I haven’t yet blogged about it, but over the last six months or so I have been working really hard to get in shape. If you have met me sometime before June of last year than you know that I was overweight and out of shape. Ever since high school I had slowly gained weight and while I have gotten better in the last couple years I was still eating too much bad food and not getting enough exercise. On my vacation in June I was talking about needing to get in shape with my family and my wife had a great idea, I should start a contest with my brother-in-law who also wanted to drop some weight. Being that we are both competitive it would be a great way to get motivated.
The basics of the contest are that every month the person who lost the most weight that month would get a $20 Amazon gift certificate from the loser, then at the end of the contest (12/15) the loser would have to buy the winner an Xbox 360 for Christmas. And it worked. We both busted ass and lost a ton of weight. We ended up splitting the monthly contests 3 – 3, but I ended up losing more weight overall and won the Xbox 360. I lost 56lbs, my brother in law lost about 37lbs.
Allot of people have asked me about how I did it, and the answer is simple. I ate less and better food, and I worked out religiously.
I started by cutting calories, I set a goal of 1200–1500 calories a day which is very very low… I didn't hit that goal everyday, but I hit more often than not. I tried my best to get a routine and stick to it, I can eat the same food all the time and it doesn't bother me, which my workers can attest to since I have been eating almost nothing but granola bars at work for six months. I cut out all of the fast food, the only exception being when I was traveling or a rare occasion. The only other exceptions I gave myself was that I could have a nice meal on the weekend each week, not a binge, but not a meal where I had to worry about what I was eating. I also cut out beer other than when I got together with friends, and tried to cut down on drinking way too much wine.
Because I was eating lower calorie I made sure to take good vitamins (GNC Mega Man) and also to take some veggie vitamins since I was still not really eating enough vegetables. (and these are supposed to be good for handling the toxins created by fat burn)
The other side was the exercise, and this is where I think I did really well. I have a treadmill in the basement of my house and I setup a schedule to workout everyday at 7:30pm. I did it no matter what, with very little exception. I would only take 1 or 2 days off a week, just to let my body rest. I helped avoid getting worn out by taking branch chain amino acids before I worked out and drinking a protein drink after I worked out. Now the actual workout was a mixture of walking and jogging, I based it off of a recommendation from a friend who used to be a personal trainer. I alternated walking quickly with jogging, at first I could only jog a couple minutes, but over the course of the six months I got up to where I could jog an entire mile (although it was very hard). To keep track of how many calories I was burning and to make sure I wasn’t pushing myself too hard I picked up a Polar heart rate monitor, very cool device. I am now getting more into running and actually starting a running program where I run outside as opposed to on the treadmill.
Its amazing how much better I already feel, and I still have about 20 more lbs to lose.
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