Tag: fat people

One step closer to Demolition Man

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Taco Bell opens a state-of-the-art, two story Taco Bell restaurant in Minnesota that prioritizes app and mobile pickup via drive thru lanes

And just like that, we’re one step closer to entering the world of Demolition Man.  The world is already full of pussies, the police are pretty ineffective at their jobs, and although not contained to one singular Simon Phoenix, there are insane sociopaths that run rampant who never seem to be brought to justice.  It only seems fitting that the time has come for Taco Bell to execute a preemptive strike at fulfilling their destiny of surviving the franchise wars, thus making all restaurants in the world, Taco Bell.

I eat way more fast food than I care to admit.  My excuse is that it really can’t be helped, because I’m still very much in daily survival mode with my two kid girls running rampant in my life, and by the time they’re fed, bathed and in bed, it’s already getting late, I’m hangry, and I just want something fast and delicious, regardless of the health detriment fast food is known to be.  All the same, I know what I like, and I would say that I know my way around the players in the franchise wars pretty decently.

I love Bojangles, I think Chick Fil-A’s app is the gold standard, and Zaxby’s is always a good way to break up the monotony.  Freddy’s has entered the market around here, and I hear that a Whataburger has opened up near Kennesaw State University, which isn’t an unreasonable drive if I actually had the time and patience to go there.  Wendy’s and Taco Bell are also welcome options, but with more of a gambler’s mentality, because you just don’t know when one of them will light a stick of dynamite in your digestive system, as satisfyingly delicious they reliably are.  I have no qualms with McDonald’s, and for whatever reason, Burger King doesn’t seem to do to well in the Atlanta market, but I’d consider them if there were one within a reasonable distance.

The thing is, at this current juncture of my life, and well fuck, at any juncture of my life, I tend to favor convenience and ease of getting my food, and hoping it’s accurate, above all else.  I know there are many who don’t like Chick Fil-A because of the original owning family’s religious anti-gay believing, but goddamn is their app good, and their restaurants loaded with hard-working brainwashed teenagers who get shit done fast, well, and like efficient machines.  So I go there above all else, because they’re reliable to get shit fast and consistent.  Bojangles and Wendy’s are like playing craps, because there’s like a 1/3 chance that the drive-thru line will be not be shitty.

But if this two-story Taco Bell in Minnesota goes gangbusters and inspires all Taco Bells around the country to adopt, that would be a game changer in like two seconds.  As efficient as all the Chick Fil-As are, their Achilles is usually the limitations of the sizes of their lots, and there are often times more cars hogging up space there than can be handled, so even if some of them have adopted app-only lines, if cars can’t get to them, they’re not really any better.

It looks like Taco Bell Defy’s saving grace is the fact that the mobile-only lines have independent entrances, and the most intriguing things are the way that the restaurant is literally built above the pickup area, so people are basically getting their food from a teller tube.  It does sound a little outlandish, but you know it has the capability of working miracles, and this is why that a Defy store is being tested in the first place.

What I’m really getting to is the fact that if Taco Bell Defy restaurants start popping up in other places, I have no doubt in my mind that they would rise up in my rankings if they were anywhere convenient.  As much of a luddite I can be sometimes, if there’s one thing about modern technology that I do love, it’s mobile food ordering, and I very much favor those companies that adopt it in well-functioning, logical and efficient manners.

I’m really rooting for this Defy, to defy the odds of surviving in the food industry, to where this can be somewhat of a standard throughout the world.  It would definitely inspire me to go to Taco Bell more, as long as they didn’t liquify my insides with their squirrel meat too frequently.  And then it would force other competitors to start trying to compete and copy, and hopefully we can embark in a world where more fast food joints are two stories and have mobile-priority lines for us gluttons who need our shit quick and efficiently.

Oh happy days abound

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I never thought I’d need something so much until I heard this: Tim Hortons coming to Georgia

Welp, so much for that whole idea of getting into better shape.  Once those iced capps start flowing, it’s all downhill from there.

