Many of us lack confidence, desire, or have the inability to change… These are all mind sets that hold us back. You are in charge of your Future…no one else just YOU!   Looking for a change, don’t know where to start, does anyone else feel the same way you do?  

Last week was a recovery week, which was welcomed because I was starting to feel some aches and pains.  I decided to do a low-carb cycle since the workouts get less intense during the recovery week.  The drop was dramatic (compared to a normal week), I got down as far as 192 lbs. and sure enough the body lost all sorts of filler and looks great — of course it will last only for a short time as the cells grab onto water again and settle back up to a reasonable level.

Carbs

When talking about carbs it’s always good to remind ourselves that there is a very significant difference between the simple carbs (or simple sugars) and complex carbs.  Simple sugars come in the way of our refined foods such as refined flour, refined sugar, Krispy Kreme and all those tasty goodies we seem to get easily addicted to.  In fact, it’s pretty tough to find anything out there that hasn’t been enhanced with some sort of simple carb or another for taste.  We find it in the corn batter for the corn dog, we find it in the hot dog itself even the ketchup — heck it’s probably in the stick for the corn dog!   You find that doing an Atkins-type diet for individuals like me, who seem to absorb carbohydrates through inhalation, that you can’t walk past the candy aisle without getting some simple sugar absorption.

There are also differences between the simple sugars, so simple sugars from raw fruits and vegetables differ from simple sugars from processed foods; when doing low-carb cycles I like to come off by doing what I call a sugar reset and I do this by coming off the low-carb cycle onto a heavy diet of just fruits and veggies at least for 80% of the day’s meals.  It seems that when I do that, as I re-introduce the carbos back into the normal diet that the weight doesn’t seem to come back pouring on; as opposed to when I come off low-carb cycles immediately to a normal diet, when the weight seems to come on almost with 2 or 3 days to the exact point it was prior to the cycle.  I love “You on a Diet” … it’s on of my favorite references and guidebooks and Dr. Oz as well as other books I’ve read over the years are of the opinion that we do have a metabolic thermostat, that once set it’s hard to reset.  My theory is that a low-carb cycle followed by a fruit/veggie reset seems to lower that thermostat and allows me to set my thermostat lower than when I started the cycle.  I apologize if this is obvious and already documented, it just shows that my time is limited right now so my apologies for not searching this further, I promise I will.

Complex Carbs

Moving on to the complex carb picture.  Once I get off the full cycle I re-introduce carbs by focusing on complex carbs and keeping to the veggies and fruits for the simpler carbs.  For now I’m avoiding any refined sugar, so no candy, pop, doughnuts, etc.  which I suppose should be avoided anyways, but they seem to make their way in especially during the holidays around my family.  Who can resist the apple and pumpkin pie?!  And bread, oh my goodness!  I love bread and pasta — so I switch to whole wheat and watch to make sure these are not refined flours being used.  For the most part I avoid bread anyway ’cause it’s hard for me to stop at one piece … so don’t put a piece of fresh-baked sourdough in front of me.  My normal diet is made up of oatmeal in the mornings, wheat-based pasta or breads if I have any … but it’s really tough to stay away from the corn.  I have a habit of cooking all my meals from scratch, which makes it easier to get the right ingredients — but an active professional life takes me all over the world with some amazing dishes that many times are just impossible to resist.

When we look at the chemistry of carbohydrates it’s hard to imagine that our bodies care .  They seem so similar.  I get reminded that this is the nature of living: small differences are everything.  This is the way with dieting, exercising or successful investing — it’s the little things that seem to make the biggest difference.  Something so simple such as developing the discipline to think differently about food — and how about — just making a habit of thinking before we eat.  Really … How many of us think about what we’re about to put in our mouths?  At all?  I don’t mean thinking about the pleasure we’ll derive, about how hungry we are, or how good something will taste — I’m talking about thinking things such as:

• Is this good for me?
• Do I really need this?
• Will I feel better after I consume it?

Wait … is this a questionnaire about food, or about over spending?  Isn’t that the point?  There’s no real difference — when we actually take time to think about what we eat, or about what we buy, or even about what we say.  Perhaps fitness and health is more about us getting lazy not about the right stuff, but about thinking about it.  We just don’t take the time to think about what we’re doing long enough to evaluate the true value it brings into our life.

I’m starting to sound like a seminar speaker.  I’m jazzed that my weight sank down to 192.2 this morning.  I suspect you’ll find me closer to 195 by the time next week comes along — but here’s the kicker.  By Thursday last week, as the carbs had been depleted from the body stores I wasn’t able to keep the workouts at any level of sufficient intensity.  Sufficient for me.  Remember my goal is fitness, not so much light weight.  Friday dragged, even when I took some energy boosters — the muscles just didn’t have enough food available to carry out their job long enough.  Which is great if you’re going for weight-loss.  It was amazing to feel the change when my body detected carbs coming back in — it was instantaneous.  Just two days of normal diet with supplements and the muscles feel amazing.

