I'm so WEAK!

I went to the gym again today. I was supposed to strength train all my major muscles, but I had no clue how. Luckily, my gym seems to have a Nautical machine to work every muscle and more. So I simply went to each one, tried to figure out what they were doing on the diagram and followed along–6 to 12 reps, just as planned, and increase the weight if I’m not feeling the “burn” after 12.

Well my lower body and back can take 50 lbs easily, it seems. My abs can take 40. But when I got to my upper arm/shoulder workouts, HOLY SH!T was it heavy! I am so weak, I can barely do 6 reps at 30 lbs, my arms quivering from the first rep. Geez, it really lets me know what shape I’m in. Now I have a new short-term goal–increase upper body strength!

Anyways, after the weight training I got back on the elliptical and went for my daily 30 minutes of cardio. Tomorrow will only be cardio.

On a side note, I’ve been doing good with eating today. Breakfast at 6 am was a handful of almonds, yogurt and a Fiber-1 bar. Midmorning snack was a handful of almonds again.

I made an interesting little sandwich for lunch–lean turkey meat, baby spinach, provolone cheese (yes, so horrible), and a teaspoon of some spicy salsa on whole wheat bread. It was actually tasty, and the salsa spared me the need for mayonnaise or anything like that.

Dinner tonight will be sticky rice, a mini-salad and chicken breast pre-soaked in a solution of soy sauce, Japanese sweet vinegar, cooking wine, honey, garlic and grated onion.
Funny thing, I usually prefer dark meat over white meat because white meat gets so dry and hard, but I found out by experimenting that leaving the chicken soaking in grated onion for an hour keeps it soft and tender. You just have to be careful because it’s easier to burn because of the onion.

I’ll post up the recipe sometime!

The plan

So after reading half the book, I immediately took out my little food diary and began taking notes in the back of it. My plan?

Food

Well, I consider myself a healthy eater to begin with, since I cook for myself and roommate. I have the occasional take-out on busy nights, but I cook with a lot of veggies, white meats and use whole grains whenever bread is involved. My other carbs, I'll admit, do come from white spaghetti and white rice and the like, but I figure there's only so much one could do without completely cutting out the yummy stuff. So the only change I'm making to my diet is to completely cut out sweets (which I only had a small piece of homemade cake or ice cream every night for dessert) on weekdays. I will still record everything in my little notebook. Calorie-wise, I'm already eating only about 1600 a day, so I don't want to lower that any more. The book emphasizes proteins and fibrous veggies and eating about 4-6 small meals a day. I'll try to follow as best as I can, but I don't want to commit to anything here. Like I said, I like how I eat.

Exercise

Now this is where the big change comes in. My plan is to be at the gym by 5:30 am--before classes--every morning. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll strength-train my entire body for a total of 30 minutes (he said no more than 45 minutes), then do the elliptical for 30 minutes at my target heart rate. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, I'm only going to do the elliptical for 30 minutes and no strength-training. Saturday I do nothing. Now, how do I know my target heart rate? The book gives a real easy formula to find out:

1. Take your pulse at your neck or wrist (while you're relaxed). Count how many beats occur in 60 seconds. This is your resting heart rate. Mine was 74 beats per minute

2. Use 220 - (your age) to find your max heart rate. For me, since I'm 19 it'd be 220-19 = 201

3. Now you find the gap between these two numbers--you know, the range your heart can go. Mine is 201-74= 127

4. Decide how much exertion you want to put on this. Me being a beginner, sedentary and obese, the book recommended 60-65% of my potential. So 127 x 0.60 = 76.2

5. Add this new number to your resting heart rate and voila! That's your target heart rate. Mine is 150.2, or just 150.

So I input this number in the nifty little options on the elliptical machine, and it does it all for me. I just have to crank my legs for the next 30 minutes.

Additionally, the book advises to exercise before breakfast in the morning, since you have used up all your glycogen in your sleep and are already in the fat burning stage when you begin exercising. I guess I'll try! (even though I'm not a morning person)

Saturday-the special day

Saturday is the special day reserved for cheating. I have to do this otherwise I may go crazy from sweets deprivation. The book actually recommends a day for cheat-meals; apparently eating pure crap cranks up your metabolism into panic mode so that you have a nice head start for the beginning of the week. Of course, calorie input vs. calorie output is the law anywhere, so you can't do this every single day. Before going hogwild on the junk food, though, I reserve Saturday morning for another crucial step in my nutrition program: Keeping track.