Seriously though, this news tickles me pink as my daughters’ wardrobes.  The best news I didn’t know even needed to come to fruition.  I love Tim Hortons, it’s no secret to anyone who’s known me for a minute or two.  Specifically their iced capps, which I’m bound to consume in ridiculous quantities whenever I’m remotely close to an area where Tim Hortons are accessible.

When I went to upstate New York, I hit up at least seven different Timmy’s.  When I visited Detroit for a day, I hit two different Timmy’s on the way out of town, one of them being inside of an Arab supermarket.  When my dad and I drove to Cleveland for baseball, I made a nearly 30 minute out-of-the-way detour to Youngstown, Ohio just because there was a Tim Hortons up there.  Every single layover in Toronto means an iced capp, and for someone who doesn’t have Tim Hortons remotely accessible on the daily, I’ve consumed more iced capps than some Canadians.

And now they’re coming to Georgia.  Reportedly 15 locations between Atlanta and Columbus, so hopefully some of those are remotely accessible to where I am now.  I can’t say I’d be optimistic about the quality of their baked goods considering the available workforce around here, but considering the iced capps will be coming out of machines and bagged concentrate, I think I still have reason to excited about the potential of being able to get iced capps down here in the near future.

Man, first it was Buc-ee’s and now Tim Hortons coming to Georgia.  Just need Wawa to miraculously crack into this state and I’ll have to tell myself to stfu when I get mad and ragey in Georgia traffic and asking myself why I still live here.

Time to combat the dad bod

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the challenges that have emerged during the journey of raising a second child is that I’ve basically had to give up running.  I haven’t run since October, and it’s been way longer than that since I’d last had a formal workout in a gym.  Raising kids has a tendency to make stuff like exercise expendable in a day’s agenda, and it was bad enough I had to forfeit gyms due to pandemic, but throwing a second kid into the mix has taken running off the table for me as well over the last few months.

Needless to say, I’ve watched my weight do some rollercoaster-ing since the original lockdown occurred, and now it’s not headed in the right direction.  At first, my weight started to drop because I wasn’t eating well, often not eating enough, and with the gym off the table, muscle mass began deteriorating, so the weight from muscle mass presumably started coming off.  Eventually, running became my only real exercise, and doing cardio with no weight training meant that I could really only lose more weight, and I actually got my weight down to almost my peak high school weight, in the 170’s area, and I actually felt like I was looking pretty decent, in spite of the loss of all my gains.

Eventually #2 showed up and life went into hard(er) mode with two kids in tow.  With my job also ruining my life at this point and the challenges of raising two kids simultaneously, the running eventually ceased, and mythical wife and I more or less went into survival mode as far as our eating habits went.  We never had the time and/or energy to cook not-trash food for ourselves, and with the little time we did have, we have been eating a whole lot of garbage over the last few months.  My weight has been creeping up in this time, and it’s been especially noticeable when I’d be doing virtual job interviews and putting on dress shirts, and feeling the bulge and tightening in all the wrong places.

I normally don’t like to put too much stock into weight numbers, since when I worked weights I always spouted the whole muscle weighs more than fat thing, but with no weights in play, I knew that each and every pound that I’d gain was solely based on my own poor choices.  At the time of starting this post, I’d crept up to 192.4 lbs., and with the reality that I haven’t exercised in months, that means I’m 192.4 lbs. of fat fucking American embodiment of failure.

Anyway, my intention is to stop the bleeding, and to try and get back on the horse.  Due to the fact that #2 has been sleeping at night fairly well as of late, I had the confidence to get back on the treadmill and go for a run, the first one I’ve done since October 7th, 2021 (thanks Garmin fitness tracker).

It was the worst run I’ve had in probably 16 years, since I’m basically starting from scratch.  I was running at a pace that I had to keep slowing down .1 at a time because I was blowing out and getting gassed, and it took me nearly 40 minutes to traverse three miles.  Now I say traverse, because I definitely didn’t run the whole time, like I used to do my old workouts of non-stop running.  My pace was probably around 12 minutes a mile, a far cry from my old 9:50 pace, and I feel like I have a long way to go before I can competently get back to those kinds of splits.

