The Running Ben

Last week I ran the Bristol 10k, which goes against pretty much every gene I've inherited. I appreciate that to some out there 10 kilometres represents a recreational morning jog but with my history of borderline-hedonistic decadence and general fatass-itis, it's a pretty significant achievement for me. Although I was somewhat humbled the moment I crossed the finish line when my body succumbed for a split second to some kind of sob/dry-heave hybrid convulsion, but that dignity lapse aside the event was without incident. Huge props to my PT Hattie for making the extra effort to keep me motivated, given that I couldn't run more than 2k in one stretch back in February it's been a big boost to my health overall.

My followers and I...just like Forrest Gump...

Before the run I'd set up a JustGiving page which is still up if anyone has the inclination to donate. There are some goodies you get in return - naturally my self-made pap and some animation-related bits and bobs, so please do check it out.More good news (back in the comparatively sedentary world of animation) is that "The Naughty List" will be shown as part of Anima Mundi, the Brazil-based festival which takes place from July 15th-24th in Rio de Janeiro and the 27th-31st in São Paulo. The festival screened "House Guest" a bunch of times last summer and I'm incredibly happy to be involved a second year in a row.On the subject of festivals, I recently wrote an overview of my experience at the Stuttgart Animation Festival (ITFS) which is now up at Skwigly. Generally speaking it's pretty positive, kinda makes me wish I could go to more festivals, so hopefully the next film will be the one that gets me flown all over the globe. Until then you can read the article here:
The 18th Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film – Overview

Synecdoche, Bristol...doesn't work quite so well as a pun...

So, about a month after I'd hoped, I've finally shifted enough extraneous flabby tissue to have reached my target belt size. And yet I still have the body and disposition of a Philip Seymour Hoffman character. I need Marky Mark to give me a good dressing down.
Having dug out that clip I just realised that Hoffman circa '97 was in better shape than I am now. That reference sure bit me on the ass.
I've consequently betrayed my lineage and joined a gym. Amazing carrot-and-stick effect a nice pair of buttocks has when using the cross-trainer in front of yours. If you're a girl and reading this, that was an ironic and biting dig at the assumptions of a cynical society. For true.Changing the subject, my short film "Ground Running" will be making its first festival appearance of 2010 at the Skepto International Film Festival, taking place in Cagliari, Sardinia. To display my superb geographical knowledge, that's one of the Italian islands the boot is gearing up to punt.
This film was completed and put out in 2008 (a couple months after I finished "House Guest") and then quickly rescinded when a bunch of people pointed out some eerie similarities to another film. I amended these last year, ultimately lengthening the film as a consequence. Once I've retired "House Guest" I plan on putting more effort into sending the new edit of "Ground Running" around and getting it seen. In the meantime, the Skepto festival will take place toward the end of the month, exact day/time/place to follow.

You might wanna skip this one...it gets kinda grim...

NOTE: My medical situation is such that I actually can't speak for very long, if at all. As a consequence it's very likely that I'll be blogging a lot more to compensate and let the poison out, so to speak. Apologies in advance...

2001, A.K.A. "The good ol' days". Stairs were a bitch but by Christ it was nice to have chicken wings whenever I wanted...

I've noticed with some alarm that a female acquaintance of mine has taken to referring to me as 'chum' in text messages and emails. While not factually inaccurate, it's a little undermining - here are a few terms that I'd consider to be mildly less emasculating:
'Sista'
'Girlfriend'
'Gal-pal'
'My gay friend'
'Eunuch'
I'm assuming she's decided to assert the strictly-platonic nature of our friendship in a preemptive move against any potential transference issues. Since getting sick I've been reaching out for coddling and conversational hair-stroking like an attention-seeking, self-pitying adolescent and it's probably knocked any trace elements of legitimate manliness out of me. That and the fact that, after four years of regular weight loss, I'm still a man with tits. Sure, they're smaller and perkier now, but their upright, conical pointiness kinda makes it worse. Statistically speaking, any girl's fat friend (or 'chum') is the person least likely to wind up in the sack with her. I'm generalising of course - had there not been the odd exception I'd have probably suffered some kind of testicular blow-out by now.
Note how I'm not even attempting to deny my intentions here. That's because at the end of the day my mind works exactly the same way every other man's mind does. If you're female and I know you, it's very likely I've contemplated making some kind of move. It's the one thing I have in common with every other straight man you know. In my case it's called 'playing the odds', something one ends up doing automatically when one spent most of one's teens looking like an oddly-shaped potato.