Managing the numbers

Saturday morning at 7 am before I eat anything and after I have pooped (tmi, I know), I am going to weigh myself, check my sizes with measuring tape, and most importantly, check my body fat.

How to check body fat? The book goes on to list impossible silly ways like water submerging or some sort of electricity thing that are all crazy expensive and can't be done inside the home, and then finally gets down to the skin-pinching calipers. Apparently there's one caliper out there that you can do absolutely by yourself. It's called the AccuMeasure, and for a simple, non-digital one, you can get it for about 6 to 7 bucks. The digital ones cost about $20.

Heart Rate Moniters USA (a seller on amazon) sells them for $6.75 with free shipping. This is the exact one I ordered, which is still on its way:

http://www.amazon.com/Accu-Measure-Fitness-3000-Personal-Tester/dp/B000G7YW74/ref=sr_1_85?ie=UTF8&m=A3H9V1EMGQSHX7&s=hpc&qid=1253473382&sr=1-85

(I mean, free shipping? When does that ever happen for such a cheap product?)

Anyways, it's an absolute must for keeping track of body fat, which is what you really want to lose in the first place.

AAAND...this concludes my plan for losing fat. From now on I'll be posting data and random comments. ^^ I'll update at least every saturday with current raw data, and I'll try to write down my meals and exercise I did every day, too. Hope to see results soon!

The backstory

I was 90 kg (a whopping 198 lb) at 5'5'' (165 cm) a year and half ago when I finally decided to take hold of my life; my diet then consisted of simply writing down absolutely everything I ate, at what time and how much, along with the calorie count. With just this simple method, I managed to lose 10 kg over the span of 5 months. That's about 2 kg (4.5 lb) a month, which is supposed to be a nice and steady rate. I was happy with it, at least.

But then, everything stopped. At 80 kg (176.5 lb), I'm definitely not satisfied with my body, yet my diet method wasn't working anymore. Back then I didn't do anything about it...but now it's been just over a year, and nothing's changed. I had reached a plateau. And what did I do once I hit the plateau?

Essentially nothing. I began looking at supplements and continued writing down everything I ate, but I never even thought of adding exercise into my regime. I hated exercise. I'm lethargic and sedentary and wanted "the easy way out."

Well, all that changes today. When my roommate began her diet last week, she rode her bike to classes every day and ate less than 1200 calories a day. She was dropping pounds like marbles, according to her. I began looking online for "the easy way out" again just last night, when I ran across a website for an e-book.

This book is Tom Venuto's Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle (for $40). The site looked just like one of those diet scam sites that I became so familiar with, but I was interested in the links surrounding it on google--sure enough, I found a link on ripoffreport.com about it and began reading. What was strange, though, was that the person accusing the book actually seemed more noobish than the people defending it. And there were TONS of people defending the book with valid, legit reasoning. I was almost won over. Almost.

The only thing that was preventing me from getting the book was the cost, so I ended up taking the cheap, lame route and downloading it off a free e-book website (wait, I redeemed myself!). After I got it and began reading...something just clicked off in my brain. This guy is amazing. He managed to make me rethink exercising and fitness. He actually motivated me to do this. I finished half the book before I went back on the site and bought my own copy.

So today, the first thing I did when I had spare time was go to the local gym and hop on the elliptical machine for 30 minutes at my target heart zone. That's how inspiring it is.

Now, there's nothing new in this book at all; it's just how the material is organized and presented. You know, exercise and nutrition help you lose weight. That's all. But this body builder beats down everything I had misconceptions on and helped me stable myself on the right track. A few of those I'll highlight in points, such as...

1. The scale tells you only the surface of the story! What? Even BMI is weak at analyzing fitness. You don't want to lose weight in kilograms or pounds--you want to lose body fat! Measure your body fat percentage, not just your weight.

2. Exercise (cardio/aerobics) is a must to lose fat! Dieting or fasting will only help you lose water and muscle!

3. Strength training is also a must to lose fat! Having muscles boosts your metabolism and burns fat just by sitting there idling.

...and other such information as this. No these aren't quoted, they came off the top of my head. Anyways, they may seem cheesy coming from me, but they really do sound good in the book. I just recommend getting it. And no, I won't give you the link to the free website, because I really wanna support this dude.

Anyways, this is the backstory to beginning my nutrition program. Next is the plan I'm going to use ^^