On the Pumping Up of the Self

Princesa de Poder

I recently turned 29, and if being stuck in waiting rooms with a bunch of ladies’ magazines (and, um, nursing school) has taught me anything, it’s to expect a big metabolic slowdown when I’m thirty. While I’ve lifted weights on and off for years, now’s apparently the time to get serious, as my build tends more toward WWII-era hottie than it does toward Amazon.


More muscle would also be an asset to my work life. When you’re a nurse (or a nursing student), you have to lift and turn a lot of patients who can’t move themselves. These patients tend to be, um, hefty, so a well-trained set of muscles proves very useful.

This isn’t going to be easy, though. You, gentle readers, may not have to devote a lot of thought to this, but you’re supposed to be getting 0.8 g of dietary protein per kg of body mass per day. And that’s just for sitting around breathing. If you’re more active, or, say, trying to build muscle, you’re going to need more. For my purposes, I’m going to be starting off at 1 g/kg/day and trying to increase as evidence warrants.

This whole endeavor, however fits neatly into my lifetime program of making things difficult for myself (see: full-form guitar chords, traditional Chinese characters). When you’re a lacto-ovo vegetarian, 1 g/kg/day can be a hard row to hoe. Sure, there are many low-calorie, high-protein vegetarian foodstuffs from which to choose, but you can get pretty bored pretty quickly. And sure, there’s that protein powder stuff, but it tastes like death.

Still, there’s a weight setup in the basement that calls to me every time I have a load of laundry to do. Someone left the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Bodybuilding downstairs next to the bench press, so it can’t possibly be long before I’m hauling around senior citizens two at a time.