M-A-S’s BodyBlog

30 days until I step off that airplane.

30 days until I see my wife and daughter’s beautiful faces again.

30 days to toil under the weight I’ve been pushing for the past 164 days.

30 days to give everything I have to give.

30 days to lose those last ten pounds.

For the past 164 days, I have resoluted to change my life. Change my habits. Change myself for what I believe will be for the better. Now I sit here with 30 days left and know that it’s time to finish strong, stay disciplined in my lifting and diet.  The discipline to say that I will only eat that 6oz piece of chicken and not all this other food that everyone else is eating.  The discipline to push out those last couple reps. The discipline to do my cardio. The discipline to be the person the two loves of my life deserve.

To know where I am going I have to see where I have been:

From May 15, 2009 to October 18,2009

As my weight slowly dwindles down here in this desert inferno, those around me have started to take notice. They ask me what I’ve done. I tell them it’s a simple equation for me, 20% lifting weights, 20% cardio and 60% diet. Without a proper diet and only doing the first two is like trying to take down a brick wall with a tennis ball. I now hear things such as, “I’m starting my diet tomorrow”, but tomorrow never comes.  They come up with ideas such as no eggs, only waffles, only pancakes, only this or only that, not as much of this and not that much that…but in the end the little of this and the little of that usually end up getting smothered in some kind of condiment other than mustard.

So here it is, my deployed lifestyle. The lifestyle I’ve used to melt off 22 pounds of fat and 2 inches off my waist. The life style that has gotten me so much attention. The lifestyle that will help me melt off another 25 pounds of fat. I say lifestyle because that’s what it takes, a diet is just a fad or trend that will ultimately make you fail and fall back into your old habits. But a change in lifestyle, well that is a whole new concept. Why just change the way we eat? Why not change things in our lives that ultimately made us want to eat these so called comfort foods.

I wake every morning at 0350, trudge down to the bathroom at the end of the dorms, take care of business, and mix three scoops of N.O. Xplode in 5-6 ML of water. I go back to my room take my Leukic Hardcore…let me stop for a minute, before you start thinking that I’m here to sell supplements, I’m not. I’m telling you what I take. I then make the 2 minute trek over to the gym, weigh in, and start to lift.

The way I lift is also unique I guess. I do giant sets. I pick four exercises and do all four exercises right in a row using a medium amount of weight, this is my first set. I rest for about 1-2 minutes and then do all four of the exercises again. I do this about five times. Giant sets cut down on rest time and totally kick your butt. My workouts usually last no longer than 50 minutes.

I then go back to my room consume one scoop of BSN Syntha 6 Vanilla mixed with one scoop of BSN Cellmass arctic berry. The chow hall is my next stop (6am). I order 5 egg whites and sprinkle a little cheese of top for a little flavor. I usually also get a bowl of cottage cheese and mix apple sauce into it. At 830 I eat a can of tuna. At 1030 I have a protein shake. Lunch is at 1130 and I have a chicken breast (or fish) with some broccoli, kidney beans, and some apple sauce for desert. At 1430 I have another protein shake. 1630 is more or less my dinner and I’ll have another chicken breast or can of tuna (in olive oil with some garlic salt). I try to minimize my carb intake after 4pm.

I do my cardio when I get back to the dorms; my favorite so far has been a 30 minute incline walk on the treadmill. For every minute that passes I increase the incline by .5, while maintaining a speed of 3.5. I also mix in some high intensity interval training (HIIT) on some days with sprint intervals on an elliptical or treadmill.

When I’m done with cardio, I’ll have one scoop of Syntha 6, just to give my body something to snack on and help it restore my energy levels. I usually have about 1 hour before I need to go to sleep so I’m not too worried about the 13 carbs and 200 calories, since I usually burn around 480-600 calories during my cardio. Most nights I go to bed at 8-830pm, I choose not to hang out with people here after work.  I see these people all day at work so it’s not really high on my list of things to do. Going to bed early also allows me to get enough sleep so my body can heal and it makes the days fly by. The best part of my day is when I can finally go to bed and dream about my wife and my little girl back home. I’m excited to show my beautiful wife the body I’m building here.

Being deployed here in Iraq I have realized just how lazy and counterproductive I was back home. I have been here for 33 days and have lost 15 pounds. In the past week and a half I lost 6 pounds. I see many people here on Body Space with excuses like, I work long hours, I don’t have time to eat right, I’m trying to eat right, I don’t have time, and of course my all time favorite, I’m bulking.
My daily routine is consistent. I get up early before work at 4am lift for an hour, do some cardio and then go to work for 12 hours a day 6 days a week. My diet is very simple and doesn’t require much though. Usually it’s two chicken breast, ¼ cup raw broccoli, ¼ cup carrots, and a ¼ cup raw kidney beans. The only thing that varies is every other day I’ll have some apple sauce and if they aren’t serving chicken that day then I get fish or another healthy protein source.
Trust me, just force yourself for one week and you’ll suddenly be waking up before the alarm goes off. You’ll be running to the scale in excitement to see if you lost any weight. All it takes is a plan to simplify your life and de-clutter.  I like to live by the rule; if it doesn’t matter in five minutes then I’m not going waste time on it. Fitness and your overall well being well that does matter in five minutes and beyond. So next time you tell yourself some excuse, ask yourself, is that really the reason or am I just being lazy.

