increases in my strength and changes in my body. That motivation alone was powerful enough to keep me going to my regular sessions with Carrie with no problem at all.
After the initial eighteen months of weight training and cardio with Carrie, I had reached my first fitness goal. I was much stronger and was ready to haul huge pieces of equipment on any fire line I might be asked to join. I had a much higher aerobic capacity and was ready to take any cardio fitness test Carrie could throw at me. I had also become a regular and enthusiastic gym goer; you could set your watch by my regular visits to the club, and I was on my way to becoming a bona fide gym rat.
But, despite all these positive changes, that still did not mean I was totally fit. While I was significantly stronger in 2004 than I had been in 2002, the truth was that I was still overweight and had even started to gain more weight in 2004. There were two main reasons for that. The first obvious reason was my eating habits. I was still indulging in great restaurants and the best take-out I could find in the city. My regular visits to the vending machine on the first floor of the building (better to hide my terrible habit from the people in my lab and in my department who had their offices on the eighth and eleventh floors), where I indulged in a Twix bar, my very favorite candy bar, before most every workout. That combination of chewy caramel together with a crunchy cookie on the bottom all covered in chocolate was irresistible and made me feel like I was gathering my strength and energy for my upcoming workout with Carrie. So while I was much stronger and firmer, I was still carrying too much weight on my five-foot, four-inch frame.
I started to realize that I needed to pay attention to what and how much I ate even beyond my Twix bar habit. It was the height of the Atkins and South Beach diet crazes, and this got me thinking about how many carbs I consumed every day—in fact at all meals, all day long. For example, I loved to make my own waffles for breakfast in the morning and eat those freshly made waffles with butter and syrup. Not just Sunday mornings, but every morning. I could make the fastest and most delicious fresh homemade waffles in the city, and they immediately went from my plate to my hips. When I got tired of waffles, I would go out and find a wonderful hunk of peasant, walnut, or date bread and toast and butter that for breakfast. You can’t imagine the number of amazing bakeries in New York, with bread so much better than any bread I ever had in California or Washington, D.C. Yum! Lunch was often a sandwich on good bread, and dinner came from a fantastic array of restaurants (lots of pasta included) or take-out in my Greenwich Village neighborhood. One of my very favorite meals was bulgogi, a Korean barbecued beef dish with noodles from a fantastic pan-Asian restaurant in Soho. The dish could have easily fed two or three people. I ate the whole thing myself for dinner with a side serving of rice to sop up all that delicious sauce—heavenly! With this kind of eating lifestyle, it was no wonder I ended up at least twenty pounds overweight despite my regular gym habit.
Fit, fat, and fearful. Those were the three words that best described Wendy Suzuki in 2004. The “fearful” part was mainly due to another major factor affecting my life at that point. I was smack dab in the middle of that inevitable trial by fire for academics: winning tenure. Here is a Cliffs Notes version for the uninitiated. First, you are lucky enough to be hired by a big fancy research university that gives you a shiny new lab and a pot of money that is just big enough to get your groundbreaking neuroscience research going but not enough to sustain it for more than a couple of years at the most. This happened in 1998 for me. As soon as you arrive in your new home, you immediately start setting up your brand-new lab and at the same time you start madly writing as many grants
After the initial eighteen months of weight training and cardio with Carrie, I had reached my first fitness goal. I was much stronger and was ready to haul huge pieces of equipment on any fire line I might be asked to join. I had a much higher aerobic capacity and was ready to take any cardio fitness test Carrie could throw at me. I had also become a regular and enthusiastic gym goer; you could set your watch by my regular visits to the club, and I was on my way to becoming a bona fide gym rat.
But, despite all these positive changes, that still did not mean I was totally fit. While I was significantly stronger in 2004 than I had been in 2002, the truth was that I was still overweight and had even started to gain more weight in 2004. There were two main reasons for that. The first obvious reason was my eating habits. I was still indulging in great restaurants and the best take-out I could find in the city. My regular visits to the vending machine on the first floor of the building (better to hide my terrible habit from the people in my lab and in my department who had their offices on the eighth and eleventh floors), where I indulged in a Twix bar, my very favorite candy bar, before most every workout. That combination of chewy caramel together with a crunchy cookie on the bottom all covered in chocolate was irresistible and made me feel like I was gathering my strength and energy for my upcoming workout with Carrie. So while I was much stronger and firmer, I was still carrying too much weight on my five-foot, four-inch frame.
I started to realize that I needed to pay attention to what and how much I ate even beyond my Twix bar habit. It was the height of the Atkins and South Beach diet crazes, and this got me thinking about how many carbs I consumed every day—in fact at all meals, all day long. For example, I loved to make my own waffles for breakfast in the morning and eat those freshly made waffles with butter and syrup. Not just Sunday mornings, but every morning. I could make the fastest and most delicious fresh homemade waffles in the city, and they immediately went from my plate to my hips. When I got tired of waffles, I would go out and find a wonderful hunk of peasant, walnut, or date bread and toast and butter that for breakfast. You can’t imagine the number of amazing bakeries in New York, with bread so much better than any bread I ever had in California or Washington, D.C. Yum! Lunch was often a sandwich on good bread, and dinner came from a fantastic array of restaurants (lots of pasta included) or take-out in my Greenwich Village neighborhood. One of my very favorite meals was bulgogi, a Korean barbecued beef dish with noodles from a fantastic pan-Asian restaurant in Soho. The dish could have easily fed two or three people. I ate the whole thing myself for dinner with a side serving of rice to sop up all that delicious sauce—heavenly! With this kind of eating lifestyle, it was no wonder I ended up at least twenty pounds overweight despite my regular gym habit.
Fit, fat, and fearful. Those were the three words that best described Wendy Suzuki in 2004. The “fearful” part was mainly due to another major factor affecting my life at that point. I was smack dab in the middle of that inevitable trial by fire for academics: winning tenure. Here is a Cliffs Notes version for the uninitiated. First, you are lucky enough to be hired by a big fancy research university that gives you a shiny new lab and a pot of money that is just big enough to get your groundbreaking neuroscience research going but not enough to sustain it for more than a couple of years at the most. This happened in 1998 for me. As soon as you arrive in your new home, you immediately start setting up your brand-new lab and at the same time you start madly writing as many grants
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