Week 5 Day 5: Damage Control

On Monday May 23 we had a cheat day as per page 100 of The 4-Hour Body (4HB). We did it because my wife has been volunteering down a the evacuee center for the Slave Lake fire and she has not been able to follow the program to a tee. Different companies where donating lunches to the volunteers so she had not control over what she ate because they were told they wouldn't have any space to store personal things like lunches. This change is daily routine was bothering her and in turn affecting me so we planned an organized preemptive strike!

The Damage Control chapter in 4HB is an important part of shocking the body out of routine to help spur further weight loss. The basics of it are take special supplements that day, then do special yet very simple exercises at certain times through the day and eat a couple of helpful foods during the day. The results were interesting.

I gained 4.4 lbs in that one day...is this bad? Did the cheat day rules not work?

I also LOST 0.5% body fat that day! What does this mean?

I gained weight but lost body fat so...I gained muscle! I would have to say it was a very successful cheat day even though after 5 days my body is still sore all over from the exercises we did that day.

But the real damage control I was speaking about in this posts title would be the next two days after our cheat day.

Even though on our cheat day we got very full and sick from the crap food we were eating we ended up cheating the next 2 evenings. I think we cheated these two other times because we still couldn't get back onto our regular routine the very next day. We were also foolish enough to cheat the second 2 times without following the 4HB rules of cheat days or cheat meals. This is where my problems were this week.

We needed to get right back on program as strict as ever!

Well it's been 1 full day since getting back on full program and I'm already almost back to my weight and body fat pre-cheat day. On Monday I will be getting measured again and I plan on getting the numbers from the weight loss clinic to share with you.

I think after 3 good days on program with weekend the results will be good.

-Ian

Week 4 Day 5: 8813

I'm excited this week because I'm getting new found energy and just a little ambition to do things. Don't get me wrong I will always love movies and video games but now I feel like I can start doing other things. Now this is just a feeling...getting up and doing things is still a mental fight.

Some fights I'm winning this week are: 2 lunch time walks, 22 to 24 cups of water per day, new hole on my belt.

Because of my first lunch time walk I got a new personal best steps in one day 8813! It really didn't seem that hard to do that much walking. I'm already thinking of working to 10000 steps.

On our Wednesday visit to the weight loss clinic I was informed that for my size I should be drinking at least 22 cups of water per day. That's over 5 L man this has been a challenge both for drinking and pee breaks! After upping the water intake over 3 days I lost 2 more pounds so I can't really complain.

Making the new hole so my belt was smaller was fun! This little win made me feel really good...because my jeans were beginning to slide down. Don't worry, Ethel didn't see anything!

I have decided to start tracking my Body Mass Index (BMI) as well. It can't hurt to track something else. So check out the stats page to see updates for that. Also, you can find some helpful links to Wikipedia to help you understand BMI and Body Fat Percentage.

Have a great day,

-Ian

Week 4 Day 2: Water for Slave Lake

So this weekend 40% of my childhood town of Slave Lake Alberta was destroyed by a forest fire. I was so shocked when I first saw the pictures of the new town hall & library burning. Then I got scared because my little sister and step mother still live in Slave Lake. I also have extended family and friends in Slave Lake.

Slave Lake Town Hall & Library Burning

I couldn't find much news except for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It was amazing the info that was getting out from people in Slave Lake but I don't know if this was helping or making things worse. I didn't hear from my little sister till almost 1am that night. They were safe and heading to Westlock. The roads out of town were closed due to 3 forest fires that seemed to be all around the town so they had to wait before being allowed to leave town.

I was in shock most of Monday and didn't go in to work. There was a chance my little sister and step mother may be dropping in to stay with us because they didn't know if their trailer in Slave Lake was destroyed.

By mid morning we heard word that my older sister and family who live in Wabasca, that is 123km north east of Slave Lake, may also be evacuated. So now we had a chance of having a big group of visitors. Turns out things are fine for now in Wabasca and my litter sister and step mother didn't have to come to our house.

With all this excitement I didn't get my 5000 steps Monday and I don't think I drank enough water. We did make it to the weight loss clinic and still lost a pound so I'm happy for that.

But I'm still sad about my childhood memories that went up in flames.