2001, that same summer. In hindsight, maybe an intervention of some kind was in order...

After a fairly substantial decrease in mass earlier this year I'm now officially in the final stretch, but through focusing on exercise of late I now weigh more (through either increased muscle mass or a large, undiscovered tumor) than I did six months ago. Two shirts I bought in August that were too snug at the time now fit very comfortably...so I'm getting thinner...but I'm gaining weight?
It's confusing as all fuck.In frustration I genuinely contemplated the weight loss aid Alli, which is now a legal product in the UK. I quickly recalled a conversation with my GP back in 2006, in which he offered to put my name forward as a candidate for testing the drug. Here's the ensuing exchange as best I recall it:

GP: It has been quite successful in the States, albeit with side effects.
Me: Side effects, eh? Well, gee-whiz, how bad can they be?
GP: Depends. The drug works by stopping the absorption of fat during digestion, so it leaves your body as waste.
Me: So, I poo fat, basically?
GP: Well, it's kind of a fat/poo cocktail. What you evacuate is essentially grease. The side effects mainly involve loss of control over your bowel movements.
Me: Just to get this straight: My options are to either spend less money on fatty foods, or pay for a drug that might see me shitting hot grease on a regular basis, with no control over when or where?
GP: It's advised you carry spare trousers wherever you go.
Exeunt, pursued by a bear

Well, I made the 'bear' bit up. But having lived twenty-two years without ever having any kind of pant-shitting incident (post-diapers), I was fairly certain I didn't want to start then and politely declined by backhanding the GP with his own clipboard and scampering away, fearful tears running down my cheeks.
At the end of the day, it's an issue of continued willpower and, while it's always going to be boring, I've managed so far without surgeries or nightmare incontinence pills.
Endeavouring to actually improve my physique rather than just get smaller, my legs and arms are in pretty good shape while my mid-section still maintains a consistency similar to that of briefly-microwaved cookie dough. So I've abandoned the scales as an accurate record and am instead going by punching holes in a belt. Not that scientific but it's less likely to fluctuate inexplicably.
Here's where I am now. It may be overly-ambitious but I'm hoping to reach my goal...hole by the new year.My next entry will be considerably less fecal, I promise.

Ben Vs. Contentment

The Republic of Hungary is the next stop for 'House Guest', which has been included as part of Busho 2009, the Budapest Short Film Festival. Dates and times haven't been listed yet, but will put them up when I know. Official website here.
On a less encouraging note, the last month and a half has been strangely decadent - between the awards, the Faith No More show and some unexpected perks in my personal life, June 2009 will probably go on record as one of the best months of my life. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that my weight has gone unacknowledged until now, and I'm back at 96kg after reaching my target of 95kg last month. Not a huge setback, but I need to start thinking more conscientiously so I can throw it into reverse again. See, I'm not wired like most fat guys, I don't eat when I'm down because I can't be bothered. When things are going really well, though, bring on the dim sum, JD and porterhouse steaks.
So, ironically, it's harder to lose weight when I'm in good spirits. It makes a kind of sense - when I was monstrously huge I was always pretty content, and I started successfully losing weight only when I got anxious about my health. Then when I was settled in Bristol and happy again, the loss more or less plateaued.
Psychologically speaking, I could surround myself with negative stimuli and make myself all depressed to start losing weight quicker (y'know, get all paranoid about swine flu, the economy, tick-infested chipmunks that are coming to kill us all, that kind of stuff) but then I'd be a misery-guts and just bug all my friends. So unfortunately the only other option is boring, sensible eating and boring, sensible exercise. But I guess I'd rather be bored than morose.Here we go again.