It is 2am. I am tired. I am depressed. I am self conflicted.  Being in the military I work some pretty interesting hours. Right now I’m working 12 hour shifts from 6pm to 6am. I live in base housing in an apartment style building. I sleep during the day…correction I attempt to sleep during the day. I probably only get about 4-5 hours of sleep.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been leading what you would call a false-positive life. I have been working out on a regular basis and my diet has been at best spotty but heading in the right direction. Now back to the lack of sleep. Lack of sleep makes me agitated and snappy. I then eventually do something to piss off my wife, causing me to feel stupid.  I get depressed and then start eating…crap.

Well not really… Yesterday we received a 10-pound box from my wife’s grandparents. What was inside? A luscious treasure trove of chocolate, which included 8 Hershey’s bars, a bag of Milky Way singles, Reese’s Fast Breaks, Hershey’s Kisses and many other assorted candies. It now sits in a large bowl in my kitchen…haunting me.

It has been 21 days since I had my knee surgery. The stiffness in the joint is all but gone, and I’ve decided to restart cardio, mostly just consisting of walking. Since I’ve hurt my knee I haven’t been able to take the dog for really any walks what so ever. When she was younger I used to run with her and she was energetic for the rest of the day. She now lays around the house and sleeps. So daily walks, with each day going a little further will do both of us some good, and once I feel very comfortable on how my knee has heeled I’ll start to do HIIT training on an elliptical trainer again. From what I’ve learned so far on losing weight, especially fat, Weight lifting and Diet will not do it, there has to be cardio of some sort thrown in. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of me being over weight.

So this weeks Transformation of the Week really got me thinking (http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/Totalmeltdown/more.php?section=progresspics) . If this guy can lose 40 pounds over a span of 6 months, I’m pretty sure I can lose 20. My wife wants to go home for Christmas next year. I’m kind squeamish about going home. When I left home to join the Air Force I was a average framed 180 pound guy. So I get the looks from family and friends, I want those looks but for a different reason. Looks that indicate…holly crap, look at him, he looks awesome. My ultimate goal I suppose should not be weight and it really isn’t. My ultimate goal is to have a waist smaller than 32, I’ve done the math and logic would say that at my height the correct weight for me would be in between 180-185. Currently sitting at 204 I have a little ways to go.

So got my box from bodybuilding.com the other day. And after my little fiasco of me consuming everything under the sun, "I eat because I’m unhappy and I’m unhappy because I eat", I needed that box. It was my saving grace. I had ordered some Optimum Chitosan. I’m not going to say it was only the Chitosan but combined with a mostly Tuna diet over the past 2 days I’ve widdled down to 204.5 from 211 in 16 days. I’m thinking I’d already be past my goal of 199 if I could only get into the gym on a more frequent basis. I’m seriously going to try to get in there today and do some chest. I have a knee apointment this morning at 10 and hopefully they tell me I can drive again. I can walk with just a little bit of a limp, but my quad still feels weak.

The novelty of weight loss is a great thing. That first whole week, you are determined as hell to make it. You eat right. Work out hard. And tell yourself, this is it, I’m going to finally do this. Then life happens. The novelty starts to where off. You find yourself saying oh, i’ll just eat this one thing than that’s it. Next thing you know you are sitting in front of an Ultimate Double Whopper at Burger King.

I have strayed. I was doing a great job, i lost 4.5-5 pounds in like five or six days. Then I totally strayed. I shot back up to 208, which i’m thinking is just potty weight because I hadn’t gone yet when I weighed myself….though you’d like to know that…anyway, due to the fact that I have a bumb knee right now and i can’t drive or even walk to the gym (to far to hobble) I won’t be able to hit the gym the way I want to until next friday when i go back to work. I work nights and the Gym on Ramstein Air Base is just around the block from where I work so I can just limp on over to there at my regular time. As for right now I’m really really going to try to restart eating clean. I ate an ultimate double whopper yesterday and the whole time I was eating it I was telling myself that I shouldn’t be eating it.

So two days removed from knee surgery I will be heading back into the gym. I’ve convinced my wife to come with me to help me switch out the weight plates. Maybe I can get her to lift a little too even though she doesn’t need it she looks awesome already. I’ll be hitting chest tomorrow.