-Ian

Week 3 – Day 6: Water for Occam

This busy life of shopping, cooking, eating and now a bit of exercise is really taking a lot of our time. I may only try to post one or two times per week. Maybe one long post on Saturdays and a short post Monday or Tuesday nights what I will try for. Saturdays we have more time and Monday evening is our official weigh and measuring night at the weight loss clinic so I will want to update you with the my stats that day.

Speaking of stats I'm trying to record more information for comparison. Something that I'm hearing from everyplace especially from Timothy Ferriss's book “The 4-Hour Body” that I will talk to you more about below. So I will be posting pictures on my pictures page along with tracking my weight, body fat percentage and measurements. I will be posting all the stats on a new page and updating that as I go. If I'm really busy I may just update the stats page without posting a main blog post so check it even if you don't see something new here. Like I said I will try to post my stats every Monday or Tuesday.

Now for some bad news...I gained 2 LBS one visit to the weight loss clinic. It was a little upsetting but they gave me the suggestion that I may not be drinking enough water. I always thought I drank enough water before joining the weight loss clinic and after we joined I started drinking more water. I was averaging 10-15 cups of water before program and was getting 13-17 cups after joining program. So it was even more upsetting to have them tell me I need to drink more water!

Well the next day I began drinking more water and now I'm averaging 15-20 cups of water each day. Guess what? The next weigh in I lost 3 LBS!!!! Crazy what the right amounts of water can do. Funny but at the same time I was reading the part in Timothy Ferriss's book about how he recommends large amounts of water also. Needless to say I got this message compounded into my brain this past week and it paid off!

Now that we know the program is starting to work we have begun telling some of our friends and family about it. I was nervous about telling people because we have been trying to lose weight for so long I didn't want to hear any negative comments. We have chosen not to tell people about how much money we spent pre-paying for 25 weeks of the program again just to avoid any negative comments. Our health is important and we are at the breaking point.

Two friends we told last night where very supportive and asked us a lot of positive questions while giving us a few tips. The experience of telling them was better then I expect from say our close family members. These friends are very into cooking so they got very interested in our meal plans and we even made plans to have them over for a healthy smoothy tasting. This should be fun we have it planned for two weekends from now.

Our friends were also very interested in the vitamins and supplements that we're taking as part of the program. When we joined the weight loss clinic the girl doing our consultation was explaining the program and showed us a book called “Nutrisearch Comparative Guide to Nutritional Supplements” by Lyle MacWilliam. This book shows independent research about the quality and absorption rates of over 1500 nutritional supplements available in the United States and Canada. This was the real kicker that got me to agree to dish out the money for the program. The company that makes the weight loss clinic's vitamins we would be taking got a 5 out of 5 star rating! It's crazy but common big name vitamins like Centrum rated 1 star or less and many of it's products rated 0 stars. Anyway I think this book will be very useful when you're trying to choose the right vitamins for yourself or family.

4-Hour Body – Review Part 1

So the new book I bought last weekend “The 4-Hour Body” by Timothy Ferriss is great! Don't bother reading any more of my review because if you want to transform your body, lose weight, gain muscle, recover from any injury, improve sleep or improve your sex life you need this book...BUY IT!

Ok...I'm a little mad that I spent all that money joining the weight loss clinic when all I needed was this book! That being said the money spent has been a real motivator so I don't really have any regrets. My plan is to stay with the weight loss clinic for the full 25 weeks we paid for and lose as much weight so we can adjust to a new healthy lifestyle. While doing that I will begin implementing some of the ideas set forth by Timothy.

The ideas Timothy sets forth in his book are simple to the point of non-believable at first. He always backs up his crazy ideas with research of top people and pictures or facts of his personal experience.

Have you heard of Minimal Effective Dose (MED) or Occam's Protocol?

That's when taking a certain amount of a drug or doing a certain amount of something is the minimum amount needed to get a result. You only need 1 or 2 pain killers to get rid of your headache so why take 3 or 4? In regards to bodybuilding if you want to gain muscle mass you only need to do enough exercise and the right exercise to stimulate the hormones in your body to start building muscle THEN give your body several days of rest. Muscle building hormones stay in your body building muscle for days and over training can hinder your muscle growth.

Occam's Razor: “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity” or rephrased as “The simplest answer is usually the correct answer ” but I like to say KISS – Keep It Simple Silly!

