Journey Thus Far

To cut or to bulk? Not sure how long I can keep cutting. I’ve been working out hard 5 days a week, but the other day my girlfriend called me scrawny. Man, now I feel like I should bulk up a little, but the thought of adding weight is so scary when I’ve tried so hard to lose weight. Plus I can’t even see my abs clearly yet still. I want to cut down to 10% bodyfat or so then bulk. Decisions decisions.

So after my last blog I finally saw the scale go down some to 177lbs!! I’m almost at my 170lb goal (though my bodyfat% goal I’m not sure about). Anyway I figure after the stress of being impatient I needed some inspiration so I gathered some quotes (yes, I am one of those lame quote people).

He that can have patience can have what he will. - Benjamin Franklin

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Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success. - Napoleon Hill

Someone has defined genius as intensity of purpose: the ability to do, the patience to wait… Put these together and you have genius, and you have achievement. -Leo J. Muir

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not the attainment. Full effort is full victory. Mahatma Gandhi

Man I’ll continue writing about my journey more but right now I just want to vent about hitting a plateau. I’ve been having steady weight loss about anywhere from 2-3 lbs a week but now the scale is at a standstill. I know I know, it’s not about the scale but bodyfat loss. But still I’m addicted to watching that scale go down, because I know if my lifting is increasing (slightly) and the scale is going down I’m on the right path. I’ve been at or around 180 for two weeks now. Frustrating when my goal was to get to around 175. My whole thing has been to get under 180 and I’m so close to my goal yet the scale has just stopped. Been messing around with increasing my carbs to around 160g a bit then lowering to about or slightly under 100g but nothing. I’m even on the lipo6X instead of just lipo 6.

Been switching the cardio up varying between steady cardio and HIIT, different machines, even going longer on the cardio. Nothing. Nothing at all.

So this post might interest those currently on the weight loss journey.

Now I never really thought of myself as an overweight person, but looking back I was really unhealthy and out of shape. I had one of those huge bellies that looked like I was pregnant, yet had skinny arms. I would have a hard time waking up and around 6pm everyday I was dead tired. More on this can be found on my bodyspace.

week 1:

I began my first week by going through a detox kit I got at GNC. Now I don’t really know how much it helped me internally but the detox kit requred I eat healthy and had a weeks worth of sample menus. This helped me tremendously in thinking about what healthy foods to eat. Basically at this point I cut out soda and fast food.

I did my normal workout routine which at the time was pretty basic and not working. It was probably the kind of routine a complete beginner would do. A total upper body only workout everytime: bench, barbell curl, tricep excercise, shoulder press machine. I had been doing the same workout for at least a year, not using heavy weights for hard excercises and improper form on all excercises.  Around this time I discovered bodyspace and intially was attracted to the measurement tracking tools, signed up, and overloaded on info.

Week 2:

I began counting my food information : Calories, fat, protein. I began to form a basic eating schedule, but was still working out what foods to eat. At first I went through not enough food, to a low carb addiction (now I feel I have a good balance, but still prob a lil low on carbs). I also began taking lipo 6, and doing cardio after every workout. I also increased my workout days from 2 to 5 days a week. I immediately dropped about 6 lbs in a week and a half but I now know that was from water weight.

Week 3 & 4:

I began training correctly. I copied a routine of some random guy on bodyspace who had a physique I wanted. It was a good beginner bodybuilding routine with body parts on different days, about 3 to 4 excericises per  body part and I began training like I was a body builder.

My diet finally came together more and more. I don’t care if my food doesn’t taste all that great. I’m not picky and totally dedicated so I found a days worth of meals planned. I try and make it easy and eat pretty much the same food everyday. It makes going to the grocery store a really easy experience. The only place I deviate a little is dinner. I try to switch up the meat and vegetables everyday (mainly for my girlfriend who won’t have to suffer as much for my dieting - yes I do cook dinner everyday - she has it made lol). Here’s my usual grocery list: Vegetables (Asparagus, broccoli, and mixed veggies in a bag), Apples, bucket of cottage cheese, unsalted almonds, alot of chicken breasts, marinade (different one every week to change flavor), Brown rice / sweet potatoes, old fashioned plain oatmeal, and lots of eggs. Pretty simple. I usually cook all my chicken on sundays along with a bunch of rice / or sweet potatoes and that will be my lunch. I also hard boil all my eggs for breakfast which I have with oatmeal every morning. Snacks consists of apples, almonds, cottage cheese, and protein shakes.
Now here’s when the challenges begin to arise:

1) weekends. My weekends were spent going back home to visit my mother away from my food and kitchen. I try to be as good with my diet as possible and consider a cheat meal in there, but it’s extremely hard when you can’t plan two days worth of meals.

