I’m really into food.  And as a result of being in Blacksburg for the first time without a student meal plan, I’ve had to take an alternative route in order to supply my body with loving nourishment.  So I decided to take up cooking this summer – trying a ton of new recipes, and replicating things that I would get at restaurants or see on the Food Network. And so, that’s why there is a category called ‘food’ on my blog – once I get into a real habit of updating the blog, the food photos that I usually just post to Facebook will have a home on the blog, and maybe – if I get real frisky – with the recipes that Kristin and I keep in our cookbook, as well.

But, to get to the point of this blog post, today I decided to watch a movie with a friend. It was a documentary on Netflix and it was about a man that was “Fat Sick and Nearly Dead“. The documentary was actually pretty interesting in the way that it completely focused itself around a man who decided to go on a fast for SIXTY days. He decided to do a fast that consisted completely of juice made with a juicer, which extracted the juice from vegetables and fruit only. He actually ended up losing a ton of weight because of it.

I’ve decided that maybe I’ll try my own fast in the future. I don’t know if I could afford living off just fruit and vegetables for as long, especially with how active I am and how much I like to work out, but I know that I would have to get plenty of sleep and have a moderate amount of physical activity simultaneously.  I’m thinking I’d do a 3 day fast, one day off, 6 day fast, one day off, and then a 10 day fast, to kind of build myself up, and see how many pounds I can shed.

No, I don’t think I’m fat, but truth be told it is extremely easy to gain weight as a paraplegic, but extremely difficult to lose it – YES, losing weight as a paraplegic is actually quite difficult, even though people have a misconception of a lot of paraplegics being in this awesome, supreme, physical state from being ‘so physically active’. I would also like to be in a bit better physical shape than I currently am – I’m about 10-15 pounds heavier than I’d like to be, ideally.

The primary form of cardio that I actually have an opportunity to partake in is on an arm bike or what most people call an arm ergometer. It’s really not that practical, though, because the only way that I can do that is if I decide to go to the gym, and obviously if the gym that I’m near has one.  I look for one in every single hotel gym I go to – there’s never been one.  I use the ones here on campus, and at the YMCA back home.

Until last week I didn’t even under know that War Memorial Gym had an arm bike. I know that McComas Gym has one but it’s usually broken, but I discovered that it’s probably of a broken battery. Last week I e-mailed the director of recreational sports here at Tech and expressed my discontent – noting that one of the very first things I did was a freshman was find out what accessible gym options were available to me.  I was originally told that there was only an arm bike in McComas, but it took until post-graduation-undergrad to figure out that that is not true!

We are actually going to be meeting next week with the other individuals throughout recreational sports and with the Services for Students with Disabilities office to try and identify some ways that students with disabilities can work out and basically they told me that they’re willing to put some money towards this effort. My eyes were really opened a couple weeks ago when I had an individual on my campus tour in a wheelchair that asked me what kind of options would be available to him in the gym – and let me tell you this kid was in great physical shape – and I realized that there aren’t a whole lot. I really didn’t know what to tell him.

I’m excited to be an advocate for not only myself but for people who come after me. My mom always told me that, you know, maybe I won’t be able to reap the benefits of the changes that I can make in the world but there’ll always be people that are disabled after me that will be able to read those benefits hopefully they will be very grateful for that.