Occam's Protocol page 193 of his book is what I plan to be using to gain muscle mass in the weeks to come. I may not start if for a few weeks as we adjust to our healthy lifestyle more. The Protocol is a workout plan that has 2 different workouts that should only take about 30 minutes to do and are alternated every 3 or 4 days. So workout A today then 4 days later workout B another 4 more days before workout A again and so on for about 4 hours of workout time per month. This is where the book got it's name...you only need to work out 4 hours per month to build a great body!

I also read the section on weight loss but I will not get into that until after we complete the 25 weeks at our current program. At the start of the book Timothy recommends reading the basic parts of the book first and then reading the parts that interest you like a reference book. If you're only looking to gain muscle mass then just read those pages or just read the pages on improving your sex life.

I will post more reviews of the book another time also I will not be updating my stats here because I'm about to build that new stats page to keep everything in order.

Have a great day!

-Ian

Week 2 - Day 6: Weekend Mayhem

So for the last two weeks we have had to develop a whole new daily routine. Adjustments had to be made to account for our new found cave man hunting and gathering life of shopping and cooking. I’m a big fan of routine and I hate change to my routine!

This brings us back to the weekend mayhem…weekends just are not working with our new routine! We like to sleep in so that puts breakfast at least 2 hours late so our snack is late or doesn’t happen because lunch needs to be made. Then you spend time out of the house shopping or driving around no place near a fridge of kitchen so afternoon snack is delayed.

This forces you to eat a snack with a meal which you shouldn’t do because you need the food intake at intervals throughout the day to keep your metabolism going. So having no food kicks your body into starvation mode making the extra big meal that includes snacks to spike your glucose levels! This in turn spikes your insulin levels that are the cause of most cravings.

In short:

Change in my routine = cravings and/or binging!

Well, I would like to say even though we had a change in routine I did not get any cravings so binging didn’t happen. I think this has something to do with the great vitamins we’re taking that are part of the program we’re doing. They did say we would get energy in the second week.

The vitamins we’re taking are giving me more energy and the funny thing is I don’t think I really noticed when I gained the energy. I think it was a slow process over the last week or so.  We got a lot of stuff done today and I almost got my 5000 steps. I’m going to try harder to get some independent walking in when I can. That being said…I had the opportunity to take a walk on my lunch break…and…I didn’t. I think I have a mental block to exercise when I have free time. I think it must be my childhood of video games and movies then my teen years of Internet addiction stopping me from being active.

The 4-Hour Body

On a different note I bought a new book today called “The 4-Hour Body” by Timothy Ferriss. I’m going to read through it and try to add a few of the hints and tips he talks about to my routine. I’ll will you in with some tips now and again if I find something interesting.

Weight update:

Saturday May 7: 369 lbs

That’s a total loss of 22 lbs so far!

Have a great day,

Ian

Week 2 - Day 4: 5000 Steps

 So I wanted to tell you about the exercise the program is having us do…not much right now.

For the first week they didn’t want us doing much at all as we did the detox phase of the program. This is because after a day or two we would feel tired and possibly have headaches or a foggy brain. The toxins in our bodies were being released at this point helping to improve our liver function and the function of our body in general. They really stressed the need to drink a lot of water during this phase to help flush our systems.

Not really a fun time and certainly not a good time to begin a hard core exercise routine. I spent too much time trying not to give in to my chocolate and ice cream addictions in no way would I have had the ability to concentrate on exercise.

This week as we started phase to we started taking metabolism boosting vitamins, we got pedometers and a Yoga DVD. The vitamins are giving us our energy back thank goodness! They didn’t tell us to start using the Yoga DVD yet but they did tell us to use the pedometers.

My pedometer reading today!

5000 steps per day is the first goal they gave us. Sounds like I lot and my wife though she would have trouble getting to that but I thought it wouldn’t really be that hard. Well it turns out my wife is getting 6000 to 7000 steps per day easy making me look very bad. I’m barely getting over 4000 steps on days we don’t go shopping and just under 5000 on shopping days.

I have decided I need to add some extra steps somehow:

• Short walk a lunch time
• Short walk during my 15min brakes
• Short walk right after work because I have about 5-10min I have to kill so I don’t show up to soon to pick up my wife from her work.

If anyone has any simple ideas please post a comment!