I can take the shirt off and suck it in and actually look good .  That’s a big boost — no matter how much I sucked it in when I started I couldn’t make it look good without a distortion mirror — a big one.  So measurement-wise, almost 2 inches off the midsection.  The waist continues to baffle me — it holds steady at 37 inches, but all my pants are fitting loosely, and my belts are a notch or two from where I started.  Maybe the biggest problem was the gut pushing down onto the waist putting.

Thanks to Maria for pointing out that I wasn’t categorizing the posts –

C’ya next week.

Time passages

WOW!  The 90 days are up!  Anti-climatic, isn’t it?  I got busy with life so I didn’t update the blog.  Hope nobody squeaks.

The stats finalized at 192.5 lbs. (10.5 net weight loss) and a full 4% in fat loss … so it was more like losing 13 lbs. of fat, and gaining 4 lbs. of muscle!  I feel AWEsome.  I look good — I’m managing to get enough comments to give me the ego boost necessary to design the next phase.

In the meantime — I’m taking a little time off to recover.  During the recovery phase, I’m doing weights on Monday and Friday, Yoga on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.  I stretch and do cardio/abs on Wednesday.  How’s that for taking time off!?

Seriously though — the abdominal area has seen a substantial decrease in size, I can actually fit into my clothes — it’s not like I look picture worthy yet, but compared to where I came from I’m really happy.  p90x really delivered.  So I’m ready to move to the next phase, which will be a muscle build up phase, I don’t want to lose size from my chest, shoulders and arms … which started to happen towards the end of the p90x routine.   So Muscle & Fitness here I come.  3 months of M&F combined with p90x to get some muscle growth, then I’ll hit a p90 lean routine after that.  I’ll continue to report progress once the routine kicks in again.  For the next 2 weeks I’m waiting to re-cycle onto the creatine.  I can’t wait to try the Vapor product … I hear it’s even better than NO Xplode, and I LOVE NO Xplode.

Sometimes it Just Happens

Sometimes life just happens.  Or is it — life happens … Always!  Two weeks and I disappeared from the scene.  I’m still not all the way back.  I have taken the time to keep my workout journals, just not the time to get them ready and uploaded for reporting purposes.  Business, family stuff, personal stuff … it all rolls up into lots of time away from the things we love to do.

Life seems to be that way — we seem to seek our stable level — and once we reach it we strive to keep it that way.  Change is so disruptive.  The conundrum is whether we stagnate by keeping life at a stable cruise, or whether we deal with the pain of continually changing conditions.  Let’s face it, change is not easy: for individuals or organizations.

The last few weeks I’ve been involved in helping a company reorganize — the pain of balancing the need to save as many people from unemployment versus how much to save so the company can survive is acute.  Every department fights for every resource, and yet at the end of the day there are limited resources available.  In everyone’s mind there’s a question about whether the fight is even worth it.

Struggling with fitness is no different.  We look at our resources, time, nutrition, and dollars available and we have to balance it all.   As travel took over these last two weeks I found it interesting how my workouts seemed to magically match up the right exercises with the travel.  I didn’t have to have weights on the days when I traveled, which made it nice.  I took a set of bands for a few weighted exercises and kept the intensity up.  I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to stick to the diet — I bought nuts, dried fruits, and whole wheat, non-fat fruit bars and ate very small amounts of whatever was served and viola … i weighed in at 191.4 this morning!  Yes, I know it’s Tuesday, i’m always 2 lbs. down from the rest of the week … but that’s as low as I’ve ever gotten in a lean out cycle, and I’ve done it during a non-lean phase.

Strength is thru the roof right now, my performance is at an all-time high, flexibility is incredible, and I’m actually starting to see a big difference.  My belt has moved 2 full notches in the right direction … which means I’ve lost a good 2″ of total belly circumference.  The problem was the omentum … it just sits there and hangs over the waist — it is no longer hanging over the belt … it is pulling up!

The downside is that I will have to do yet another 90-day challenge to get the shirt off … the upside is — I’m ready to BRING IT!

Active Rest

Boy I’m glad for recovery cycles, although this one surprised me — my strength has improved so much that I didn’t really want to take time off.  However, having done this so many times, it’s wise to take a recovery cycle every 4th week or so.  Some training programs will go as much as 8 weeks without a recovery cycle, but I’ve noticed more injuries once I go more than 3 or 4 weeks.

In the p90x we’re talking active rest really.  Today I had to do core, but only after doing Yoga yesterday.  So we’re still talking hard work, just bringing the intensity level down slightly to allow the body to rebuild.   Understanding hypertrophy is important to any athlete, this is the process by which our muscles grow in both, strength and size — but in essence it deals with muscle fibers developing these tiny tears and using proteins to repair them thereby resulting in increased size or strength or both.  If we fail to rest adequately we don’t give our muscles a chance to repair themselves and atrophy results … which is a weakening of the muscle which may lead to injury, but results in loss of performance.

Certainly there is a trick to figuring out the optimal activity/rest cycle for any individual, factors such as age, health, physical condition, etc. all influence how long a person can go without suffering from muscle loss due to lack of rest, so a general program such as p90x takes a sensible, smart middle-of-the-road approach.

