Slow and Steady Wins the Body Reshaping Race

The reason many of us fail at having the bodies we want is that it’s hard work. There is no magic pill or patch. We have to put in the work and control what we ingest. Why are we so weak? We expect quick results, when, trite but true, slow and steady does win the race.

Lose 2 pounds a month for 2 years and you are 50 pounds lighter.

50 pounds lighter!

Can’t wait 2 years? Wow. You took a lot more years than that to put those pounds on. How do you expect to drop them so quickly.

And, look, 2 pounds a month is nothing. You could really go at it with diet and exercise and safely lose 4, 6, even 8 pounds a month.

How about this plan. You go “all in” for 2 months, get into the swing of things, but, then, at the point where you would normally just say “screw it”, and go back to being lazy and undisciplined, you simply back off a bit.

(NOTE: You may find that this time around, you don’t want to back off. You love what you are doing and the results are keeping you motivated. Keep going!)

If you’ve been really hitting the diet and exercise thing for a couple months, you should have a pretty good idea of what you can eat to be healthier. You should have a decent feel for how much exercise it takes to be more fit.

But if you’ve decided by the 2-month mark that this lifestyle is not for you right now, don’t go back to your old habits. Keep some of the good habits you’ve developed.

Maybe during your 2 months you gave up all fast food. Hey, now, that’s a great idea! You used to eat 7 meals a week at fast food places, now you are eating none. You could go back to your old ways, but do you have to?

Maybe during your 2 months you took a 2-mile walk every morning. Nice start to a fitness plan! You used to just sit and watch tv every morning before work, now you’re moving. You could go back to the tv, but do you have to?

It’s pretty obvious to me that fitness isn’t for everyone. All I have to do is look around to see that. But if you are reading this, you must have something inside you that wants you to improve yourself.

Maybe this isn’t your time to go “all in” for fitness.

I went through many stops and restarts on my way to being fully involved in my own fitness. Finally, something clicked in my mind, and I know now I will never go back.

If you are not there yet mentally, take your move to fitness in smaller steps. Slowly, steadily, you will win this race.

Day 30 of my High Fat Diet and more about Yoga!

Here I am in day 30 of my high-fat diet, and I was just telling my friend yesterday how I feel that my body is undergoing some kind of positive transformation. I feel leaner and more energetic. I feel as if I am getting stronger.

It’s not as if this is a change that is overwhelmingly better than any of my previous changes, but it’s something, which is better than nothing, which is what I had before. I was stuck. That’s why I kept changing things up until I found something that felt as if it was getting me out of my fitness rut.

But it’s not only about the diet. In addition to eating high fat — 2000 to 2400 calories with targets of 70% fat, 20% protein, and 10% carbs — I had also been doing yoga, and only yoga, for 24 days (with a few days off in there).

I broke the streak on Monday with a round of Insanity Pure Cardio — and, yeah, my glutes were sore the last couple days — but I am sticking with yoga as my primary workout. I’ll do another aerobic workout on Friday, then increase aerobics to 3 times a week starting next week, in addition to my yoga.

I had not meant to be so much into yoga for so long. I meant only to use it as a transition workout after I tweaked my back, but the way I feel makes me want to stick with it for a bit longer.

You may or may not recall, depending on how often you read this blog, that I was introduced to yoga through Tony Horton’s P90X. Tony is not a yoga master — he’s just a guy who likes to stay fit and enjoys a yoga workout from time to time. Because he was my gateway to yoga, I really didn’t know much more from a practical standpoint than what he covered during his workouts.

But I knew if I wanted to advance in yoga, I’d need to find a better teacher than Tony. On Amazon, where I buy almost everything, I found Rodney Yee.

Rodney Yee has a ton of yoga DVDs, but I bought one called Ultimate Power Yoga just to check it out. That DVD has five 15- to 20-minute workouts on it, each with a different focus. And my world opened up.

Let me backtrack a bit.

When I saw yoga was part of P90X, I was intrigued, because I had always thought yoga was a good all-around fitness program, but I had never gotten around to trying it out. It was always so much easier to run or lift weights or do something else I understood better. Yoga, after all, is kinda weird for us euro-americans. You have to learn a bunch of poses. You have to stay still in those poses for what seems like a long time. There is a lot of balancing. It all seemed a bit much.

But Yoga X showed me that once I learned the poses and understood a bit about the rhythm and flow of a yoga workout (I know the yoga people call them “practices”, but I’m sticking with “workout” for now), it was really quite enjoyable, and I always felt great afterward.

So I bought Tony Horton’s two One on One yoga DVDs. I used them extensively, and it was exciting when I could finally do them both all the way through! (Yoga is not easy — it’s definitely a workout.)

As I added more and more yoga days into my program, I felt that I needed to get some new DVDs to keep from getting bored. Enter Rodney Yee.

I now have more than 20 yoga DVDs by Rodney Yee and others. I haven’t tried the workouts from others yet, because I really do enjoy Rodney’s workouts, but I’m sure I’ll give them a go sometime in the future.

So, let me see, I guess I got off on a love song to yoga, so what is the point of this post?

1) High Fat Diet – After 30 days, it really seems to be working for me. As someone whose blood-sugar continually flirts with “too high”, I suppose that makes sense. After another month or two on this diet, I’ll see about getting my blood tested and judge it from there. If I am judging solely based on how I feel, though, I give it thumbs up at the 30-day mark.

2) Yoga – I love it. Perhaps you’ll love it too. (Thus ends my song.)

Getting to your Fitness Tipping Point

It’s the middle of February, which means you should be about 6 weeks into your 2012 fitness plan.

You are still on your fitness plan, right?