But it was also the best run I’ve had in a very long time, because I actually got to do it.  And one thing I’ve always stated is that at no point ever, does running ever feel like a waste of time, and that’s absolutely one thing that I love, because I abhor feeling like I’m wasting time.

If all goes well, I’ll get back to a general routine of running every other day, which is good because running is also when I can try to catch up with watching things, since I can watch things on my iPad.

Furthermore, at the new gig, I’ve done some recon and my access to the fitness center has been activated, so I now officially have a place where I can hit some weights again, which I’m super excited to get started with.  I’m not really looking forward to the fact that I’ll be starting from scratch there, which means the inevitable soreness from doing, everything, is going to be pretty prevalent, but once it dissipates, I’m hoping to try and build back some of the muscle that I’ve clearly lost over the last two years.

It’s not the best stocked fitness center there is, but it doesn’t cost anything and has some free weights, so I can at least not feel entirely like a geriatric living on machines.  I intend to make the best of it, and declare war on the flab that I’ve amassed over the last few months, because how far I’ve fallen off the wagon is not okay, and there’s little I want more than to change that.

Changing the eating habits is probably going to be a bigger hurdle to clear, but at least if I have some exercise back into the rotation, that should help suppress some of the physical decay I’ve been allowing to happen to me.  I’d prefer to have the dad bod that actually looks like I work out occasionally versus the dad bod of the guy that’s let go of everything and will have to start buying bigger clothing because of it.

My 600 Lb. Life never fails to entertain

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

You’d think after ten seasons of My 600 Lb. Life, the series would start to show some signs of getting stale or formulaic.  I mean, it has gotten very formulaic, but it doesn’t change the fact that no matter how many seasons of the show march forward, America has no shortage of behemoths that continue to parade themselves to Houston in order to meet Dr. Now and think they’re going to hear something they haven’t seen in nine prior seasons.

The latest episode, Lacey B’s journey, had to have been one of the more depressing episodes in the series’ history.  And I’m taking into consideration the handful of episodes where the subject of the episode died, because they actually succumbed to their own weight problems.

But spoiler alert, Lacey doesn’t even make it the full twelve months that most episodes tend to lapse over, doesn’t get surgery, barely loses any weight, and frankly the question really is, why the fuck was she on the show in the first place, and why did TLC even bother airing it, which is an obviously redundant question, because she’s such a train wreck, there was no question that TLC was going to air it.

Lacey’s boyfriend whom was a little dull on the wattage side, caved to his sister’s argument of how Lacey was using him in two seconds, and she ends up suddenly homeless in the middle of nowhere in Texas, while her ex-companions basically dump off all of her belongings in College Station.  Next thing you know, she’s back in Washington State, in her old apartment that’s now suddenly empty because she tried to move her life to Houston, and in the end she lost like 15 lbs. down from her cruiserweight 591 initial weigh in, and the episode concludes in month 7, as if it were a failed excursion on Naked and Afraid.

I wonder if they’ll bother airing an episode of Where Are They Now? because Lacey basically didn’t even have a conclusive prologue to build off of.  But when they inevitably do, this might one of the few that I might actually make an effort to see.

All in all, season 10 of My 600 Lb. Life is about as good as all the others.  Big ups to episode 4’s Mike, because it was an episode where viewers like me realize just how rare it is to have a guy that’s enjoying so much white privilege compared to all of the other blobs throughout the show’s history, because he lives with his stable white parents in Ohio, has a normal, upper-middle class remote job, and doesn’t seem to have all the financial issues that just about everyone else in the show does.

And of course, Dr. Now’s patience with his patients has continued to sink to where there are more zingers and he seems to be aware of the show’s appeal to when he rips into his patients, and there’s rarely an episode where there’s not at least one good memorable quote he drops in defense of whatever bullshit excuse a new patient comes in with.