The Final Push

Well, I did it. I leave for the Download Festival tomorrow and I weigh in at 95kg, bang on target. Given that I shamelessly wolfed down giant portions of roti canai and crispy chilli beef at the HK Diner (best fuckin' restaurant in the city) last night, once that's out of my system it's possible that I may even have beat my target a little bit. But taking presumption out of the equation, it still means that in the last three and a half months I've lost a little over 9kg, which comes to about 20lbs. I'd be proud if I weren't so damn hungry.
So, to see if this adventure had any visible consequences, I put on the old t-shirt that clung to me so tightly back in march. Y'know, the 'symbolic' Faith No More/Ben of 1997 t-shirt. Well, I think the difference shows...Not only does it fit, there's even some slack from where the shirt hangs off my moobs (still there, the perky little fuckers). There's just one problem, one which I somehow hadn't acknowledged until now.
This shirt sucks.The layout's clunky, the colour scheme is off and the typeface is all wrong. Methinks it may have been a bootleg job. What luck, then, that the band have brought out new reunion tour shirts! Sneaky fuckers.
Apparel issues aside, I'm giddy at the prospect of seeing Faith No More live in two days. In truth I won't fully believe it's really happening until I see them onstage with my own eyes. This really is one of life's big deals. It may even knock losing my virginity off the top spot (no offense Anna, wherever you are - let's face facts, it wasn't a shining moment for either of us).
I will come back a changed man. Maybe I'll even be motivated to lose another 20lbs over the next three months...

I ate a donor kebab last night. If I'd gone on a killing spree I'd feel less shame today.

Weight loss has slowed down, still more or less on track but I'm gonna need to be a little more vigilant if I want to get to 95kgs in 20 days. I was sort of hoping I'd even wind up a little lower than 95kg at the rate I was going, but summer BBQs are starting up and I have less willpower than a sorority chick with daddy-issues at a frat party.
Anyway, currently at 96kg. Nearly nearly nearly.

Mild Shrinkage

Another quickie weight loss update, happy to say am on track and am hovering at around 97kg.
The downside is I'm at a point where I don't give a crap. This always happens a couple months in. I get withdrawal. I yearn for junk I otherwise wouldn't even touch. I actually contemplated walking into the Ms. Millie's on the way home tonight.

Fortunately the rational side to my brain won out. Grapes and water it is.

Right now this is like pornography to my pathetic, hungry brain.

I'm not having a good time. I don't want to be thin, frankly it creeps me out to be able to feel my bones underneath my skin. After I lost the first 70 or so lbs I got really worried because I could feel this hard bump on my neck. It was my fucking Adam's apple. By the time it developed initially I was already too fat to feel it so it didn't make an appearance until I was 23. That shit is chilling.
Why am I writing this? I need to go to bed. I'm all punchy.

Eeeww...

I just got off the phone with a doctor who told me that I need to 'lay off the exercise'. I never, ever would've predicted being told that kind of thing in my life.
It turns out my thighs have reacted badly to the sudden increase of Thighmaster usage, and something above the back of my knee has either popped, burst, clotted or strained. Whatever it was, I'm living with a slowly shrinking lump accompanied by a pretty nauseating bruise. There's absolutely no reason for me to take a picture of it and post it here, and yet I seem to have done exactly that.Hopefully you aren't eating. Well, if you were, you probably aren't now.
The upside to all this hazardous physical activity is that I'm still progressing well with the weight loss. Presently I'm at 98kg, and if I can lose about 1lb per week I should be at 97kg by the end of the month.Slightly less of me to go around.

The Recession...

...of my bountiful moobs, that is.
Actually they haven't so much receded as grown alarmingly pert. But I think that means they're getting smaller. I still feel a bit like Meatloaf in 'Fight Club'.

His name was Robert Paulsen...

After a month of living frugally (which can't be a bad thing in this climate) I've dropped 5kg, from 104kg to 99kg. That's around 11 lbs, which is more than I was going for. I was probably just expunging retained grease and whiskey that first fortnight. See, this is the pisser with weight loss, it starts off fast and then gets slower the more you do it. Which is why it's been such a pain in the arse to go all the way with it.I'm hoping to reach 97kg by the end of April, which should keep me on track to my goal of 95kg by June.