Today I feel good but at our visit to the clinic today I only lost 1lbs and my wife stayed the same. I think maybe it’s our activity level and maybe a few small changes we can make in our food. I’m trying to avoid any changes to our food so more activity would be better.

Have a great day,

Ian

First Week Update

The first week and a half was HELL!

Sorry for not keeping you updated on a daily bases as was my plan but if you read on you will see why the long period between posts.

The First few days were crazy!

The program we joined gives you massive amounts of high quality vitamins all the time but the first week is the detox phase. In detox our bodies begin to expel all the built up toxins in our body and jump start proper organ processes. This is all about getting ready for long team weight loss with a better running body.

So my wife and I have both started this program and that’s a good thing because one person without the help of their spouse will have a hard time. Grocery shopping and cooking, more grocery shopping and a lot more cooking…this is taking a very large amount of time and effort to make this kind of change. Especially when we only cooked maybe twice a week at home and the rest of the time we ate out. Fast food mainly on the way home…we love the Wendy’s Triple Baconator!

I now know what it is like to be a cave man! Anytime I’m not a work I’m shopping for food or cooking food we are spending all our time just trying to stay alive just like the cave men and hunter gatherers of the past.

To make things worse in the first few days of detox you get tired! It was so hard to keep motivated to make that next meal or snack. 8 hours of work, visit to the weight loss clinic at least 3 times per week for at least an hour for coaching, 1-2 hours of shopping after each visit to the clinic finally 1-2 hours cooking supper making snacks and lunch for the next day. By the time you’re done it’s 9 or 10 time for bed.

Being healthy and eating right is a hard job. Changes like this can’t happen overnight and especially with no help if you’re trying to lose weight on your own.

Thank god for the coaching sessions and the feeling of accountability I’m getting. We have to track all our food, wear our pedometer all day and report back to our coaches where we get weighed every time we visit and measured every week.

They help us plan our meals and print us off a shopping list for our meals. This is a great thing but when you don’t have all the basic ingredients in your home already the first few days are very expensive for shopping. We are buying strange oils and spices we would never think to buy. A big problem we had the first week was trying to buy the proper amounts. A regular person doesn’t have a metric to imperial conversion calculator on them at the store but we do now.

My wife downloaded a great app for her iPhone. Without the app we were buying very large portions of food compared to what they were allowing us to eat in the mail plans. You don’t think right…you buy what you would normally have bought thinking it would be about the same. WRONG

After a week our shopping trips are faster and cheaper because we know what we want and how much. Why pay for something you won’t use?

We are still adjusting to the lifestyle of healthy balanced eating and are 3 days into week two.

Week two we start a 28 day metabolic booster phase to help bring up our energy and burning fat faster. They are getting us to concentrate more on beginning some basic activity like trying to walk 5,000 steps per day. Nothing extreme because how many obese people you know that like or can jog 5km each morning? During the second phase we should continue to lose weight at a fast pace.

Incidentally the program we started guarantees 2lbs loss every week! For the price we paid it better work. We had a few days of buyer’s remorse about the amount of money we spent but in the end nothing else we were doing was working in fact we each gained 40-60lbs since we got married in 2010. The price is a BIG motivator for me!

Anytime I think I’m going to brake and cheat on the program I think of the money. I money we spent was the start of our savings to buy a house when we start having a family but because we’re both over weight we can’t seem to get pregnant so losing the weight and becoming more healthy is more important to us right now.

So…What did I lose in the first week?????

Monday April 25: 391lbs

Monday May 2: 375lbs

In my first week alone I lost 16lbs and my wife lost 6lbs but everyone know men lose faster and I have more to lose anyway.

We were supposed to visit the weight lose clinic tonight but we needed some sort of break in the pattern of work, clinic, cook, eat, shop, sleep, work, clinic, cook, eat, shop, sleep and so on. So tonight we came home cooked and eat only! My wife has time to visit a friend and I had time to post this blog!

Now for some parting notes:

• I feel like I have a bit more energy but nothing like wanting to run around the block.
• I can’t really notice the 16lbs loss at this point because I’m such a big guy. I don’t think I will notice till I’m down 30 or 40lbs.
• I do feel optimistic! This will work for us and that is giving me extra strength to continue.
• I will try my best to post something every day and I do plan to fill in the other pages of my blog when I get a chance.

Have a great day,

Ian