I barely have time to watch television these days, but it says something that among the few things that are still must-watch, My 600 Lb. Life is still up there.  I don’t even watch wrestling anymore, in comparison.

lol China

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Where all-you-can-eat doesn’t mean all-you-can-eat: man blacklisted from all-you-can-eat barbecue restaurant because he was eating too much

Frankly, there really is no place in the world that this could’ve occurred at then China.  China has no regard for rules, and they’re not above applying draconian outcomes onto their own people, especially when money is involved.  It’s just unfortunate for all parties involved, that The Internet caught wind of this story, because now it’s basically a meme, with all the observational humor armchair comedians that are coming out of the woodwork to chime in their two cents.

Naturally, the initial favor goes and should go, to the customer, whom was capitalizing on the general concept of all-you-can-eat, and it really is not his problem if the restaurant’s golden ratio of food consumed versus cost of meal begins sliding in his favor because he’s a monster capable of consuming large quantities of food.  As far as the restaurant goes, if they’re incapable of actually being all-you-can-eat, they probably shouldn’t be in business in the first place.

But then it’s revealed that the guy in question was a live-streamer, and then I feel like there’s a lot of context that kind of went missing in the bigger picture.  I think it’s safe to say that Mr. Kang here, was probably going to the restaurant, partially to eat a meal, but at the same time, ham shit up for his six viewers, by acting a little bit outlandish, and eating beyond normal, for the entertaining of others.  Now, from the restaurant’s standpoint, I can kind of lean towards them, because based on their description of how Mr. Kang would pick up the entire tray of prawns instead of using the tongs, that sounds like a dick move done deliberately, for the lulz, but is also fucking all other customers in the restaurant from getting any.

Sure, Mr. Kang wasn’t wasting any food, but at the same time I have a hard time believing that he was pounding away 3+ lbs. of pork trotters or downing 20-30 bottles of soy milk because he was just that hungry.  No, live-streamers are inherently attention whores, so he was probably stuffing his face for the camera, and most likely most definitely didn’t need to be eating that much food.

There are definitely ways to exploit buffets, most obviously being, don’t make a spectacle of yourself or draw attention to the fact that you’re trying to stay and eat the place out of business.  I used to see senior citizens at Old Country Buffets in the past, who undoubtedly were there for upwards of three hours plus, because they probably got in the door when it was senior-priced breakfast, but milked the clock to where the more expensive lunch options began emerging, and then had multiple meals while there.

But by making a spectacle of himself by grabbing entire trays, or running trains on soy milk, and undoubtedly bringing camera gear to his table, Mr. Kang ends up looking like a tool, the restaurant looks like assholes for denying someone all they can eat, and in the end, everyone loses, because lol China, of course.

Not going to lie though, all this thinking about Chinese buffets makes me miss the ever-living hell out of them.  Coronavirus be damned, I’m quite tempted to take the risk and go find some rando-China King Buffet and stuff my face stupid of lo mein, General Tso’s chicken, crab rangoons of doom and of course, chicken quesadillas.

I’ve done some stupid things in my life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

But I’m about to do one of the more dumber things that I probably don’t really need to be doing.  Especially when I’m already starting every single day at like an eight out of ten on the stress level as it is.  But who knows, maybe this is something that can serve to be a distraction to how discontent I am with certain aspects of my life, and such would be tremendously welcome to help take my mind off how much my job makes me completely miserable.  But on the flipside, as a result of this little experiment, I might be hangry all the time, and serve to make not just my own life, but those of my wife and child miserable if I’m a torrent of anger all the time.

For the next month, or rather 28 days, I’m going to be embarking on the Dr. Nowzaradan diet plan, of 1,200 calories a day, high protein-low carb.  Or, for however long it takes for me to tap out and give in to the hunger, to which I really don’t want to fail because I don’t like failing in anything that I set out to accomplish.