Weighing In

I've divided my weekdays up so as to introduce an element of routine. I always get more work done when I allocate time for it - if I just let the days pass by I tend to work more in fits and starts. It gets very tempting to lapse into a habit of working only when the mood takes me. For the last fortnight I've managed to stick to a pretty easy timetable.
•8:30am-9am - Drag my fat ass out of bed, brew some coffee and get the three 'S's out of the way.
•9am-9:15am - Exercise. Usually just something light to wake myself up properly.
•9:15am-9:30am - Breakfast (banana or big handful of grapes) and work prep.
•9:30am-1pm - Work. If I don't have any commissions to work on I use this time to scour listings and postings for any. Once I've bled those dry I work on design and animation exercises to keep me in the swing of things.
•1pm-2pm - Lunch break
•2pm-4pm - More work.
•4pm-5pm - Get out of the apartment, see the sun if it's out, walk a little and try not to spend much money.
•5pm-7:30pm - More work.
•7:30pm-10:30pm - Once I've done a full work day I use this time for personal projects, classes, meeting up with people or working on self-promotion (portfolio/showreel work, festival submissions etc). Generally a light dinner will get factored in somewhere here.
•10:30pm-11pm - Exercise. A little more thorough than in the morning, usually mellows me out some.
If I'm not done with the day at 11pm I make a point of working on my still in-progress Struwwelpeter album. Generally this comes to about a half-hour a day. As this is the most hobby-ish of my personal projects I make a point of not spending too much time on it each day.
It's been working well so far. I'm ticking boxes at a faster rate than before, plus by keeping myself occupied I'm sticking to my weight loss plan and have gone down from 104kg to 102kg. This is around 4lbs, which ordinarily would be a little bit too fast, but whenever I start up the weight loss there's always a bigger drop to begin with.

Weighty Matters

So, the officialness of Faith No More's official return was even more officially officiated today when it was announced that they will be headlining this year's Download Festival. It's a safe bet to assume I'll be there. In my ignited enthusiasm I've been digging out collected rarities and merchandise from the band that I picked up at record fairs, market stalls and, of course, eBay. One such item is an old shirt I had when I was twelve, but my love for oversized Dairy Milk bars won out against my love for the band, and by the time I was thirteen it didn't fit anymore. Along with my various other projects, I'm determined to kickstart an ongoing personal endeavour that had plateaued for a while - shifting some of my bulk.

In 2005 I resolved to lose weight, for several reasons - mainly as a check-up revealed some potential liver problems.Around the same time, 'My Name Is Earl' debuted and I was astonished to see how much weight Ethan Suplee had lost since 'American History X' (a brilliant, underrated flick that he is both amazing and terrifying in). The clincher came that same month, when I made the geekiest trek in my life to date - meeting Pinhead. At the same convention was Ashley Lawrence, and the blurry photo of her and I looked alarmingly like a publicity still of Kirsty Cotton and Butterball, the hyper-obese cenobite.

(Left) Ashley Lawrence with some kind of blubbery monster. (Right) Ashley Lawrence in 'Hellraiser'...

From this trilogy of events I subsequently stuck to my guns for two years and lost over 100lbs. By the beginning of 2008 I'd hit my target weight and all my health concerns were no longer an issue, so for all of last year the loss slowed to a crawl, and I dropped a comparatively meager 15lbs overall. Still, my BA and MA graduation photos look like a before-and-after Subway diet commercial.

Now I think I'm ready to kick things into gear again, as I'm still well above my BMI. While I've lost over 130lbs all told, I wasn't just fat to begin with. I was fucking gigantic - we're talking that-guy-from-'Lost' proportions. Right now I weigh in at about 104kg, which is about 230lbs. If I set a new weight-loss target for 95kg (about 210lbs) by the time Faith No More play at Download, I may even fit into the shirt I haven't been able to wear for thirteen years.

It's still depressingly snug at the moment...

If you're wondering what the connection is between the reformation of my childhood idols and weight loss - well, there isn't one. Except that there have been few certainties in life, one being that Faith No More would never get back together. Every time Mike Patton was asked about the possibility since their split, he insisted that 'there was no music left', that it would be a 'chicken shit' move and that he wouldn't be the singer if it happened. Whether he now legitimately believes that enough time has passed for those reasons to be rendered moot, or just that the credit crunch has forced them to ride the reunion train, Faith No More are touring again and Patton's name is included in the line-up.
My long-winded point is this - if Faith No More can get back together, anything can happen. If Faith No More can get back together, I could be a director one day. If Faith No More can get back together, I could be published one day. If Faith No More can get back together, I could be thin...well, thin-ish.
It's March 1st, and I have three and a half months to go. I can do this thing...