel motivated to be diligent. My diet now looks like this:

    Breakfast: I’ll rotate 5 breakfast grains in which I will measure exactly one-fourth cup of one of the following: 1. steel-cut oatmeal, 2. quinoa, 3. buckwheat groats, 4. bulgur, and 5. hulled or foxtail millet (11-12 grams of protein) with half a cup of Greek plain yogurt, chia seeds, walnuts, plain soy milk, phosphate-free protein powder, berries, and coffee.

    Lunch: Salad with 20 grams of protein tempeh, rinsed from a can or cooked beans or salmon with balsamic vinegar, herbs and spices, half cup of soy milk, berries or small tangerine. 

    Post-nap Afternoon Snack: One cup of plain Greek yogurt with phosphate-free protein powder, or no powder at all, and berries. 

    Dinner: Vegetables, protein of some kind, including braised tofu, and a small apple. If I want a vegan dinner, I can make a mixture of rice or quinoa with black beans, tofu or tempeh, and a cup of coconut milk. 

    Between meals: No more diet soda of any kind, only water, herbal tea, and soda water.   

  • Neddy Merrill Disease: Lifting Weights to Outrun the Abyss

    Neddy Merrill Disease: Lifting Weights to Outrun the Abyss

    I take no glory in training through my 60s. At nearly 64, with a lifting life that began in 1974 amid the clang of Olympic barbells and testosterone-choked gyms, I no longer chase records or applause. These days, I chase mobility. I chase not falling apart. A nagging flare of golfer’s elbow—inner right, thank you very much—has made its uninvited return, forcing me to swap kettlebell rows for gentler “lawnmower” pulls and abandon my beloved open-palm curls in favor of reverse curls, the orthopedic equivalent of safe sex.

    There was a time, of course, when I confused self-worth with showing off. I strutted under heavy weights in the ‘70s through the ‘90s like a tragic extra from Pumping Iron, nursing shredded rotator cuffs and wrecked lumbar discs in my quest to impress… well, no one, really. The mirror? My dad? Arnold? These days I tiptoe a tightrope between intensity and injury, trying to silence the reckless ghost of my twenty-year-old self who still believes he’s indestructible.

    This tug-of-war with time reminds me of Neddy Merrill, the doomed protagonist in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” who tries to recapture youth by swimming across his neighbors’ pools like a suburban Odysseus, only to arrive at his own foreclosed house—empty, echoing, and final. I see flashes of my own Neddy Merrill alter ego every time I glimpse my neighbor, a sturdy cop in his early 40s, shepherding his twin teenage sons off to jiu-jitsu. I envy them—their youth, their purpose, their untouched joints. But I remind myself that comparison is the mother of misery. I don’t train for glory anymore. I train because the alternative is to surrender to frailty, to collapse into a slow-motion horror film of decay. I train because being strong is still cheaper than therapy, and it’s the only middle finger I can raise at time’s relentless advance.