Besides active rest, during this recovery cycle I decided to do a low-carb cycle see if I can get the body to drop closer to the 190 range.  The thing with low-carb cycles is that the weight loss occurs due to water loss, and the body’s inability to retain water — so in a sense your body deflates.  It’s important during a low-carb cycle to drink lots of water because the body has a very hard time hanging onto it and it makes it tough on the kidneys and the entire renal system.  The other thing to note is that even if you dump 10 lbs. in a low-carb cycle, the re-introduction of carbs will result in immediate weight gains as the cells regain their ability to hold onto water … you re-inflate.  The trick is to go for enough of a weight loss that when you re-introduce the carbs there’s only a fractional rebound.  You see a lot of professional body builders do low-carb cycles pre-competition to get shredded.

In my case, in addition to dropping carbs significantly (less than 100, and hopefully less than 50 grams a day) I also decided to cycle off my two main supplements: NoxPlode and the p90X Peak Recovery Formula — both of which contain Creatine … which also help sin cell volume through water retention.  The downsize of cycling off the “supps” is that the performance will drop, but since I’m supposed to be in a recovery phase anyways I figured why not.  Most trainers recommend to cycle off Creatine every few months.  The thing is, no matter what supplements and programs we use, our bodies do have limits — and it’s awesome to explore those limits and surprise ourselves by going beyond them, but at some point we can grown no further, run no faster, last not one more second, so it’s important to keep this in mind to maintain a healthy attitude towards life in general: at some point just have fun with the process, regardless of the outcome.

2+2 is no always 4

The thing about doing something more than once is the beauty of lessons learned.  As I started this week I reflected at how caught up I was with the numbers last time: I wanted that weight to plummet as fast as possible.   And indeed that’s what I managed to do, however, I don’t think I’m built to be under 170 lbs.  I looked good without a shirt on, but with a shirt on I looked too skinny.  So this go around, the goal is not weight loss, although I do want to hit a target weight of 178 lbs at some point, my biggest goal is fitness.  And the way I’m measuring that is by looking at my performance numbers.  So here’s the skinny … given where I started, 50 lbs. of fat on the body — I have now lost 6.5 lbs. of fat and have put on 3 lbs. of muscle.  So looking straight at the weight loss it looks like I’ve lost only 2.5 lbs, but looking at the full picture it’s the equivalent of almost 10 lbs. of total mass loss, if we discount the lean body mass gain.

Isn’t math fun?

The other thing is that once I get a full extra 10 lbs of muscle the fat burning will significantly increase because muscle burns fat itself.  The goal is to increase that muscle mass another 7 lbs … yikes!  Can someone figure out how many total lbs. of weight loss need to happen in order to put on 7 lbs of muscle and lose weight?  This math is just not straight up.  But it is a blast.   If you’re reading this wondering if I’ve lost my marbles, let me just say that I’m feeling amazing: full of energy and strength.

Recovery Time

The Recovery phase sneaked up on me.  I was on such a roll and so excited to have broken the 200 lb. floor finally that I wanted to keep going.  However, after doing so many years of hard workouts I know better.  The Recovery Phase of any routine is as critical as the hard work phase; in the p90x case we’re not talking about taking a week off to sit around and get the lbs. back on, instead we’re mixing up more Yoga and xStretch into the mix.   For those of you that have done Yoga-X you know this is not easy … you’re sweating like crazy, you’re doing push-ups as part of every move and really pushing the limits.  I still have a couple of moves that I struggle with, but with modifications and perseverance I’ll get close.

The fitness level is definitely improving — I feel way stronger and capable that when I started — although this is a weird part of a routine for people who are losing weight because the muscular parts of the body gain more muscle and tighten up quicker while the “not-so-tight” parts seem to get saggier; so it’s easy to get discouraged at this point of the journey.  And frankly, this is not something that is discussed often when you’re looking at those fit people on the screen — even when they talk about their story they talk about being fat, then the transformation … but not the visually disheartening process as the body has to go thru normal, natural processes.  Especially as you get tired and fatigued it seems easy to get a little discouraged, but this is a time to enjoy, not to get discouraged.

The value of a log is that you can see where things are going.  In this case, I think it’s also important to look at your goals realistically.  After all, if you lose weight fast, your skin won’t get time to shrink back to normal and you’ll end up with sags that will make a Shar Pei look smooth.  The trick is to take it easy and take it slow — of course you have Tony Horton yelling at you telling you to get it done in 90 days, but I think if he were in front of you he would tell you to work on it — p90x is intended for people in good shape to start with, so if you’re not in shape and you start p90x, the fantastic, beach body results are not going to be there in 90 days simply because you will spend the first 2 months getting to the point where you can do the exercises in the first place.  So keep in mind to pace yourself and to set the right expectations up front.

Interestingly enough this week I’m on a business trip to Vegas, which makes it a lot easier to do the Recovery phase since I’m not having to scare people at a strange gym with all the p90x routines.  I didn’t plan it that way, but life just seem to deliver synchronicity to my door.   I’m also lucky that health has not been an issue since I started, that’s gotta’ be considered a blessing by even an unbeliever.  Keep the faith.