Hey, I’m not here to nag you and I’m not here to motivate you. Only you can motivate yourself, and with every plan to do something good for yourself — something good that involves discomfort or denial of pleasure, like getting fit (or more fit), quitting smoking, abandoning sugar —  it takes some getting used to.

Every plan also comes with a Tipping Point.

What’s the tipping point? It’s that place in your life when you are striving for a goal and … suddenly … you realize this is no longer a part-time thing, but an actual regular part of your life.

Sometimes the tipping point comes abruptly. That’s how it was for me and sugar. I really had nothing against sugar, although I was consuming less of it, because I was well into watching what I ate. But I would still go on the occasional donut or cupcake or half-a-okay-who-am-I-kidding-whole-German-chocolate-cake-with-coconut-pecan-frosting binge.

Then one day I just said to myself, “Wow, sugar really is poison for me,” and that was it. I stopped eating it.

Most of the time, though, the tipping point comes more gradually.

I am not sure when my gotta-get-a-workout-in tipping point occurred, but I was reminded yesterday that it had occurred. I was emailing with a friend of mine, and I was describing the particularly busy day I’d had. She asked, “Did you get your workout in?”

My answer was that I had, because at some point in my life I had prioritized my workout, so it would take a lot for me to miss it. I had passed the working-out tipping point.

I really don’t know when that happened, but I am glad it did.

We often, in our lives, respond to a lack of action with a curt, “I just don’t have time.” But the old adage is true: We all have the same amount of time, it’s just a matter of how we decide to fill it.

If it is truly more important for you to do something else in place of getting fit, then you have not reached your fitness tipping point. I only hope that you’ll get there, though, before some kind of serious health issue makes you re-examine your decisions.

My high fat diet PLUS yoga PLUS allergies

I am in day 20 of my high fat diet, which aims for 70% fat, 20% protein, and 10% carbs.

My body seems to have adapted to the lack of carbs, so I am not feeling as run down, although I’ve been doing only yoga the past 10 days. I switched from Insanity to yoga because I tweaked my back, but I liked the yoga so much, and my back was feeling so good, that I decided to stick with yoga for a few weeks. I haven’t done that before and have been wanting to give it a shot, so now’s a good a time as any, right?

I’ve always liked yoga, and I am really thankful that  Tony Horton got me into it during P90X. It seems like a great way to stay in shape, although I do feel the need to add some cardio. I will do that once I feel my back is in really good shape. Honestly, my back hasn’t felt this great in years, so I don’t want to do anything to mess it up.

As for the high fat diet, I am again feeling like it’s a mixed bag of pluses and minuses.

First of all, I continue to struggle to stay under 2000 calories, which was not a problem on my high-protein diet. For some reason, when eating high fat, I end up in the 2200 to 2400 calorie area almost every day.

Not that there’s anything too wrong with that. I burn enough to still be able to see negative net calories on that regimen, but I’d always read that fat is far more filling and satisfying than carbs and protein, and I am just not finding that to be the case.

Also, I am feeling some of those same episodes of “hitting the wall” after a high-fat meal. I had previously attributed that phenomenon to too much carbohydrate, but now I wonder what the real cause is.

For example, as I write this, I feel somewhat sleepy. Well, I had a good 7.5 hours of sleep last night, and it’s still morning. However, about a half-hour ago I had a heavy cream latte that had about 20 grams of fat in it. So, yes, I wonder what is causing the sleepiness.

Honestly, it could be allergies. While my mountain cedar sensitivity is severely diminished during this period of no-grain eating, it’s been raining a lot here, and mold still seems to have a pretty strong negative effect on my body.

Aside from all that, I feel great. My energy level is fine, my strength is great, and I haven’t had any problem sticking to the diet. When I go out to eat, I usually have a salad with some protein in it, which is usually what I had to eat when I dined out before anyway.

Today’s Super Bowl party at a friend’s house may prove challenging — not sure what to expect for food there — but I can always eat nothing, and maybe that will keep me under 2000 calories for at least one day.

Ouch, I tweaked my back. Now what?

I tweaked my back last Wednesday, right at the end of the workout. During the last move, rep 2 of 4. Tweak. DAMMIT!

I don’t really know if “tweak” has any medical validity — perhaps my friend Donna can chime in on that — but I use it to talk about an injury that seems minor, one that’s not debilitating, but which does cause me some concern.

So what did that tweak do to my workout routine?

Well, when it comes to my back, I always choose to err on the side of caution, and I was headed into my recovery week anyway, so the timing was almost perfect.

The injury occurred, by the way, during a jump up from wide pushups. Do 4 pushups with wide hands and feet, then jump the feet forward, standing to a squat.

I felt it in my left side, lower back, at the rear point of the hip. A twinge of pain. I am actually accustomed to minor pain in the same area, but on the right side. Been there for years. This left side, though, is new pain, and it was a pretty sharp, so I quit right there. I probably should have put some ice on it, but I didn’t.

The injury felt better the next morning, but only by about 50%, so I swapped the heavier planned workout for a lighter yoga workout — #1 and #5 from Ultimate Power Yoga, which put a lot of emphasis on the lower back.

I did that same yoga routine the next two days, then took Sunday off.

Then, on Monday, I did Rodney Yee Total Body Workout from his Power Yoga Collection. Yesterday it was back to #1 and #5 from Ultimate Power Yoga, and today will be Patience Yoga from Tony Horton’s One on One collection.

Can I tell you something? My back feels great! Seriously, not this good in quite some time.

In fact, my back feels so good, I am going to continue this yoga routine through the next few weeks, just to see what happens. Yeah, I know, I was in the middle of my Insanity with weekends off program, but I like to roll with the flow. I’ll sprinkle some Insanity or other cardio workouts into the mix starting next week.

(And, yes, I am still on my high-fat diet, but I’ll write more on that in a few days.)