Well folks, a week and a half of Hell Month left and I will be in the clear! It’s been a pretty cool experience so far, but a hard one. I have fell short in multiple ways, multiple times. I think one of my biggest struggles has been the fact that I have fallen short a couple of times. Well mainly because of this blog. It seems kind of silly for me to be trying to encourage everyone that is reading this to lose weight and get into shape if I’m not being a good example and listening to my own advice in the first place. I feel like I am one of those personal trainers you see at your local Vasa gym who is overweight and trying to teach you how to work out. I mean, granted there are people out there who know how to do something even though they don’t do it themselves.
I guess what I have to keep reminding myself is that I am on a journey to get back into shape. I know how to do it because well I’ve done it before and I used to be in fantastic shape. However, life is different now. I am not as young and I don’t have even a fraction of the free time and energy as I did back then. Because of the different challenges I face now, I have to learn and experiment different methods of accomplishing the same goal.
So yeah, my hell month challenge has not gone perfect for me, but at least I am trying to do the challenge. I, and I’m sure most of you, expect perfection out of yourself. It’s an especially hard thing to avoid. I just thought I could make these rules for myself and follow them to an absolute “T” with nothing more than grit and will power. Well unfortunately that just isn’t the case. To expect perfection out of myself, and then to fail is demoralizing. It makes me feel like I am getting no where and making no progress. Especially when I can’t even push myself for one whole month. Realistically though that just isn’t true.
I am on my way to getting down to 10% body fat and I am closer now than I have been in a long time. All because of my “failures” this month. Today and tomorrow I am juicing all day again. I’ll get in all 3 of my workouts this week and I’ll stay right around 1550 calories each day this week as well. Then I will do the same next week. And hopefully by the end of next week, I will be pretty darn close to 10 percent!
Other than my soapbox moment, everything else has been going well with the journey. I think within another month or so it will be safe to say I am stronger than I have ever been. I think it’s pretty fair to say that now, and I definitely am overall but when I was 19 I bench pressed 250 pounds once. I’m not absolutely positive that I could do that right now but I know I would be close. I can however Incline Bench more than I ever have before as well as lift more on Squats, Pull Ups, Dumbbell Fly, Romanian Deadlifts, and Overhead Press. All because I went from sitting on my butt every day all day, at work and at home, to working out 3 times a week and watching my calorie intake for 11 weeks. Eleven weeks ago I couldn’t hardly do pull ups with my body weight 6 times. Today I did 6 pull ups with 55 pounds strapped to my waist.
What I am really kind of banking on after this month is over is just building a lot more solid dense muscle mass. My whole approach to this weight loss thing is kind of a lean bulking method. I have been eating just enough calories to keep my energy levels up while being able to build muscle but ideally not gaining any to little extra fat. After the end of this month, I will continue on this same path as it seems to be working pretty well for me. The idea is that through enough time of building muscle and keeping the calories low, that the muscle will require more and more calories each day and thus forcing my body to pull from fat supplies to fuel those muscles. This is one of those things a lot of folks fail to recognize when trying to lose weight. Someone who has a lot of muscle mass can eat way more calories and not gain any weight because the muscle eats more calories rather than letting them be stored for fat.
Weekly Weigh In
Current Weight – 179.2
Total Loss – +.2 Pounds
Not really any movement this last week on weight. That really is just because I had a couple of days where I ate at just about maintenance (1700-1800) calories. I just had an off week. To be honest, I was lucky to only be about 1700 calories because I easily could have gone way over that almost every day this week. I was just a bottomless pit for some reason. I could eat 10-12 ounces of chicken and just be stuffed and then about 2 hours later I was craving more food. Carbs mainly, I just wanted everything carbs.
So this week, I’m getting right back on track and sticking to the 1550 cals a day with my two juice days. Sunday will be my wife’s birthday and it will be my one big cheat day this month. I couldn’t be more excited about it either 🙂
That’s it for today’s update on my get fit journey. If you like what you are reading and you enjoy following me along in my journey, please push the follow button so you can continue to get updates!
The Cardinal Gift 