2) Coworkers and Girlfriend: For some reason everyone seems to either look at me funny when they say I want to eat healthy. They think I’ve gone nuts and look at me with disgust. My coworkers laugh at me and try and pass on all kinds of junk food since every friday my work buys lunch. My girlfriend you would think would be 100% supportive but she hated how I was "changing". This is frustrating because a) I’m bettering myself and b) you would think she’d support me.

Still after 4 weeks I began to really tell the difference. Visually there didn’t seem like much of a change (something that would increasingly frustrate me in coming weeks), but I knew that my body was changing.

Next time I will detail weeks 5-7 and catch us up to the present. Feel free to ask any questions. I’m more so doing this to document everything. I should have done it earlier so I don’t have to recall all the information. Thanks for reading.

So I’ve taken my love of bodyspace and fitness to the maximum level of devotion and decided to start my bodyblog. Why? Well first off I spend an entirely obscene amount of office work time browsing every inch of the bodybuilding.com website including other body blogs and have noticed two things about a majority of body blogs and profiles. 1) alot of the ripped / exceptional physiques on this site seem to come from either former athletes (many high school / college athlete) or similar types who had great physiques to begin with prior to their bodyspace creation. Their first progress photo is usually quite good and its really frustrating to see them go from ripped to really ripped. 2) Then theres the bodyspace profiles of guys who are in the process of getting to their goals. I fall in the later category and being in this category I feel like I am learning so much and undergoing so much change that I ultimately feel compelled to document my changes as well as my thoughts on the process of achieving my goals. So I guess I’ll begin my blog with a little about me and my journey thus far (the introduction post - so to speak)

I’ve never been an athelete in any real sense. When I was 11-14 I played little league football, and spent a good summer or two in middle school rollerblading. That’s about it. I was a skinny kid most of my life. The kid who could eat whatever and never worry about fat.  Then when I was about 17 when I really started discovering pot, booze, and women. Then college. College and the neverending partying lifestyle brought me in the worst shape of my life. I used the at least two of the following substances everyday: pot, booze, and cigarettes. I drank soda ALL the time, and ate fastfood about 90% of the time. That’s when I began to really feel the effects of horrible living. My skin was horrible, I started to develop belly fat (but only belly fat which was horrible), and I became so tired that it was almost depressing. Somehow though, I’m a motivated individual and kept an incredibly insane and busy college lifestyle. I constantly was busy from 9am until 10pm at night. There were times when  I was tired my mind felt disconnected from my body. I didn’t think there was anything that could fix it.

Then about my junior year in college I began trying fitness. I think I, like every out of shape male, just wanted to be big and get attention. I think at that time I reached a breaking point where I wasn’t happy with myself but I knew that it was fixable. I spent my first "real" time in a gym. I had a good friend and we would work out everyday hardcore doing one hour workouts and doing high intensity sprint like running cardio for 30 min. Sounds good right? but unfortunately even after a good 6 months to a year of this it wasn’t the change I hoped for. I did gain some muscle but poor form, poor diet, and a slow loss of motivation would end up with a slow creep out the gym. I would still workout half assed throwing weights around for the next 3-4 years. I did however accomplish one goal that summer. I did quit smoking and my quality of life did improve (however I did and sometimes still still struggle).

Anyway to catch up with the present. When I was smoking and party it up in college I first weighed prob around in the 150’s (estimate can’t quite remember then). When I quit smoking, worked out, but had a poor diet I balloned to about 170’s. The post college and grad depression left me ballooning almost up to 200lbs. I had a 41" waist. I looked like old men who had been drinking their whole life. Then this past March 2008 everything changed and that’s when I began my journey.

March 8th, 2008 my dad passed away. Now most people when affected by this degree of hurt take it really hard. I did. However, being the person I am, something inside me told me that I could be depressed and resort to vices to control my depression, or I could make this a turning point in my life. A point in my life when I am no longer can take the out of control life, and really strive to become everything and anything I want to be. Thus one month after my dad passed I began to really workout, this time correctly.

I signed on to bodyspace, took a one week detox kit, read up on nutrition and fitness, and bought every muscle magazine I could find. I began to eat, live, and work like a bodybuilder. And this is where I am now (you can see progress on my bodyspace). Of course it hasn’t been an easy journey, I have had a few slipups including this past weekend (cheating on two meals, 3 beers, and a few drags of a cigarette), but I know I am on the path to being who I ultimately want to become. It’s only been about 6 weeks, and I have at least 6 more weeks to my goal. I’ve lost 16 lbs and about 6 inches off my waist, gained some muscle, beginning to look cut, and starting to uncover my abs. My mental focus is clearing up, I’m about to take my GMATs and pursue an MBA in finance, and I can actually run and walk for more than 5 minutes. I wake up refreshed. I smile. It’s beginning to really be an amazing life.
The next few days I will describe my journey in more detail, but I wanted to give my blog a bio and background before we dive into the present. If anyone reads this thanks for reading and please comment !! I’d like to know if anyone is reading.

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