On December 17, I gave myself a challenge: I would weigh 180 pounds by the day I graduate.
That gave me precisely five months to gain 23.8 lbs, starting from 156.2. That's about a pound every six days.
Easy, right?
Well, maybe if I drank litres of Pepsi every day. But to make things difficult, there were two other conditions:
1. Don't gain an unreasonable amount of fat.
2. Don't do anything clearly unhealthy.
Before I continue, here is a pretty graph of my progress so far.
That gave me precisely five months to gain 23.8 lbs, starting from 156.2. That's about a pound every six days.
Easy, right?
Well, maybe if I drank litres of Pepsi every day. But to make things difficult, there were two other conditions:
1. Don't gain an unreasonable amount of fat.
2. Don't do anything clearly unhealthy.
Before I continue, here is a pretty graph of my progress so far.
The blue line (Weight) represents my actual weight every morning when I wake up. The orange line (Target) is the slope to my target weight. The red line (Trend) is a trend line created by adding the tenth of the difference between two days, rounded to one decimal place, to the second day.
As you can see, I am slightly ahead of schedule, and I have five more pounds to go. But this is where things get difficult.
To understand, you would have to ask: why am I doing this in the first place?
Because I hate failure.
Last winter, living in Nanjing University, I decided on a whim to find out what would happen if I tried to gain weight. I found that I could get to a little over 170 pounds, and then I stalled. The scale would not budge any higher. I ate three or more large meals a day of oily Chinese food and white rice, and I could not get any heavier.
Challenge accepted.
I decided on 180 lbs because at 5"10.5, 180 lbs is the line at which I become overweight according to the BMI scale. The BMI scale, of course, does not take into account body composition. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance, is considered obese by the BMI standard. It has always made me curious what it would take to get over the BMI overweight line without actually being unhealthily overweight.
But that puts me in uncharted territory. I have now gained about as much weight as I have ever successfully gained. To get to 180 lbs, I will have to break the Nanjing barrier.
For how I plan to beat my un-expandable stomach, you'll have to wait for the next chapter.
As you can see, I am slightly ahead of schedule, and I have five more pounds to go. But this is where things get difficult.
To understand, you would have to ask: why am I doing this in the first place?
Because I hate failure.
Last winter, living in Nanjing University, I decided on a whim to find out what would happen if I tried to gain weight. I found that I could get to a little over 170 pounds, and then I stalled. The scale would not budge any higher. I ate three or more large meals a day of oily Chinese food and white rice, and I could not get any heavier.
Challenge accepted.
I decided on 180 lbs because at 5"10.5, 180 lbs is the line at which I become overweight according to the BMI scale. The BMI scale, of course, does not take into account body composition. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance, is considered obese by the BMI standard. It has always made me curious what it would take to get over the BMI overweight line without actually being unhealthily overweight.
But that puts me in uncharted territory. I have now gained about as much weight as I have ever successfully gained. To get to 180 lbs, I will have to break the Nanjing barrier.
For how I plan to beat my un-expandable stomach, you'll have to wait for the next chapter.
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