Dedicated to Living Deliberately

It’s the morning of my Day 9 Personal Fitness Challenge and I thought now would be a good time to give a recap of the previous four days…

I got a comment on the previous article from Karol Gajda of Riduculously Extraordinary who checked out my post and thought that my “diet” was in effect starving myself.  I respect Karol greatly and so I wanted to take another look at it and possibly provide an explanation.

First, I’m not intentionally starving myself.  In fact, the only reason I’ve been writing down my diet during this is that I suspect that I’ve been consuming too many calories for far too long, hence my thirty pound weight gain, and the only way I can know for sure is to track my normal behavior for a bit.

I’ve lived in upstate New York for all my 37 years, always in the snow belt.  And I’ve always noticed a pattern with myself.  As the weather gets cold, I crave heavier foods, stews, chili’s etc. and I take in a lot more calories.  In the summers, the weather changes significantly to hot and humid so I crave less food.

During the first week of July 2010 we had record heat waves in the mid to high nineties and the fact is, it was too damn hot to eat.  It may as well have been 120 degrees considering the vast temperature ranges we live through here.  I ate till I was comfortable and then didn’t eat any more.  I’ve always been that way.

I agree with Karol that if I could eat all the rice, beans, fruits, veggies and oatmeal I want and lose weight, but I’m just not craving any of that except for the fruit and the veggies right now.  I prefer cold cereals in the summer over hot oatmeal, but that will reverse come autumn.

Karol asked whether the The Bodyweight Exercise Revolution (aff) recommended such a strict diet and it, in fact, doesn’t contain any diet-related information at all.  It truly is a Bodyweight Exercise program.

I am excited to see their new TacFIT program, which is more comprehensive and contains a diet eBook and even a Menu’s eBook but the The Bodyweight Exercise Revolution contains the most effective high intensity, short-duration routines that I know of.

I realize that the last post was quite long so I’ll try to be more brief, focusing more on the results I’ve noticed after completing the first two iterations of the 4 X 7 program.

The poor pictures do not illustrate the most compelling story as of yet, but I feel much less flabby already, particularly in my core.  My legs get A LOT of work on this workout, followed by my abs getting targeted second.  So, my legs feel rock solid already.

During the first iteration of 4X7, I was able to fit in multiple iterations of biking, running and swimming for my triathlon training program.  Due to weather, and having to facilitate day long JAD’s at work this week (resulting in no “lunch hours” by which to swim) I’ve missed out on a lot of this training the last four days.  I ran once on Sunday, and I swam once on Tuesday.  I’ve not biked at all this week.

I am hoping to ride the bike to and from work tomorrow but we are expecting Thunderstorms, so it may just be the swim on lunch tomorrow.  Game-time decision.

A brief recap:

Day 5 – Zero Intensity

I got a nice 1.75 mile run in, had a good sweat going and really felt strong throughout.  I finished that up with the Zero-Intensity Bodyweight workout that involves active stretching and range of motion exercises.

I won’t detail my diet for the four days this time, but suffice it to say, it was much the same as the previous four except that there were no evil deserts taunting me from the kitchen.  So, in fact, I think I ate better.  Leftovers were the order of the day, feeding on fruit, cereals, and vegetarian minestrone soup for dinner.

Day 6 – Low Intensity

This being a Monday, I would have liked to have rode my bike to work.  I mistakenly took the advice of our weatherman in that we were expecting T-storms on this day and Tuesday so I didn’t ride.  I did the Prasara yoga routine and I noticed that I was much better able to move through the exercises than I was on day 2.

I’ve been battling dizzy spells all week and I suspect that it’s related to stress at work.  I was having bouts of dizzyness in January which forced me to get glasses and a head scan, neither of which helped so they told me that I just needed to relax more.  Prasara yoga?

Diet was okay.  My vegetarian choices at work are few and we honestly have little time to cook these days.  We work hard to prepare and feed the triplets now that they are eating some mashed people food, but then my wife and I just pick at whatever we can find in the short blocks of time where we have peace to do so.

I had a Subway Veggie flatbread sandwich at work, a couple of pieces of mushroom pizza at home since we had family over and some eggs for breakfast.

Day 7 – Moderate Intensity

I had been doing my workouts in the morning but this particular morning was extra chaotic with the kids.  So I did manage to swim 425 meters on lunch, and then didn’t get my moderate intensity exercise in till around 9pm.  My son Owen has all of a sudden started screaming for an hour to two hours when we try to put him to sleep.  It complicates matters because if we let it go for more than fifteen minutes at a time, he will wake up the other two and they will start screaming.

So, I actually had to take several breaks in my routine to go up and soothe him.  My wife had taken Bella to the store, leaving me with the boys, so I was the only one there to do it.  It was around ten o’clock before I got the last iterations done and I actually fell asleep on the floor for a half hour.  Taking an hour to do what should be a twenty minute high intensity program defeats the purpose a bit but I just wanted to share that life isn’t always cooperative to what you want to do so if you want to get it done, you have to push through some boundaries and work around some obstacles.

Taking an hour to do twenty minutes of exercise is a whole lot better than spending an hour on zero exercises…I hope that made sense.

Day 8 – High Intensity

My first go on Day 4 of the High Intensity routine was not very successful.  I shyt the bed (metaphorically speaking) but again, some exercise was better than none.

On Day 8, while I still couldn’t do 8 full rounds of the four exercise routine, I did a whole lot better than Day 4, which encourages me for the next leg.  I’ve come to realize that I will consider this 31 Day challenge very successful if I am able to complete all of the iterations, in the time alloted, for each round of the four days of exercise, and so that is my goal.

For days 7 and 8 my diet was much the same.  Eggs in the morning, salads in the afternoon, and the last of the Minestrone soup by Day 8.

Where am I at with my weight?  It’s fluctuated a pound here and there as I am building muscle while losing fat.  As of this morning, I am at 188 pounds and am much more pleased with how I feel and how my physique is noticeably hardening.

If anyone has any words of wisdom or encouragement, or even if you want to call me a puss, by all means, share in the comments.

I’ll report in again on day 13.  Many thanks for reading.

_______________

Like what you’ve read?  Check out my eBook, You, Simplified – Handbook for A Simpler Life.  50% of the sale goes to environmental organizations.

For those interested in poetry, you can purchase my new collection here:  Foundations

{ 2 comments }