Why the fuck am I going to be putting myself through this kind of hell?  I don’t weigh 600 lbs. I’m not trying to get weight loss surgery.  But after years of watching My 600 Lb. Life on TLC the greatest network in the history of humankind, I’ve been clowning on the people who appear on the show for ages now.  They’re fascinating specimens of human beings, and it’s not so much of the train wreck of watching another human being that has somehow managed to balloon up to 600+ lbs. as much as it’s always interesting to learn about their history and their mental conditions that led to such horrific downward spirals.

But the fact is that I have been clowning on the vast majority of the people, especially the ones who are quick to say yes, that they can cold turkey embark on the Dr. Now diet of 1,200 calories a day, but then fall so tremendously short of their initial weight loss goals, which has fluctuated between 50 in a month, 60 in two, or for those who really break the scales at first weigh-in, 100 in two.  So, as mythical wife and I were watching the latest episode (S9 E12), and Tammy bungled her way through her first period of time and naturally missed the mark completely, and I asked her, I wonder if I could do the Dr. Now diet?

And just like that, the ball began rolling, and here I am, on the cusp of putting my life into dietary hell, for literally no reason at all other than to see if I can do it.  I spent what little time I had today to do some cursory research on what kind of meals I could be eating, along with what foods I should be avoiding, and I’m more or less prepared to dive right in starting tomorrow, and only time will tell how miserable I’ll be, or how it’s not that hard after all, and perhaps I’ll lose some weight in the process.

Naturally, my goal isn’t just to do the diet, but also to brog about it each and every day, as if I didn’t already have enough things going on in my life to also take a slice of time to throw down some words about the experience.  But who knows, much like the beer testing in December, maybe it’ll encourage me to write more, and maybe I’ll actually spit up some quality words in the process.

So the parameters are quite simple:

  • 1,200 calories a day; most likely spread across three meals, and maybe some compliant snacks, but the end goal is as close to 1,200 calories at the end of the day as possible
  • I will continue doing my usual exercises, which has really been reduced to 100 push-ups a day, and running three miles, typically three times a week
  • I will try my best to document the food that I am eating for each meal, photos if I’m feeling ambitious
  • In the event that I tap out, it will be announced that I have tremendously failed and admit that I’m an asshole who doesn’t actually understand just how hard it is for the people on My 600 Lb. Life to do their thing

But if I do succeed, hopefully I’ll have lost some weight, and maybe have broken some bad habits in the process.  All the same, I’m already thinking of the things that I’ll probably go apeshit on once the diet is off, and the primary reason why I’ve chosen 28 days is that any longer collides with my birthday, and I think the chances are higher that I’d want to indulge in some capacity around then.  Who knows though, either indulging will wreck me, since I’d been eating clean for 28 days, or I’ll have gotten so used to eating clean that I won’t want to break the streak of cleanliness, even for my birthday.

A catch-up post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve felt the inner need to do one of these, but at the same time, it’s been a while since I last posted too.  Not a day goes by when I don’t notice when I post, but between my job entering our busy season, the general busy-ness of raising an infant daughter, night classes, and I do mean night classes seeing as how they’re 9-11 pm, taking up two nights a week with often other nights of the week doing homework for said night classes, as I’ve stated a gabillion times at this point, I simply just don’t have any time.

And with what free time I do have, I’m either usually too gassed and fried in the brain to want to sit down and try and gather my thoughts and write about things especially when feeling unmotivated in the first place, and so I usually end up fast-forwarding through the week’s wrestling programs and when I have them available, catching up on TLC programming like My 600 lb. Life and 90 Day Fiancé.  And as much as I hate to constantly lean on wrestling and TLC to find things to about write about, I can’t remember the last time I had leisurely time to just casually surf the internet for local happenings to rap on, and often times general news around the rest of the world is usually sad and infuriating in the first place and I don’t want to feed into negativity that I can simply avoid.

One day, maybe, I’ll have more free time to write again in the future.  For the sake of my own sanity and gratification, I certainly hope so.

Continue reading “A catch-up post” →